Denmark!? Who ever thought I would be exploring this northern country as winter casts itself over the sky and the sun curls around the edge of the earth ever earlier…?
Jacob Svendsen, one of my fellow participants in the Ireland Listening Room retreat, longtime songwriter and native Denmarkian;), invited me over with the irresistible persuasion of booking me in to a songwriters showcase almost every night of the week in Copenhagen.
Brett Perkins, the organizer of the Listening Room who also happens to live in Copenhagen, colluded with this plan by inviting me to perform at his monthly Listening Room Open Stage.
And so, banjo in hand, backpack a-bouncing, with no Danish to my credit, I boarded a bus in Regensburg, Germany…and then a train (tunnel after tunnel through the mountains with brief glimpses of the ice-laced countryside)…and then a ferry (in the dark of winter evening, water lapping black as pitch against the boat’s sides)…and then another bus ( as the moon rose a brilliant orange and I shifted around in my seat to keep it in view, wondering if any of the noisy German students crowded around me had noticed it)…and made it to Copenhagen thoroughly done with public transportation.
The huge wooden beams of Copenhagen central station arched above me and I felt myself in the bottom of an ancient ship. Why had the world suddenly turned upside down?
Jacob picked me up and we boarded the local train ( so much for being done with public transportation) and made our way out to Alberstlund, what is called « the outskirts of the city » by its inhabitants but feels like a suburb. Except for the fact that it’s very ethnically diverse and full of townhouse apartments rather than individual houses with lawns and picket fences.
My visit started out well with a solid week of congestion and coughing and I basically lay in bed for the better part of each day, filling up on orange juice and echinnacea. Exceptions were made for;the making of sushi with a brief visit to the city for ingredients and tiger balm to assuage my phlegmy self; a bike ride to the only hill in the area for a view of the city (Denmark is very, very flat…and the only hill happens to be a construction debris dump that was covered over with earth); the show at the Listening Room Open Stage (featuring me and the most excellent Belfast musician Michael Cochrane, along with may other talented folks during the open stage part of the evening); watching the film Melancholia by Lars von Trier, beautifully filmed and also pretty unnerving.
We also got out to explore Freetown Christiania, which in and of itself could take up an entire post. Basically it is an ex-army base that was squatted by back-to-the-landers in the 70′s and has expanded and become one of the largest urban ecovillages in existence. This year they finally signed a conratc to buy the land from the city for a minimal fee so as to no longer be under threat from the local government. Our first visit there was at night so I didn’t see much but got the sense of a vibrant night-life. The second time we went was right before I left Denmark to return to Ireland and we wandered around for a good couple of hours. The streets are lined by a mixture of re-appropriated army buildings and homes that people have built out of recycled materials. There are no cars aloud in the area, they have their own postal system and schools and a warehouse full of materials – everything from windows to old floorboards and machinery! – multiple music venues and restaraunts…It’s essentially a real utopian model of what a city could be like.
Copenhagen itself is steeped in history and the contradictions of most cities. A few interesting and cool things : the harbour in the middle of the city has been cleaned up to the point of being swimable; bike lanes are as wide as car lanes, and run in opposite directions on either side of the road, similar to car lanes; the parliament building is completely unprotected; more and more of the downtown area is barred to motor vehicles and a tax is being issued for any cars that want to drive in and out of the city to decrease use of individual vehicles.
After the first week I bounced back just in time for a series of shows, starting with Blagards Apotek hosted by another wonderful songwriter, Benjamin Aggarbaeck. I have to say throughout my visit in Copenhagen I was extremely impressed by the sheer quality of all the songwriters I heard. On more than one occasion (and I know i’m not alone here) I have sat through open mics trying to internalize my desire to cringe…not so at these events! The interesting thing about Blagards is that it is completely owned by the employees- the owner passed away and left it to the workers. It’s thus run as a sort of collective.
The following night Jacob and I ended up at Cafe Retro for another set and open stage. The highlight for me of this night was watching someone play the « hurdygurdy »…look it up.
Somewhere in this week I also tagged along to a sound engineering job Jacob had at a local library. Little did we know we were going to be listening to Simona Abdullah, the worlds only female player of the Darbuka! A truly gifted musician, definitely worth checking out.
Another highlight of the visit was biking in to Copenhagen and stopping by the bay of the Baltic Sea! The water and wind felt very healing for my naturally wilderness oriented self that has been contained by cities for most of this trip…
Sunday night we went to a concert by Ben Howard, a musician from the U.K. that I’d been hoping to catch whilst in Ireland, only all his shows were sold out. Amazing concert! The band barely made it over from Sweden as the bridges were all being closed due to a hurricane warning…so we made our way home from the Pompehusset ( an old waterworks building gone venue) with a little assistance from the howling winds.
Monday! Another show, this time at the Underbar for a series called the Monday Night Music Club. Great listening crowd and a really good local band to end off the night called Rovdrift. It was rare to hear people singing in Danish at the events I was at, so a nice change! On that note, I didn’t pick up any Danish over my two-week stay…I have concluded, and been told by many Danes, that it is an incredibly difficult language to learn.
Tuesday night, final show at Tempel Bar- the place was absolutely packed and I was dripping by the end of my performance. Another line-up of great open stagers afterwards and a lovely end to the series of shows. Completely exhausted, I spent Wednesday attempting to recuperate before the Songwriting Guild holiday gathering on Thursday night.
Friday morning saw me on the way to airport, windshields lashed by rain.
I now sit in a little room in Galway, tomorrow off to Wicklow to get in some countryside time before Dublin – Paris , Paris– London (stupid airlines), London – Montreal.
The solstice approaches and I warm my soul with thoughts of snow (here’s hoping!) and wood fires that crackle into a silence that so many humans live without ever hearing.
See you on the other side of the pond.
