FAQ (English)
Frequently Asked Questions
- everything you always wanted to know about Gangway but were afraid to ask about
Edited by Brian Iskov
English translation: Martin G. Houlind & Brian Iskov
Last modified: 30 December 2002
A brief characterization1. WHO WERE THOSE GANGWAY, AFTER ALL?
1a. Henrik Balling
1b. Allan Jensen
1c. Torben Johansen
2. HOW MANY DRUMMERS HAVE GANGWAY HAD DURING THE YEARS?2a. Jan Christensen (1982-84)
2b. Gorm Ravn-Jonsen (1984-89)
2c. Cai Bojsen-Møller (1991-94)
2d. Jeppe Moesgaard (1996-98)
3. WHAT WAS GANGWAY'S CAREER LIKE?3a. The Beginning (1982-83)
3b. The Irmgardz Era (1983-87)
3c. The PolyGram Era (1987-90)
3d. The Electra Era (1990-91)
3e. The BMG Era (1991-98)
4. WHO PRODUCED GANGWAY?4a. Søren Wolff
4b. David Motion
4c. Illinton
4d. Kasper Winding
5. WHO ELSE HAS BEEN CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH GANGWAY?5a. Peter Ravn
5b. Jesper Siberg
5c. Halfdan E. Nielsen
5d. Annette Bork
6. DID GANGWAY MAKE ANY VIDEOS?6a. Join the Party
6b. The Loneliest Being
6c. The Idiot
6d. Once Bitten, Twice Shy
6e. My Girl and Me (1986)
6f. My Girl and Me (1988)
6g. Going Away
6h. Mountain Song
6i. Never Say Goodbye
6j. Everything Seems To Go My Way
6k. Sycamore Sundays
6l. Come Back As A Dog
7. WHAT IS "GANGWAY IN TYROL"?7a. Behind the scenes
7b. Summary of the plot
7c. Credits
8. WHAT HAVE GANGWAY DONE IN TERMS OF LIVE PERFORMANCES?9. ARE GANGWAY REALLY THAT BIG IN JAPAN?
A BRIEF CHARACTERIZATION:
"Revolving around the clear, artless voice of Allan Jensen, Gangway created a melodic universe, where the pop songs often concealed bizarre lyrics. At the same time, the band developed their sound from an acoustically based one to one that incorporated samplers and rhythm programming with inspiration from techno and dance music. Without losing neither the pop nor the humour." - "Politikens Dansk Rock 1956-1997"
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1. WHO WERE THOSE GANGWAY, AFTER ALL?1a. Henrik Balling
1b. Allan Jensen
1c. Torben Johansen
1a. Who - and what - is Henrik Balling?
Henrik Balling was the guitarist and main songwriter of Gangway; he also played keyboards on "The Twist", "Sitting in the Park", and "That's Life", and performed backing vocals on "The Twist", "Sitting in the Park", and "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake". Furthermore, he produced "Happy Ever After" and "Optimism©" (the latter in collaboration with Illinton). Henrik played the bass on "Boys in the River" off "The Twist", the recorder on "Paris, Mexico", and the banjo on "That's Life".
Henrik was born on April 10, 1959 in Hvidovre, Copenhagen. He got his first guitar on his eleventh birthday in April 1970 - the exact same afternoon the Beatles parted. The next year, his record collection began to take shape with the purchase of "Deep Purple in Rock" and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath. Henrik spent his teenage years listening to the radio and borrowing every record available at the public library. Today, he claims to be hearing-impaired.
"I passed the A-levels with mediocre results. But I would have earned top marks in a quiz about pop music." - Henrik BallingHenrik started writing songs around 1980, and formed Gangway two years later. Since then, he has worked as a presenter on the chart show "Puls" (on Danish TV 2, 1995-96 and 1997), after being guest host on another television programme, "Videoværten" ["The Video Host"], in 1993 (on Danish DR-TV).
Outside the framework of Gangway, Henrik has contributed to the album "Livsform 2" ["Life Form 2"] by Gekko (1988, on guitar - the drummer, Cai Bojsen-Møller, later became a member of Gangway), and the live CD "Vega 22.10.96" by Sharing Patrol (1996, on keyboards). Moreover, Henrik arranged the strings on the track "Se" ["Look"] from the Anne Dorte Michelsen album "Alting vender tilbage" ["Everything Returns"] from 1987, and, in 1991, he produced five tracks for The Magnificent 7, included on a compilation called "Secrets #5" (Jesper Siberg was the engineer). Henrik is also listed as one of the engineers on the first Baby Hotel Hunger EP (1986).
He composed the signature tune for a talkshow called "Mors hammer" (also on TV2), as well as three tracks for two Japanese artists. In early 1998, he scored a Danish feature film by Peter Gren Larsen, called "Baby Doom". He has been working with British singer Lester Noel, and - accompanied by singer Bjørn Fjæstad and scientist Peter Lund Madsen - toured Denmark in 2001 with a small show called "Brain Songs", which is pretty much, what it says it is. In 2002, he produced three songs for singer/songwriter Lise Westzynthius.
1b. Who - and what - is Allan Jensen?
Allan Jensen was the lead singer of Gangway, and did two songs for the group ("World of Difference" and "April Fool"), as well as the lyrics for two others ("Yellow" and "Out on the Rebound from Love"). His light, charming pop vocals - originally influenced by Morrissey - has often been praised as one of the group's major assets. Down to the spring of 1991, Allan also played the bass. He then concentrated on singing, and the bass lines were recorded and then played back on tape until Halfdan E. joined the band for the "Happy Ever After" tour. In late 1994, Allan went back to playing the bass. He played the drums on "Yellow" off "The Twist", and is listed as percussionist on "Happy Ever After".
Allan was born on December 28, 1960 in Copenhagen. He has always been a keen football player - in his boyhood on the grounds of "Holmens Church", later on the first team for "Frem" (although he only played two rounds). Allan's musical career began in the autumn of 1982, when he did a few demo tapes as a drummer for Naïve - then a Joy Division-ish group by the name of Words & Welfare (Jesper Siberg, later the sound designer for Gangway, also played in the group). His only musical appearance outside Gangway in the life of this group consisted of two concerts with Allan performing jazz standards, accompanied by well-known Danish jazz musicians such as Bo Stief and Hugo Rasmussen.
In March 2001, Jensen released his first solo album, called "One Fine Day"; he describes the style as "strongly tuneful pop music".
1c. Who - and what - is Torben Johansen?
Torben Johansen was Gangway's keyboard player. Since the "Happy Ever After" album, he has written 8 of the 72 published Gangway songs. He did backing vocals on "Sitting in the Park" (on which he also played the guitar) and "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake". He is also the only non-speaking member of the group in the "Gangway in Tyrol" film.
Torben was born on April 5, 1963 in Haderslev, Jutland. He is often confused with another Torben Johansen, who is also a musician, but who refuses to use his middle name (the inclusion of which would avoid such confusion). Let it be known, then, that Torben from Gangway is the one who sang and played the guitar in the new wave group Escape Artists (1981-84). The members of the group were huge Gangway fans, and thus immediately jumped at the offer of supporting their idols at the "Musikcafe'n" in Copenhagen.
Escape Artists only recorded one album, which was never released on vinyl. Torben then moved to Copenhagen and played with Gangway as a paid musician until he became a full-time member with the recording of "Sitting in the Park" in December 1985.
More recently, Torben has acted as a consultant and producer for Cinnamon Sigh - a rock group "along the lines of Radiohead and early R.E.M." - and the prize techno/rock act Puddu Varano. In December 1999, he produced and co-arranged an album called "Overmorgen (Millennķum)" with Danish poet and painter Martin Bigum.
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2. HOW MANY DRUMMERS HAVE GANGWAY HAD DURING THE YEARS?2a. Jan Christensen (1982-84)
2b. Gorm Ravn-Jonsen (1984-89)
2c. Cai Bojsen-Møller (1991-94)
2d. Jeppe Moesgaard (1996-98)
2a. Who is Jan Christensen (1982-84)?
Jan Herlin Christensen grew up in Køge, Zealand, and had just moved to Copenhagen in 1982, when Henrik Balling and Allan Jensen decided to form a band. Through an advertisement in the Danish music magazine MM, Jan joined the band, and played the drums on their debut album, "The Twist".
