The Blue Van

The rock and roll is not dead!!

21.05.2007 - Intervista a cura di Alessia Camera

Hi! And nice to meet you! You began playing together almost 8 years ago in a small village in the North of Denmark, 500 km from Copenhagen. You started jamming together in one of your grandmother’s basement when you were 12 years old playing vintage blue tunes. But why at this age you were interested in playing blues and vintage music? In Italy at this age, the most of the guys are listening only to pop music!
Hello Alessia, nice to meet you too. OK, the short story is this: the band got together two years before I joined, which I did in on New Years Eve '96, 15 years old, and in the beginning they played a more noise oriented kind of rock a la Dinosaur Jr., Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth. Then Søren (keyboards),who played guitar at the time,saw a tv commercial for a Danish coffee brand featuring the music of Jimi Hendrix and was, more or less, blown away by the music. Then he went out to buy some Hendrix compilations, became a fan and so did the rest of us and we soon figured out that Hendrix was inspired by these old blues guys and that there were a lot of great music in the same veins so we started to explore on our own. Short story long!

So I think that, if you were jamming at 12 years old, a few years later you would be able to play your own music, inspired by the great people of the past like Cream, the Animals, The Small Pieces. In the band, who has normally the idea for the songs? And how is the following realization?
Søren & Steffen are the most prolific songwriters in the band I suppose and then me and Allan come up with something once in while. But that doesn’t really matter because we all then meet up in the rehearsal space and create the song together, and we all get our say. In that sense we are a very democratic band for sure.

The name “The Blue Van” comes from the van known in Denmark for collecting the mentally ill, the loonies!
Is it a provocative description of yourself made by the people who lived in your village or is your thought about yourselves?
None of those actually. In Denmark in the sixties we had by now very legendary a beat band singing in Danish called Steppeulvene (The Steppenwolves) and they had a song called “0-0-0”, which is the phone number you would dial in Denmark in the old days if you wanted an ambulance. The lyrics go: “Call the blue van and an ambulance/dial 0-0-0 for help!" (in Danish of course). So on the same New Years Eve on which I joined the band we were listening to Steppeulvene and it was decided that we should be called "Den Blå Vogn" which we later translated to English: The Blue Van. I thought it was a terrible name… But I have grown to love it.

Then you moved to Copenhagen, sure that will offer you something more! I think that this would be a strict but essential condition to let your music known and to let the growth of the band. You recorded a demo in an old garage for the booking agencies and records labels. How was your arrival in the big city? Describe something positive and something negative.
Yes, well in the beginning there was lots of negative stuff, like… Well, first of all Søren broke his arm within the first week because he crashed on his bike, trying to save the record he was carrying under his arm. So we could not rehearse for a month. We got a really expensive apartment and we all had to work for a shitty substitute company.
On the positive side: we made that demo “A Session With The Blue Van”,then we got a booker right away and he got us jobs and that lead to people seeing/hearing and that lead us to play Roskilde Festival in Denmark and then we were off!

I read an article about you in one Italian magazine, “Rock Sound” where you say that a musician has a lot of facilities living in Copenhagen, because a lot of people and a lot of places are interested on the band and on the project. Could you explain this? How is the musician’s life in Copenhagen?
Well, what I think we meant is that big cities in general have more facilities; clubs, venues, rehearsal spaces etc. compared to the country side where we are from. A musicians life in Copenhagen is perhaps a little better than in, let’s say London or New York because venues and and cultural events often are supported by the government which means that the artist is almost always guaranteed a certain amount of money. Besides that there is a pretty decent music and club scene in Copenhagen.

Your first album, “The Art of Rolling”, was recorded in Germany in 2005, in Hamburg; the mixing was ready after a month and the overdubbing took only the voice. The result is an album characterized by the energy and the feeling given off during the shows. But why did you go to Germany and you didn’t recorded in Copenhagen?
There’s a pretty simple reason for that: our main manager was born in Germany and he had some good experience with this studio in Hamburg (Sound Factory) owned by a guy called Lutz Rahn in partnership with a British guy called Mark Willis and Hamburg is close to Copenhagen. So there we went.

The work collected a lot of positive comments, in the Sun, in the New York Times, in the Rolling Stones. What do you think about?
That was a very good thing of course, it opened a lot of doors for us. We had by then got a record deal with a record label called TVT Records in New York, and with their help and the good reponse we got, we can go to see many parts of the world.

I saw you twice, in January in Verona and in March in Roncade with JET.

During your shows it seems to be in another atmosphere, breathing the ’60 and the ’70, maybe for the Hammond played by Søren, for the voice of Steffen, or for the rhythm made by Allan and Per. Your shows are like a hurricane where you are able to display all your energy and great music in a way where the guys could only dance and sing!
Tell me the truth…from what comes all your energy?
It simply comes FROM playing; when we get going there’s nothing easier. We can be sitting backstage feeling like something we don’t want to talk about, not wanting to go on. But as soon as it’s show time and we are there, on stage, there is no turning back, no easy way out. Just make the absolutely best out of it. Have fun, live it. And we feed a lot from the crowd of course. The more they dig it, the more we dig it.

In 2004 you went on tour 3 months in USA (New York and all around),then in England and in Germany supporting Razorlight. Later, you went also to Tokyo and Osaka, the last tour was supporting JET, and you came also to Italy. What do you think about the different places where you played? Which are the places that you liked so much for the people and for the country?
All countries have their own thing. In Germany it’s not the food for sure! A opposed to Italy that along with Japan have the best food in the world. When it comes to people I don’t know really… No country strikes me as being better or worse. Every country have morons and idiots but at the same time they also have kind and great people. The Japanese are so very polite; the Italians and Spanish are very passionate, even a little aggressive, but that’s OK and the American people are very open into what YOU are doing, so… Every country has it’s own quality.

I think that the shows could be different not only for the people who are playing and for the different situations but also because new countries, new locations and new people coming to listen to your music could give you different emotions. Could you explain us the main differences you looked in the different countries you went?
The Italiens and Spanish gave us a very warm response, maybe because you are very warm blooded people? The Americans love ROCK. The Brits dig energy and good tunes. And so on…

Your last work is “Dear Independence” and it’s very different from the first one. The music is melodic and less crude, but the sound is sharp and sparkling. Could you explain us the meaning of the different songs, maybe the three which we can listen from your myspace?
We toured a lot with “The Art Of Rolling”, played around 200 shows in two and a half years and when you finally get back home after such extensive touring and what comes along with it, you don’t sit down to make another wild rock n’ roll record. Also we picked up a lot of new influences, especially in America, where we found a new love for soul music from all the old vinyls we were buying for no money all around the country.
“Don’t Leave Me Blue” is a good example of our soul side. It was on the last songs we made before going into the studio and it was jammed up from a riff that Steffen came up with.
“Goldmind” is a classic Søren riff, written on guitar as he is also a guitarist and it point’s toward the style we had on “The Art Of Rolling”.
“Time Is Right” was made a couple of months later, when we were in Chicago to finish the album. It was made in another studio with another producer and then remixed by our first choice of producer in the studio in New York where the most of the album was done. That’s why, if you listen closer to it, you can hear it has a different sound than the rest of the songs.

Are you on holiday now? What are the future plans of The Blue Van?
We are all on holiday right now, or whatever you want to call it. Very soon we’re going to relocate to a house to work on material for a third album. Wish us luck!
We also have some gigs coming up, mostly in Denmark, but they keep on coming so maybe we’ll be back in Italy before you know it. We would love to that’s for sure and it would only be our third time this year so… Keep an eye on our homepage if you want to see us! That is. Bye!