You don’t always choose when your brain wants to philosophise. After our show with Angus and Julia Stone in Dublin last year, the heavy snowfall and high waves forced us to cancel the Glasgow show and stay behind in Ireland (Erik proved his vikinghood by going there anyway to see Godspeed You Black Emperor, but that’s a different and just as fantastic story). On our sudden day off, we were invited home by none other that Damien Rice (who turned 37 the day after, but that’s also another story), who guided the four of us through Greystones, a windy little town just outside Dublin with the eco café Happy Pear as a natural origo.
Damien was not surprisingly a normal human being, a guy who had studied engineering before his creativity forced him to try music as a full-time hobby, and kept on doing it for quite a while. When I met him, he had just cancelled a solo show some lightyears away – he was tired, and more interested in talking about his film project than about music. Music was something of the past, a thing that grew out of hand and out of reach for the control-freak engineer. He wanted to start on scratch, on a project where he could make his own rules again.
So yesterday, in a barn in Dyrøy, my brain came on. Two Russian clowns, Hranit and Lillya, were having a fight. The younger Lillya was doing all she could to get the elder Hranit, a former orchestra violinist, with her to play on the nearby Festiwala. The plot was simple enough. The morale too: who should have the right to decide over the other? Does pure lust and initiative sometimes outweigh talent and skills?
The string of thoughts isn’t anywhere near of even getting really started. Hranit and Lillya left me crying on a bench in the encapsulating darkness of the barn, with children already having captured the stage and transformed it into a playground. I wonder what would happen if they kept on playing forever.