Jan left the band in August 1984, not happy with the lighter pop style of the new songs. He then became the drummer in a new band, which he named Baby Hotel Hunger (it has since become known merely as Hotel Hunger). Soon, Christensen quit this band too, and he has since stopped his musical activities in favour of being trained as a teacher.
2b. Who is Gorm Ravn-Jonsen (1984-89)?
Gorm Jølk Ravn-Jonsen succeeded Allan Jensen as a drummer in Naïve (aka Words & Welfare), who at the time shared a practice room with Gangway. At the beginning of 1984, Gorm also turned to Gangway, but as a keyboard player. This soon proved to be unsatisfactory, as he had never played the keyboards before; when Jan Christensen left the band in August, Gorm resumed drumming.
On the debut album, "The Twist", he played the bass on "Yellow", the guitar on "Violence, Easter and Christmas" and additional drums on "Rhythm's Our Business" (for the sake of convenience, he was just credited with "miscellaneous"). Gorm played the drums on the next two albums, "Sitting in the Park" and "Sitting in the Park (Again!)".
After financial controversies with the record company Irmgardz, a failed attempt at a breakthrough in England, and bouts of infighting, Gorm got fed up and left the group in April 1989 after a string of miserable gigs in Jutlandic sports centres (although he briefly rejoined the band for an appearance on Danish TV in March 1998).
He has since stopped playing the drums, and now concentrates on singing and guitar playing. In 1996, he wrote and recorded a melodious rock album; at the time of writing (January 1998) the project, which goes by the name of Jølk for the time being, was yet to find a buyer. Furthermore, Gorm has contributed to the Nanna album "Rocking Horse", produced by Søren Wolff (1991 - drums and drum programming), and Love Shop's "Go!" (1995), on which he did backing vocals. He has recently formed a production company with Wolff, called Idiophone. Gorm did some sound engineering on Henrik Balling's "Brain Songs" tour and CD in 2001.
2c. Who is Cai Bojsen-Møller (1991-94)?
Cai Bojsen-Møller played the drums on 3 Gangway records ("The Quiet Boy Ate The Whole Cake", "Happy Ever After", "Optimismø") and was misspelt twice. Formerly known as Kai Hansen, he played in funk groups such as Buz Stop (1981-84), Metro (1983-84) og Paris Paris (1983-85); he even appeared in the Danish version of the Eurovision Song Contest 1987 with Trine Dyrholm.
In 1988, Cai wrote the music for the Gekko album "Livsform 2" ["Life Form 2"], on which Henrik Balling played the guitar on the title track. Cai and Henrik have known each other since school, where they played together in various bands. During the recording of "The Quiet Boy...", Cai was called in to do drum fills on some of the tracks, after which he became a full-time member of Gangway.
After the "Optimism©" tour - on which he played the drums as well as keyboards and percussion - Cai devoted himself to his techno label Multiplex, formed in April 1995 in collaboration with Steen Mogensen, also known as Kong. The duo did the music for the play "Faber Mundi" (released on CD under the pseudonym Goto), the short subject "Elskede Dyr" ["Beloved Animals"] (as cK; an abbreviation for Cai and Kong), and the "Get Lost" section of the summer exhibit at the Danish museum for modern art, Louisiana, 1996.
In 1997, Cai released a solo album of minimalist techno, "A Bit of Something", followed in 1998 by "Super-Sonic Jazzy Session". He has also appeared on an English techno compilation under the name of Idiot Savant.
2d. Who is Jeppe Moesgaard (1996-98)?
Jeppe Juul Moesgaard played the drums on Gangway's "That's Live" tour in 1996-97. It was his debut as a live performer, and the fact that the band had only managed to practise twice before the opening night, only added to his nervousness. He even had to rent a drum kit, as he did not own one himself at the time. He also contributed to the last two Gangway songs, "Don't Trust Me" and "Goodbye", off "Compendium".
Even though he has played the drums for many years, and has worked with Danish jazz/rock musicians such as Morten Kærså, Bo Stief, and Frans Bak, Moesgaard is an unknown quantity in terms of making records. For a long time, he has been teaching piano, drumming, and singing lessons; in turn, he has been taught by Kasper Winding, who recommended him to Gangway after producing their album "That's Life".
Moesgaard was the Danish skateboard champion of 1979. He accompanied Allan Jensen on his solo tour in 2001.
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3. WHAT WAS GANGWAY CAREER LIKE?3a. The Beginning (1982-83)
3b. The Irmgardz Era (1983-87)
3c. The PolyGram Era (1987-90)
3d. The Electra Era (1990-91)
3e. The BMG Era (1991-98)
3a. The Beginning (1982-83)
Gangway was formed in Copenhagen in 1982. Around that time, Henrik Balling had a lousy job in Illum, a big department store in the center of Copenhagen, where he was compressing cardboard boxes in the vaults. Here he met Allan Jensen, who turned out to be endowed with both a sense of music and a good singing voice. The third member of the band, Jan Christensen, the drummer, met Henrik and Allan through an advertisement in a music magazine.
In December 1982 the band played their debut concert at a grammar school. The band was called Unforced Error, but the members changed it rather quickly after Allan heard Julie Andrews sing the words "gangway, gangway" on the radio during the Christmas holidays. At this early stage, the music sounded heavy and dense; a dark and chanting kind of rock music inspired by such new wave bands as The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen.
During 1983, Gangway played a number of concerts in Denmark together with other bands who also belonged to the so-called "black school" -- for instance, Scatterbrain (with Jesper Siberg) and Twice A Man. They were spotted by Jan Wintersøe and Ken Revoltaire, two representatives from Irmgardz, an underground record-company.
3b. The Irmgardz Era (1983-87)
Around that time, Irmgardz (formed in 1979) was the most important independent record-company in Denmark, and they wanted to pay for Gangway's recording time in a studio. In December 1983, the band recorded a master tape in the Hookfarm studio. "Half a year went by," Henrik Balling recalls, "and then Irmgardz called us and asked us to finish that bloody record." They did so in May 1984, but at that occasion the band also re-arranged a number of songs, because they was getting tired of the black mood and sound. "There wasn't much left of Echo & The Bunnymen. It was more a kind of pop music inspired by what was happening in England at that time. At first, Irmgardz didn't like it, but after having listened to it a couple of times their disappointment turned into enthusiasm," Henrik remembers (Opus 3/91). Meanwhile, Jan Christensen left the band and Gorm Ravn-Jonsen, who had joined in the beginning of 1984, stopped playing keyboards and continued as a drummer.
"THE TWIST" was released in November 1984, and the reviews were very nice -- also the ones in the English music magazines. It was in fact the first Danish record with English lyrics that sold over 10,000 copies in Denmark.
In 1985, Peter Ravn directed three music videos with Gangway for Weekend TV, a Copenhagen channel, and through Irmgardz the band released two 7" singles, "Out on the Rebound from Love" and "Once Bitten, Twice Shy". New Musical Express, a leading English music magazine, appointed the latter of the two "Single of the week", and the song was re-recorded in December, when they were in the studio with nine new songs and Torben Johansen on keyboards.
Gangway made their sound more sophisticated on "SITTING IN THE PARK" which was released in February 1986. The perfectionist pop music with a certain British sound attracted attention both in Denmark and England -- thanks to especially "My Girl and Me", the single which also became a classic in that particular genre. "People seem to believe that we've always wanted to sound extremely sixties and minimalistic," Allan Jensen said later on. "The truth is that it was the only sound we could afford." (MM 6-7/88). "Sitting in the Park" was finished in three weeks, only because Irmgardz couldn't pay for more recording time in the studio.
The fact that the company's ways of business were more idealistic than economic certainly came to Gangway in July 1986, when the band shot a musical film-comedy in Austria. In "Gangway in Tyrol" the band performed in their easily recognizable anti-image: wearing terrible check-patterned jackets with pipes in the corners of their mouths. "That was really easy to spot," Henrik said later on, "but we couldn't stand it. There was only space for one thing, and that was a gibbering, blithering stupid sense of humour" (LB 7/92). Peter Ravn and Asger Larsen got the idea for the film, and they also wrote the screenplay and lead the film crew which consisted of eight people.
The four musicians paid for the journey and the stay themselves, but despite Irmgardz's many promises they never sent the band any money, and Gangway in the end had to scrape up all the money they could in order to pay the hotel bill. Since they did not get any royalties from Irmgardz either, the band could not help declaring the company bankrupt. March 1987 Irmgardz closed the doors for the last time.
3c. The PolyGram Era (1987-90)
Gangway had together with Irmgardz tried to get a deal with some major foreign record-company, and in the summer of 1987, the band signed a contract with the English department of the Dutch concern, PolyGram International. The goal was to break in England, which on several occasions had been very interested in the Danish band. In order to achieve this goal, Gangway re-recorded nine old songs -- and a new one ("Here's my House") -- with David Motion, an English producer.
In 1988, Allan Jensen told the Danish music magazine MM: "The most obvious solution would've been to re-release the record ["Sitting in the Park"]. But our old record-company totally rejected selling us the master tapes. So we thought: "Up yours -- we'll just record it once more!" And that's not a problem at all. To me the songs are a very unique bunch -- and no one outside Denmark has ever listened to them. This particular record is not meant for Denmark. Of course, it will be available in the stores, but it's not going to be a new Gangway album."
"SITTING IN THE PARK (AGAIN!)" was the name of that particular record, and it was recorded during two months in the Werner Studio in Copenhagen. It was Gangway's first step in the direction of a more modern and smooth sound based on machines, with a more extended use of sequencers, samplers and synthesizers. In 1987, the new version of "My Girl and Me" was released as the first single through London Records, a subdivision of PolyGram. But the timing was rather unlucky: Around that time, the company had several hits on the top of single charts, such as Salt'n'Pepa and Glenn Medeiros. Although Gangway's single was placed high on the A-list of BBC Radio One, it was given a lower priority. At the same time, London Records restructured their sales department; a fact that did not easy the situation in any way.
"PolyGram got angry with London Records. Then they got offended, and our manager -- who until then had been a great manager and had got us a fine contract -- got mad in the wrong way, and the result was a lot more quarrel," Torben Johansen recounts. At the end of the day, Gangway's manager was fired, and the result was that London Records lost interest in them.
PolyGram could not do anything about the situation in England but tried to launch the band in Germany instead. "My Girl and Me" was once again released, and here it was also played often on the radio, but at this time the band was so disillusioned by their English mis-adventure, that they could not come up with any sort of entusiasm. "We were highly inattentive and we didn't gain anything either. At last we stopped dreaming," Henrik Balling said later on (FS 91).
"Sitting in the Park (Again!)" was released in Denmark in July 1988. It was never released in England.
3d. The Electra Era (1990-91)
In the time after the failed foreign adventures nobody was interested in Gangway. "That was by far the worst time," Henrik Balling recalls. "We were on a tour in 1989 still playing the same songs from '85-'86, and people got a bit tired of it, and we got tired, too. It was very unpleasant to watch everything slip out of our hands -- occasionally we went to our practice room and played together. But nothing more happened. In the end, it was all too much, and we started quarreling and fighting ... That wasn't funny at all."
Something only happened when Michael Kastrupsen, the Danish A&R man of PolyGram, got hired by Electra, a small new Danish record company. He was still very fond of Gangway, and in 1990 the band signed a new contract. (Meanwhile Gorm Ravn-Jonsen had left the band.) With David Motion as producer, they recorded a number of songs, which Henrik Balling had been writing on since the first "Sitting in the Park".
"THE QUIET BOY ATE THE WHOLE CAKE" was released in March 1991, and it was an album that, in the words of music critic Per Juul Carlsen, "sounded proud and eager to prove that the band was too good to be defeated" (LB 7/92). The extended use of sequence programming and heavy hip hop drums made the album ahead of its time, and it has remained a favourite to Gangway fans (counting in Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys) and the band itself. In spite of positive feedback from the rather surprised Danish music critics, the record never really came out to the people who should want to buy it. Electra hadn't got the money to market the album in a proper way.
"We needed a music video -- it wasn't shot until six months after the single was released, and you can't do things that way," Henrik Balling said later (Jam 40/92). Furthermore the company forgot to re-new Gangway's contract, and when it expired in the autumn of 1991, Gangway went away. At that time, Electra was about to go bankrupt, and the record company did so a short while after.
3e. The BMG Era (1991-98)
Genlyd, another Danish record company, had long before "Sitting in the Park (Again!)" been interested in signing a contract with Gangway and after the company had become a part of BMG, a worldwide concern, the band joined BMG/Genlyd. This meant better financial stability for the band and better marketing: "Suddenly, we've got the same opportunities as all the other up-coming stars have. For instance, we have released a music video and the album at the same time -- you know, the record company has a budget that makes these things possible. That's extremely important," Henrik Balling said (Jam 48/94).
At the same time, the band's older albums were released in Japan by the new Hammer Label company. A couple of the records contained bonus tracks, and one of these -- based on an old demo version of "Yesterday, When I Was Drunk" -- has in fact never been released in Denmark. Furthermore, "QUIET EDIT +", the 1992 remix album, has been available in Japanese stores only.
"HAPPY EVER AFTER" was recorded in the summer of 1992 in the Easy Sound Studio in Copenhagen, Denmark, with Katie Dahlstrom from USA as engineer. Henrik Balling produced the album himself, and Cai Bojsen-Møller, who had done some of the drum fills on "The Quiet Boy ...", was now a full-time member of the band. This meant that for the first time since 1986, acoustic drums were to be found on a Gangway album. On "Happy Ever After" the band tried to experiment even more with the music than before, a fact that the critics liked, and Torben Johansen broke Balling's monopoly of song writing by writing three tracks for the album. Two of these were released as singles. However, it was Balling's "Mountain Song" that was going to give the band their breakthrough to their audience; this happy, catchy song came in as number seven on the air play chart of the Danish radio that year, and the music video, being shown often on TV, got a lot of attention because of all the colourful violence in it.
During Gangway's spring tour a lot of the concerts were sold out, and the climax of the success was the Danish Grammy awards in February 1993, where the band won no less than four prizes: "The Best Danish Band of the Year", "The Best Danish Song Writer of the Year" (Henrik Balling), "The Best Danish Rock album of the Year" and "The Best Danish Music Video of the Year" ("Mountain Song"). Henrik later said: "We were really excited about getting all these Grammy's, but very strangely our album, which sold extremely well at the time, stopped selling at once on the up-coming Monday after the awards -- and then you wonder: "Was it something I said, or ...?"" (BMG video). "Happy Ever After" has, until now, sold almost 40,000 copies in Denmark, which makes it Gangway's greatest commercial success ever.
In 1993, Gangway played un-plugged on Danish TV. As one would expect, the band chose a rather strange song to perform: Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" arranged for piano, guitar, and cardboard-box drums.
Later that year the band recorded their own techno version of "Break or Bend", a song originally written by Lars Muhl, a Danish singer and song writer. It was released on "From All of Us ...", a tribute record to Lars Muhl. Henrik Balling produced the song together with Lasse "Illinton" Mosegaard, a young Danish dance-music enthusiast, and their collaboration continued during the production of Gangway's next album, "OPTIMISM©", on which Illinton programmed all the bass lines and drum patterns. The songs on the album were all recorded in his appartment. "When we started making this album, the record company hadn't heard any demos or anything. We were just asked to start recording the whole thing in the studio. I think they heard some of the first songs around Christmas, and at that time we'd been playing and recording for somewhat three months or so," Henrik told Jam Magazine.
The result - an energetic venture into the realm of techno pop and disco - was released April 1994. This time the critics were more reserved, and some music journalists agreed that the song writing was not that good, compared to Gangway's previous efforts. (However, they liked Allan Jensen's song-writing debut, "World of Difference".) Concerning the copyright in the title -- it is actually not a C but a G -- the band explained that they would sue anyone who used the word "optimism". The Danish government were going to be the first ones put on trial.
Feltwave, a Danish TV production company, shot the music video for the first single, "Everything Seems to Go My Way", but the expected sales figures did not show up. "Optimism©" did not sell more than 10,000 copies in Denmark. In the autumn of 1994, Gangway went on an extremely low-budget tour, where both new and old songs were performed in new sequenced electro-pop versions. "Those concerts were really odd and strange," Henrik recalls. In December 1994, after a more successful tour in Japan, Cai Bojsen-Møller stopped playing in the band in order to concentrate on his own record company, Multiplex.
In 1995, Gangway for the first time recorded a track sung in the Danish language: "Butiksleg" by Grethe Agatz. ("Butiksleg" is the sort of game Danish children plays where one of the participants pretends to be the owner of a shop of some kind and the other children pretend to be the customers.) The song was released on "Tangokat", a children's record (released by the Danish radio, DR and Sony). The song was produced by the band itself, and Master Fatman, a Danish multi-media personality, did the vocals together with Allan Jensen. Later that year, Kasper Winding, one of the most wanted producers in Denmark, called Henrik Balling. Winding praised Gangway's music in every way and offered to produce their next album. The band could not turn down such an offer.
"THAT'S LIFE" was recorded in four weeks in London during the winter of '96. The lyrics were written by Henrik while walking in the Soho district, the night before they were to be sung in the studio. Torben and Allan each contributed with a few songs again. The tempo was slow, and on Winding's request the sound became more simple and sparse, and Allan's voice became more significant and audible. "That was the things he'd longed for in our former production, where every inch of the tape was stuffed with some sort of idea. Of course, we thought the ideas to be rather nice, but if you've got a lot of really bright ideas and present them on one long string, the ideas ruin each other. This time we've used the vocal and the song as our starting point and then saved some of the good ideas in order for the remaining ideas to be really great. On this album, the air and the pauses are extremely important," Henrik Balling told Chili, a Danish youth magazine.
The record was released in September 1996 together with "Come Back as a Dog" as the first single. It was played a lot on the radio and Danish TV also played the charming music video a good deal. Gangway really expected great things of their new album, and their following disappointment was extreme, when "That's Life" did not even sell as much as "Optimism©" did (10,000 copies). Among the band's albums "That's Life" thus became the number one poor seller.
In the autumn of 1996, the band again played on a tour in Denmark with Jeppe Moesgaard playing the drums. The audience stayed away, however, and after another series of concerts in the spring of '97 Henrik, Allan and Torben decided to split up. The band's decision was issued in September 1997 by Gaffa, a Danish music magazine: Officially the reason was a lack of commercial success, but unofficially there had also been some problems within the band and between the members. The release in January 1998 of the compilation CD "COMPENDIUM GREATEST HITS", with 16 old and two new songs, was the main attraction at the burial of Gangway -- the anti heroes par excellence of Danish pop music.
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4. WHO PRODUCED GANGWAY?4a. Who is Søren Wollf?
4b. Who is David Motion?
4c. Who is Illinton?
4d. Who is Kasper Winding?
4a. Who is Søren Wollf?
Søren Wolff produced "Sitting in the Park", on which he also played a bit of guitar; it was recorded at Hookfarm Studio in December 1985. He can also be heard on "Didn't I Make You Laugh" off "Happy Ever After", playing the acoustic guitar.
As long ago as 1971, Wolff formed a band called Gates, where he was responsible for vocals, keyboards, and electric guitar; SW-80, who made their debut in 1980, was an offshoot. He has worked as a musician for - among others - Anne Dorte Michelsen, Miss B. Haven, and Kim Larsen, as well as the legendary new wave group Kliché (whom he accompanied in a string of live gigs, playing electric guitar). Wolff has also produced a number of other Danish artists such as Anne Grete, Henrik Strube, Rocazino, and Nanna ("Rocking Horse" from 1991, on which Gorm Ravn-Jonsen played the drums). He and Ravn-Jonsen recently formed their own production company, Idiophone, and are now busy writing and producing songs.
4b. Who is David Motion?
David Motion produced "Sitting in the Park (Again!)" (1988) and "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake" (1991), thus playing an important part in Gangway's development from an acoustically based guitar band to a synth-based technopop group. Motion was also the one to propose Michael Brauer as the mixer of "Sitting..." (Brauer has worked with such notable artists as Grace Jones, James Brown, and Manic Street Preachers).
In the mid-eighties, David Motion was a studio engineer for Wang Chung and the punk band Crass; he produced albums for - among others - Strawberry Switchblade (their debut LP from 1985, described by All Music Guide as "overproduced, typically 1980s electro-pop"), Red Box (a folk-tinged duo from London), and Tommy Page. In 1993, he did the soundtrack for the Sally Potter film "Orlando", with Jesper Siberg on MIDI; he also produced one of the tracks written by Henrik Balling for the Japanese singer and actor Shino Okamura.
4c. Who is Illinton?
Illinton, whose real name is Lasse Mosegaard Jensen, remixed three tracks off "Happy Ever After" in 1992, and appeared with Gangway on the Danish TV show "Eleva2ren" in March 1993, performing a zippy techno rendition of "My Girl and Me". He played the didgeridoo on "Mountain Song" at the Danish Grammy Awards the same year, and helped out on "Break or Bend", Gangway's contribution to the Lars Muhl tribute album "From All Of Us...". In 1994, he co-produced "Optimism©", where he was responsible for the bass and rhythm programming. The album was recorded in Illinton's bedroom.
At the age of 17, Illinton contributed to the popular Danish rave anthem "Kaos" with Dr. Baker (1989). He has since helped the rapper Lucas to a breakthrough with the album "Lucacentric" (one of the singles, "Lucas with the Lid Off", went Top 30 in USA), and appeared on records with Al Agami, Excess Bleeding Heart, and the Danish techno pioneers, The Overlords. Furthermore, he co-produced Blachman Thomas' trail-blazing single "Aphorisms" from 1993, and collaborated with another Gangway producer, Kasper Winding, on C. V. Jørgensen's "Sjælland" ["Zealand", 1994] and the self-titled album by Pop From the Deep End (1996). He has also done remixes for The Poets.
Illinton now lives in London, where he - among other things - has assisted Peshay on writing and producing "Miles from Home", an outstanding and widely praised album.
4d. Who is Kasper Winding?
"Gangway could have been the Pet Shop Boys or Crowded House. They're just as good as regards singing and writing songs." - Kasper Winding (GAFFA #3, March 1996).
Outlining Kasper Winding's career could easily fill up an FAQ on its own. Since his teenage years, he has been very active as a professional musician, and he is one of the most sought-after producers in Denmark; in 1996, he produced Gangway's "That's Life", after admiring the group from a distance for several years. (He was also responsible for the Lars Muhl tribute album "From All Of Us...", to which Gangway also contributed in 1993, as well as Allan Jensen's solo album, "One Fine Day" from 2001.)
Winding is equally adept at playing the drums, keyboards, percussion, bass, guitar, programming, and singing (although he has taken quite a beating for his affected falsetto vocals). At the age of 11, he won the local beat championship in Øbro; he has since performed with a vast number of domestic and foreign artists, both jazz musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Palle Mikkelborg) and rock stars (The Rolling Stones). He toured with Danish icon Otto Brandenburg, and was a member of the very popular band Shu-bi-dua.
As far back as 1970, he did the soundtrack for "Revolution i vandkanten" ["Revolution at the water's edge"], a film made by his father Thomas Winding (a well-known Danish media personality); he later composed the scores for "Mig og Charly" ["Me and Charly", 1978, with C. V. Jørgensen] and several films by Anders Refn (the single "Sjæl i flammer"/"Soul on fire" from the TV series "Een gang strømer"/"Once a cop..." was a Danish hit single in 1987). He has been married to Brigitte Nielsen, lived in New York, Milan, and Paris, and now lives in London with actress Simone Bendix (who appears on "Think of Spain" off "That's Life").
In the 1990s, Winding has drawn attention to himself as an award-winning producer for C. V. Jørgensen ("Sjælland"/"Zealand", 1994) and Caroline Henderson ("Cinemataztic", 1995). In 1996, he formed Pop From the Deep End in collaboration with Henrik Lund, his partner for many years (he also mixed "That's Life"), and Klaus Menzer. Incidentally, Illinton appears on one track off their debut album.
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5. WHO ELSE HAS BEEN CLOSELY CONNECTED WITH GANGWAY?5a. Peter Ravn
5b. Jesper Siberg
5c. Halfdan E. Nielsen
5d. Annette Bork
5a. Who is Peter Ravn, and what is his connection with Gangway?
Peter Ravn has designed all of Gangway's Danish record sleeves since the 7" single "Out on the Rebound From Love" from 1985. Ravn was the first Danish designer to claim a professional fee for his covers (e.g. Tøsedrengene with Anne Dorte Michelsen), and the first to create a consistent image for each band, incorporating publicity stills and videos. Thus he has also directed quite a few videos for Gangway (including the TV movie "Gangway in Tyrol"), as well as furnishing them with clothes from Democrats, his own designer label, since 1992.
In the late 70's, Ravn played the guitar in a garage rock band, Ainsley & The Jet-Setz, which later turned in to a new wave group called Pop Du Nord. It was dissolved in 1982, but the name was to be used for a series of music programmes which Ravn made in 1985 for a Copenhagen TV station, Weekend TV. The first three Gangway videos were made just for this show. Ravn produced the programmes in collaboration with Anne Dorte Michelsen, who was then his girl friend (he also wrote a track for her album "Alting vender tilbage" ["Everything Returns"] in 1987).
In 1983, Ravn did the video for the classic electro tune "White Horse" with Laid Back; he was also responsible for the stylized look of Me & My in their hit video "Dub-i-Dub" from 1995. He has directed videos for TV-2, Randi Laubek, Juice, Dizzy Mizz Lizzy and Shirley. Peter Ravn is currently the art director of a Danish magazine called "Blender".
5b. Who is Jesper Siberg, and what is his connection with Gangway?
Jesper Siberg is credited with "sound design" on "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake", "Happy Ever After" and "Optimism©".
In 1980, he formed one of the first Danish techno groups, Scarlet Scatterbrain & His Scooters, inspired by the new electronic sounds of Kraftwerk and Ultravox. Under the name of Scatterbrain, the band released two albums on Irmgardz, and played around Denmark with Gangway at the beginning of 1983 (both Allan Jensen and Siberg have played in Words and Welfare, later known as Naļve). Parallel to this, Siberg collaborated with the poet Michael Valeur, who recited his texts to Siberg's music (1982-87). Ten years later, the two met again, working on a computer game project called "Black Out".
After Siberg left Scatterbrain at the turn of the year 1984-85, he has worked as a sound engineer for "Kanal 2", a Copenhagen TV station (1987-90). He then established his own studio in London, where he has done synth programming and sound design for, among others, the Gangway producer David Motion on his soundtrack for the Sally Potter film "Orlando" (1993).
Furthermore, Siberg has contributed to records by his former Scatterbrain colleague Hilmer Hassig (Naļve, Love Shop, Elisabeth), and he assisted Henrik Balling in producing a demo CD for The Magnificent 7 in 1991. Siberg and Coba, a Japanese musician, formed the techno duo CEL in 1997.
5c. Who is Halfdan E. Nielsen, and what is his connection with Gangway?
Halfdan E., as he usually calls himself, played the bass on Gangway's "Happy Ever After" tour in 1992, and also joined the group when performing live on the TV show "Eleva2ren" in March 1993.
Halfdan E. was born in 1965; at the age of 12, he built his first guitar out of chip boards, nylon strings, and fish glue. In 1984, he joined the band Dieter's Lieder, and contributed to the hit record "Dig og mig" ["You and Me"], released the same year. After the group dissolved in 1988, several of the members got back together in Work, who only did one single, and Flying Fish, who in 1992 released the album "It's Almost Fairy Time". Halfdan has also played with Laid Back and the backing band for Poul Krebs, called Bookhouse. He was educated at the Danish Academy of Rhytmical Music and has done music for TV, film, and theatre.
He is probably best known for his work as a producer. In 1993, the critically acclaimed "Pas på pengene" ["Take Good Care of the Money"] was released, with the Danish poet Dan Turéll reciting his own words to a collage of sound and music, provided by Halfdan E. Turéll died later the same year, but Halfdan managed to collect a series of old recordings, which he set to music and released as "Glad i åbningstiden" ["Happy during the Opening Hours"] in 1996. He also produced and/or contributed to albums with Venter på Far (with Anne Dorte Michelsen), Elisabeth, TV-2, and Peter Belli, as well as his wife Susi Hyldgaard's "My Female Family" (1996, co-produced by Kasper Winding).
5d. Who is Annette Bork, and what is her connection with Gangway?
Annette Bork played the bass during the second half of Gangway's "Happy Ever After" tour in 1993. She succeeded Halfdan E. Nielsen, who for a long time was thought to be unable to do the shows. When the band discovered that he was available after all, they had already found Annette through Henrik Lund, a well-known sound engineer. Gangway chose a female bass player after working with Lene Eriksen from Miss B. Haven on the track "No Matter What".
Bork has played with a number of bands, among them Singing Zoo, who won the "John of the Year" award at "Musikcafe'n" in 1984, and the girl band Female Attractions. At present, she is a member of Gabsky and the Heavenly Orchestra.
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6. DID GANGWAY MAKE ANY VIDEOS?6a. The Loneliest Being (1985)
6b. Join the Party (1985)
6c. The Idiot (1985)
6d. Once Bitten, Twice Shy (1985)
6e. My Girl and Me (1986)
6f. My Girl and Me (1988)
6g. Going Away (1991)
6h. Mountain Song (1992)
6i. Never Say Goodbye (1993)
6j. Everything Seems To Go My Way (1994)
6k. Sycamore Sundays (1994)
6l. Come Back As A Dog (1996)
"Whenever we make videos in Gangway, we always make sure that we are pictured as idiots. And why is that? Are we trying to endow this icy, idealizing, and beautifying video world with a human element? No, that's not the reason; we do it because we know that if we repeat the same pattern over and over again, the chance for commercial success increases." - Henrik Balling ("Videoværten"/"The Video Host", DR-TV 1993)
6a.-b.-c. The Loneliest Being - Join the Party - The Idiot (1985)
Dir.: Peter Ravn.
In 1985, the designer Peter Ravn did the music programme "Pop du Nord" for the Copenhagen TV station "Weekend TV". Here he had the opportunity to do music videos with different artists, among others Gangway, with whom he made videos for three tracks off "The Twist" (four, if you include an introduction in which "On the Roof" accompanied a rooftop view of Copenhagen). The three videos were later shown as a programme in its own right on Danish national television, and on the English satellite channel Music Box.
One of the videos was "Join the Party", in which the four members of the band appear as assistants in a butcher's shop. An elderly lady enters the shop and is rather shocked by the stiff price asked by Henrik for the goods he is selling. He leans over the counter and says with a friendly butcher's smile: "Well, that's the way things are going these days". Peter Ravn explains: "A lot of Gangway's lyrics are quite humorous, and "Join the Party" even has this really silly rhythm box and an absolutely stupid cinema organ theme. Creating beautiful images for that song wouldn't make any sense at all. I was just trying to capture the mood of the music" (LB 9/86).
Excerpts of the video for "Join the Party" can be seen in the TV movie "Gangway in Tyrol" (1987).
6d. Once Bitten, Twice Shy (1985)
Dir.: Asger Larsen.
In "Once Bitten, Twice Shy", Gangway has invited a couple of lovely girls home for a festive evening. It's not a success: The members of the group - naturally dressed in checked jackets, polo neck sweaters, and pipes - offer the girls sausages and sparkling water, toy with their food, and generally indulge in all sorts of goofy behaviour. Henrik falls off a chair, Gorm is chasing girls, and Torben is having a pleasant time with an electric toothbrush. At the end, he fires a handgun into the ceiling. "We love embarrassing situations", Henrik Balling explained in "MM" (2/86).
Gangway funded the video themselves; it was estimated at 600 Danish kroner and ended up costing 800 Dkr. Due to its "destructive" nature (as Jørgen de Mylius, a well-known TV personality, described it) and the poor technical quality, the video has never been shown on Danish television, with the exception of the brief extract shown by Henrik Balling, when he hosted the programme "Videoværten" on Danish national television in 1993.
"Once Bitten, Twice Shy", also known as "the sausage video", was directed by Asger Larsen, who knew Balling from the wacky, experimental video group "Heinrich von Hinten", of which they were both members (their films enjoy a cult status in some circles - the guitarist Peter Peter is a huge fan). Larsen, who later co-directed "Gangway in Tyrol", has also played in the new wave band J-189, been a bass-player with Laid Back, and appeared in the Lars von Trier film "The Element of Crime" from 1984.
6e. My Girl and Me (1986)
Dir.: Peter Ravn & Asger Larsen.
Strictly speaking, no real video exists for the original version of "My Girl and Me". When it was released in England as a single, it was attended by the pub sequence from "Gangway in Tyrol". The British were not amused ("too many knees, gentlemen!").
6f. My Girl and Me (1988)
Dir.: Eric Watson.
For the second version of "My Girl and Me", Gangway personally chose Eric Watson - known for his work with the Pet Shop Boys - as the video director. The final outcome differs from other Gangway videos in that is it almost totally straight; it is also one of the few in which the group can actually be seen playing their instruments (although Torben has been provided with a cor anglais?!). The video was shot at the Brixton Academy, where Watson had previously done "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" with the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield.
In "Musikhjørnet/The Music Corner" (14 Dec 1988) on Danish national TV, Henrik Balling talked about the problems which arose during the making of the video: In England, music videos are thought of mainly as commercials, for which reason you cannot show drinking, sex, and violence - which is exactly what a lot of rock songs are about. That is why Watson had to illustrate the contents of the lyrics in a rather indirect and stylized manner: A slow motion pillow fight between a "dog" and a "cat"; people in animal get-ups consuming colourful liquids, etc.
6g. Going Away (1991)
Dir.: Torsten Leschly.
The video for "Going Away" is in black and white, and consists of a series of absurd silent movie-type tableaux, based on ideas by Henrik Balling. He says: "It's something that I would like to do more of, because I associate certain things to the music I have made. And I know that I'm right. It has got nothing whatever to do with the lyrics. The content is derived only from the music. I think that's much more effective than merely taking the lyrics as one's starting point and maybe just the outermost layer of the music" (THAT'S GANGWAY).
Among the associations are Allan sitting in a rowing boat, Cai inflating the tyres of a bicycle, and trees hung with suicides. Henrik is quite fond of the video, and he should be happy that it was made at all: "It was shot six months after the single was released, which is not the proper way to do it. It only cost 5000 kroner [around £500]. That's so stupid - 5000 kroner, surely they could afford that. They should have made the video when the record was released, and then maybe it would have been shown in one of those music shows on TV, and people would have noticed that we had made a new album" (Jam 40/92). The video was the first collaboration between Gangway and the production company Feltwave.
6h. Mountain Song (1992)
Dir.: Torsten Leschly.
Henrik and a youthful female companion are having a meal at a restaurant. As he is unable to pay the bill, the girl is carried off by the unpleasant head waiter (Torben), and Henrik is thrown across a table. The kitchen staff take the girl to a run-down hovel, where she is strung up, as the others play a hose on her. When the washer-up (Cai) returns to the restaurant to get some alcoholic beverages, Henrik follows him and knocks him down with a spanner. After which he picks up Cai's handgun and shoots the three nasties inside. Everything is linked by Allan, who is sitting at a typewriter acting as a kind of omniscient narrator. During the middle section, the audience is treated to a sequence with model Pia Nissen, who is plugging the album "Happy Ever After".
The video, which was written and directed by Torsten Leschly of Feltwave, caused quite a stir in the media because of its violent nature. Henrik Balling justified the video by saying that it wasn't nearly as graphic as the stuff you'd normally se on TV on a Saturday night, and that if you didn't realize that it was meant to be a bit of a laugh, then it was clearly as stupid as the vigilante films it was sending up.
The girl, who appears in this video as well as the sequel, "Never Say Goodbye", is named Tusnella Frellesvig and was only 14 years old at the time. She has since appeared in the buff on the cover of "Flere Ho's/More ho's", a CD by the Danish hip hop group "Den Gale Pose" [aka "Madness 4 Real"].
6i. Never Say Goodbye (1993)
Dir.: Torsten Leschly.
The video for "Never Say Goodbye" follows Peter Ravn's graphic concept for the "Happy Ever After" album cover: Strangely coloured, vertically outstretched images at the left, with a white text box at the right, where the moving continuation of the "Mountain Song" story unfolds. Allan is once again hovering over the proceedings as a kind of narrator, and the illustrated text goes like this:
"Like two ships in the night, they met. They met like two ships that afternoon at the restaurant. Everything went wrong, but now all was well. He [Henrik] had proved to be brave and saved her [Tusnelda] from the iron grip of a gang of criminals, and now he carried her to the train because she had to go home, as he had promised her. Alas, he could not go with her, as he had to go about his duties at a big department store. Now, the moment had arrived. The moment which they had both hoped would never arrive - the moment of parting. They held each other as if it was their last embrace. She had to shed a tear, for he was so brave. He had saved her.
Would they ever meet again? "We'll meet again, and very soon", he whispered tenderly into her ear.
Soothed by his tender words, as if they were medicine, she motherly adjusted his jacket. Finally, she got on the train. On an impulse, she pulled off her golden heart necklace and handed it to him. At first, he didn't quite understand the meaning of this gesture, but soon realized that the heart was for him.
In return, he pulled a hip flask out of his pocket, and offered her a drink. Which was of course wrong of him, for she was only thirteen years old. But he thought that he deserved a drink himself; after all, he was thirty-seven years old and had experienced quite a few things that night, which needed to be washed down.
The word GANGWAY echoed through his head. The perfect gift for this lovely young woman was the new Gangway CD, "Happy ever after". In a neat hand, which he had perfected at boarding school, he wrote a few loving words. He handed her the CD, and she pressed it against her throbbing heart, moved by his thougtfulness towards her.
The train was about to depart and it was time for their last farewell. He was a bit awkward, because his parents had divorced when he was a child. His mother had been unfaithful to his father, and now he found it difficult to commit himself to another person.
He wanted to go with her, but he was afraid of what his boss might say, if he was late the next morning.
Although they were only a few feet apart, they waved goodbye. They waved, because words were useless. They only had a few minutes left together, but they both wanted this moment to last forever.
Now, the shrill starting whistle sounded. As she blew him a last kiss, the train doors closed. He jumped up and down to get one last look at her. As she went through the train, he followed from window to window, trying to keep up with her. It actually made him look rather silly."
The video ends with the four members of the group bouncing merrily up and down, while the line "All work and no play makes Gangway a dull band" is repeated about 20 times.
(Eerily enough, the train guard is identical to the head waiter - Torben - from "Mountain Song", and the washer-up, Cai, appears in the front of the train with an axe and a satanic smile...).
6j. Everything Seems to Go My Way (1994)
Dir.: Torsten Leschly.
"Everything Seems to Go My Way" takes place in an unpleasant, decadent café with a shabby clientele of whores, elderly ladies, henpecked husbands, and sailors on shore leave. In the opening sequence, Cai and Torben are on stage, making music (this time, Torben plays the double-bass!), while Allan is backstage, stuffing his pockets with big bundles of money. Torben is next seen playing cards, but he is not in luck; when his lovely young female companion dares to look up from the table, she is slapped on the head.
Henrik makes his entry as a blind and deaf man - on crutches. He is treated somewhat roughly by the people at the adjacent tables, but when he is chosen to join the show on stage, Allan cures him just by touch. Besides himself with joy, Henrik jumps onto a pommel horse and performs some amazing physical exercises. By magic, Allan then produces a chest full of money, and while Henrik fills his pockets, Torben's girl friend is mysteriously drawn towards the stage, where she embraces a very happy Henrik.
Gangway's first video off "Optimism©" was produced by Feltwave, as were the previous three; in addition to the group, 40 extras is featured, and no - it is not Henrik Balling doing those incredible gymnastic feats, although he might claim otherwise.
6k. Sycamore Sundays (1994)
Dir.: Torsten Leschly.
The video for "Sycamore Sundays" was shot back to back with "Everything Seems to Go My Way", on the same set, with the same extras.
Like the lyrics, the video is about a lonely fellow who has left his girl friend. It's all very sad: Allan sings a few lines huddled-up in his bed, standing in the corner of a miserable little room. Cai, Henrik, and Torben contribute to the moody atmosphere with plaintive violin playing, and the 40 extras are just sitting there, crying their eyes out.
The two-part chorus at the end of the song is sung by Allan and a boy, who looks a bit like a younger version of Allan. At this point, the focus switches back and forth between Allan in the foreground and the boy in the background; Allan remembers this as being "a nice touch".
Neither Allan nor Henrik or Torben find it very likely that the video has been shown more than once on Danish television - if it has been shown at all.
6l. Come Back as a Dog (1996)
Dir.: Peter Ravn.
With "Come Back as a Dog", Peter Ravn returned to making videos for Gangway after a ten year break. Parts of the video were shot at a Copenhagen hospital, as Ravn - in the words of Henrik Balling - "thought that the transformation from dog to human should take place - in part, at least - on Earth and not just in Heaven" (BMG video).
In the video, Allan appears in the same get-up as on the cover of "That's Life" (done by Ravn): stripped to the waist, with surgical appliances and a collar supporting his neck. Torben and Henrik is alternately seen as patients - pottering about in hospital shirts a few paces behind Allan - and doctors, responsible for Allan's imminent metamorphosis. After scanning and examining Allan's brain, he gets to choose which breed of dog he would like to be (although his first choice is politely but firmly turned down by Dr. Balling and Dr. Johansen). He is put on the operating table, Torben and Henrik unscrew his legs - and in the end, they succeed in turning Allan into a border collie! The doctors are happy, and the dog is too - as witnessed by the Polaroid self-portrait of the dog, which the two doctors later receive by post.
The name of the dog is Ida, by the way.
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7. WHAT IS "GANGWAY IN TYROL"?7a. Behind the scenes
7b. Summary of the plot
7c. Credits
7a. Behind the scenes
In July 1986, Gangway and a film crew of 8 persons went to the Tyrol to shoot a musical farce, inspired by Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965), both starring the Beatles. It was a 14 day shoot, the outcome of which was the fortyfive-minute "Gangway in Tyrol", based on an idea by Peter Ravn and Asger Larsen, who wrote and directed the film, and also appeared on camera playing minor parts.
Irmgardz, Gangway's label at the time, agreed to fund the project, but was unable to raise the money before the departure, and so they promised that the money would be sent to the film crew in Austria. The four members of the band emptied out their bank account - 40.000 Danish kroner (about £4000) - and went away for a fortnight. But despite frequent telephone calls to Irmgardz, who maintained that the money was due to arrive any day, no money was ever received, and when it was time for the film crew to return to Denmark, Gangway had to pay the hotel bill out of their own pockets. The bill came to 40.000 Danish kroner. "It was exactly what we had brought along", Henrik Balling recounts. "It was just like that "Fawlty Towers" episode, where John Cleese wins £90 at the races and then accidentally breaks a £90 vase...".
The finished film was not shown until a year and a half later, partly because of the prolonged editing process - which was in turn caused by the lack of funds - and partly because the film was pre-empted when it was originally due to be transmitted on Danish national television. When it was finally shown, it was fifteen minutes overdue.
"It's a real cult item... it is SO lame, but it's got these things which lend themselves to imitation", Henrik Balling says and describes how the film was shown at an annual festival in a cinema in Aarhus, with Peter Ravn and Asger Larsen attending the event. The audience turned up in chequered jackets with pipes in their mouths, and everyone knew the dialogue by heart! "They were all shouting the lines as if it was "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". It's a very small but very knowledgable cult following", Henrik Balling concludes.
7b. Summary of the plot
After the James Bond-inspired opening credits, in which a topless woman is seen doing a sensuous dance in a pair of over-sized "lederhosen", there is a knock on the door at the office of the Danish minister of cultural affairs (Claus Berthelsen, singer of Naļve, and also signed to Irmgardz at the time). A civil servant (Lars Finsrud) tries to draw the minister's attention to an old matter from Berthelsen's days in the ministry of fisheries - since then, he has also been a minister of agriculture - but he is only talking about this new band, the members of which are all taller than 1,80 m, and whose video for "Join the Party" can be seen on the minister's TV set. "It's not jazz music, but it is youthful with a jazzy touch, and that's what I like", he proclaims.
And that is why Gangway (Allan, Henrik, Torben, & Gorm) is granted a trip to the Tyrol at a poorly attended event at the Windsor Theatre. The band, naturally dressed in unsigthly brown-checquered jackets, repays by performing "ONCE BITTEN, TWICE SHY" and doing a couple of fancy dance steps. The minister is enjoying himself immensely.
At Copenhagen Central Station, Gangway are saying goodbye to their families - two ice cream cones get in Henrik's eyes at that occasion - and they depart. As the train leaves the platform, Henrik's terrier sets off in pursuit of its owner.
On the way, the band members smoke a pipe and chat about train safety and electronic data processing. At night, an English-speaking stranger (the director, Peter Ravn) enters the compartment; our four friends look at him in wonder, but they brighten up appreciatively when they notice the stranger's checquered jacket. Out of his insulated bag, he pulls a carton of milk, pours out, and right away, weird hallucinations wash over the group: richly coloured alpine tableaux, with Gorm milking a cow; a scene from the butcher's shop in "Join the Party"; Torben going on a rampage in the "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" video.
Fresh from a good night's sleep, the four of them enjoy the nice morning view, to the strains of "THE PARTY IS OVER". Then they dress and go for breakfast in the dining car (here, Henrik succeeds in having ketchup smeared all over his face). The band arrives at the idyllic town of Mayrhofen, where they are welcomed by the mayor (Sigfried Kröll) and a gruff-looking town librarian (Asger Larsen, the co-director). The latter's patience is severely tried whenever someone fails to see, that if something is good, then something else is invariably just as good. They all go sight-seeing, with an incompetent Tyrolean orchestra in tow.
At the Hotel "Neue Post", where the band is accommodated, they are awakened by the town librarian, who takes them along to a clothes shop. After being furnished with "lederhosen", the four skip off and go to a pub, where two merry folk musicians (the Hippacher Duo) are entertaining the customers; Allan tries his hand at a little yodeling. Gangway reciprocate by performing "MY GIRL AND ME", during which Henrik, Torben, and Gorm climb onto the table and do the twist.
When they are done, Henrik loudly declares that this is the best evening he has ever had. But the town librarian has arrived in the meantime, and when Henrik refuses to sing the praises of other things in the village, repeating his exhilarated exclamation instead, things go terribly wrong. The band has to take flight. As Torben reaches the safety of his hotel room, he is surprised by the librarian who chases him around the room with a knife in his hand. Meanwhile, the other three are standing in the hallway, singing "SCREAM". Eventually, the librarian falls over and bangs his head against the floor, after which he is dragged to the woods and buried.
"YESTERDAY, WHEN I WAS DRUNK": The morning after, Gangway goes for a walk in the beautiful alpine landscape. When they try to get through the village unseen, they are spotted and driven into a corner. It turns out that the townspeople only want to congratulate them for getting rid of the tyrant. Henrik delivers a heartfelt speech about love, brotherhood, and the discovery of radium.
They all wander off to a sunny park ("SITTING IN THE PARK"), where Henrik awkwardly courts a fair maiden (Lisbet Matz, the assistant director) - unsuccessfully. The mayor unveals a new monument: four Roman statues of Allan, Henrik, Gorm, and Torben. Our friends faint out of sheer delight. They say goodbye to the locals, and just as Henrik's terrier finally catches up with the train, it leaves for Denmark, and the little dog has to turn back. THE END.
7c. Credits
Written and directed by Peter Ravn & Asger Larsen.
Producer: Lars Blarke.
Director of photography: Michael Berenth.
Assistant to the photographer: Julie Falkentorp.
Assistant director: Lisbet Matz.
Sound recording: Jørgen Lyd Nielsen.
Assistant to the producer: Finn B. Rasmussen.
Editor: Torben Skjødt Jensen.
Music score: Henrik Balling.
Music score engineered by Jesper Siberg.
© 1987 DR TV-U, financially supported by The Danish Institute Film Workshop.
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8. WHAT HAVE GANGWAY DONE IN TERMS OF LIVE PERFORMANCES?
Gangway made their début in December 1982, as a trio called Unforced Error. The occasion was a concert at Køge Gymnasium, arranged by the drummer Jan Christensen, who used to study there. Henrik Balling played the guitar, Allan Jensen sang and played the bass. Everyone was very nervous - Jan played "incredibly fast", and Allan's trembling hands just barely managed to plug the bass into the amplifier. "It was a rather tense concert", Henrik recalls.
In the winter of 1983, the group - which was now called Gangway - toured Denmark with other new wave bands such as Twice a Man (a Swedish synth duo), Scatterbrain (with Jesper Siberg), and Escape Artists (with Torben Johansen). Henrik Balling insists that the members of the audience were interested solely in the other bands.
After the release of their début album "The Twist" in 1984, Gangway embarked upon a tour of Denmark and were quite overwhelmed by the attendance; the very first night of the tour, in "Huset" in Århus, was sold out, and at the "Musikcafe“n" in Copenhagen, people stood in long lines out on the street. A few had come all the way from Funen [more than 100 km away], but had to return home empty-handed.
"In the first part of our career, our live performances differred greatly from what you would hear on the records. We changed some of the songs and rarely tried to copy the sound of the albums", Henrik says of the early tours (P3 96). The three members of the group - Henrik, Allan, and the new drummer, Gorm Ravn-Jonsen - even took turns at playing the various instruments, for instance on the "Midtfyns Festival" in 1985. As of the second half of the year, Torben Johansen made up a fourth, playing keyboards with the band as they performed for a crowd of 30.000 at the Copenhagen Stadium on September 21st, as part of the televised charity event "Rock for Afrika".
Allan Jensen reveals: "The first two tours were fun to do, because it was still a new and exciting experience. Being on the road was a bit like a school camp. But after a while, you couldn't return to the same place without thinking: We really have to think of something else now...". Torben Johansen also thinks of the early performances as being the best; getting to perform live was generally easier at the time, and Gangway was a very popular band at grammar school parties.
After releasing the original version of the "Sitting in the Park" album, the group also visited England, where they performed at the North London Polytechnic - not a well attended gig - and the Danish Embassy in London, where their acoustic set was warmly received by the attending journalists and especially Andy Partridge of XTC, joining in the chorus of "The Party's Over" and expressing a wish to produce their next album.
Gangway has played the Roskilde Festival three times, in 1985, 1986, and 1988. Since then, they have not been asked to play at the festival, which - according to Gorm Ravn-Jonsen - could be the result of their lousy performance in '88, when the arranger Leif Skov paid quite a lot of money in what seemed to be a good bargain at the time. But, as is well-known, Gangway's intended international breakthrough never happened: "Sitting in the Park (Again!)", which was designed for the English market, was never released in England, and a job playing support for Lloyd Cole did not materialize.
By way of consolation, the record company tried to launch the band in Germany; they performed a gig on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where the Beatles played in the early sixties. The members of Gangway were not happy, either with Germany or their supporting band (which was called Love and Money). Crestfallen, they returned to Denmark, where they had to settle for a string of miserable gigs in Jutlandic sports centres, needing the money badly. It was a bleak period.
"When we did a tour in 1989, we were still playing the same old songs from '85-'86, and people were getting tired of them ,and we were getting tired. Our career was pretty much at a standstill", Henrik says.
As of April 1991, Gangway started touring again, with Cai Bojsen-Møller playing the drums. For the first time, the band broke with the traditional line-up (guitar/bass/drums/keyboards) and used prerecorded tapes. This was partly due to the new technological sound on "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake", as well as to Allan's decision not to play the bass anymore, concentrating on the vocals instead. To begin with, the bass lines were played back on tape, an approach which sometimes proved to be a bit stiff and awkward. On the other hand, Allan was free to develop a fascinating set of peculiar swaying motions, which made him a natural eye catcher on later tours.
On the "Happy Ever After" tour, the band returned to playing nearly everything live (with the exception of a few breakbeats), and for this reason, bass player Halfdan E. Nielsen joined the band. Gangway played their first gig as a quintet in November 1992 - which was also their first concert on the remote island of Bornholm - and continued playing live for almost a year. "We agreed to anything that paid well", Allan says, "I think we even played at "Hjallerup Marked" [an oldfashioned rural cattle show and flea market]". In May 1993, the band joined the touring festival "Rock Tour", where they played a 40 minute set; at this point, Halfdan E. was replaced by Annette Bork.
The "Happy Ever After" tour was one of the most successful Gangway tours ever (although most of the audience members "only wanted to hear "Mountain Song"", according to Henrik and Cai). Occasionally, fans would turn up in chequered jackets and polo neck sweaters - 6 years after the band left their anti-image behind.
In 1994, Gangway gave notice of a large-scale tour but had to call it off because they could not find the time to rehearse the show, nor the necessary financial backing. When they did a series of concerts six months later, everything was so plain and pared-down that one reviewer felt impelled to use the term "anti-concert". Henrik Balling explains: "[On the "Optimism©" tour], we brought a sequencer, and it sounded quite identical to the record. We were trying to begin a fresh chapter, and we did. The concerts were very dull [and] very strange. Sometimes you would look at the audience and it was quite obvious that they thought so too" (P3 96).
Henrik, Cai, and Torben all played keyboards; the visuals consisted of a deliberately poor slide show made by Henrik (among the subjects were some table legs and a plate with sweets).
In December 1994, Gangway went to Japan for 10 days and played four gigs. The band left the machines at home, and also played tracks from some of the early records, even "The Twist". The exclusive tour went off more successfully than the Danish tour, and for two consecutive nights, the band performed for a capacity audience in Tokyo.
In the spring of 1996, Gangway set out on a tour in two parts, "That's Live". Jeppe Moesgaard appeared on drums (it was his live début), Allan Jensen resumed playing the bass, and the Odense band Bloom supported the group. Gangway concentrated on performing songs off the new album, which did not particularly please the audience, the critics, or the band members. Visually, the band continued the hospital look from the "Come Back as a Dog" video, although this only lasted for a couple of concerts.
When the band resumed touring in the new year, they compiled a set list which paid more attention to the earlier songs. Embellish was the support band on the tour, which began on the 11th of April and ended in Frederiksværk on the 17th of May. This was to be Gangway's last public live performance.
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9. ARE GANGWAY REALLY THAT BIG IN JAPAN?
All of Gangway's records have been released in Japan on the local Hammer Label (with the exception of "Happy Ever After", "Optimism©", and "That's Life", which were released on BMG). The company was set up in 1991 with the sole purpose of releasing Gangway records in Japan.
Henrik Balling explains: "David Motion did something with some Japanese guys and then he was introduced to some other guys who worked in producing, sound design, and arranging. They enthused over some Gangway records which had been imported to Japan, and they asked David if Gangway was to be released in Japan. Well, he didn't think so, but why didn't they do it, he asked. They thought about it and then started from scratch, looking up CD factories and cover designers in the telephone book" (Jam 40/92). The next year, Henrik went on a promotion tour of Japan and re-recorded three tracks off "The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake" with some Japanese musicians. These versions were later released on the "Quiet Edit +" album, which also featured the first two Gangway singles. The CD was released as a limited Japanese edition in 3000 numbered copies, which sold out fast.
In December 1994, Gangway toured Japan playing four concerts: In Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo, where the tickets were entirely sold out. The audience was extremely attentive, because Japanese concert tickets are rather expensive (approximately £35) no matter what band is playing. "People don't talk during the performance, and they clap their hands fast and intensively in the break between the songs", Torben Johansen says. The band also performed in a record shop, playing three songs and signing records for a number of happy Japanese fans.
Furthermore, Henrik Balling has written two songs by request for Masahiro Takashima, a well-known Japanese singer and actor. The songs were produced by David Motion and Henrik himself (together with Illinton) respectively, but Henrik never got a chance to meet the artist because Takashima was busy shooting a film. Henrik also wrote a third song for a well-known Japanese female singer but when asked to rewrite the chorus in order to make it more dramatic, he turned the offer down -- and thus it did not get anywhere at all. At the end of the day, the lyrics were sung by an unknown female singer.
"I think the songs are quite good", Henrik Balling says. "It is also a big laugh to write lyrics for a Japanese, because he's gonna sing'em in English and they don't quite understand what they're singing. In one of the songs for instance ["The Language of Love"] there is an interlude which goes: "All this sublimation / some day I think I'm gonna explode / and I'll never ever be drunk enough to win the Nobel Prize", and then the chorus goes: "No Nobel Prize" ...".
Gangway's status as a cult favorite in Japan continues to this day with the release of an exclusive compilation album, "Re:MasterPieces", in 2002.
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Research texts:
Tordis Berstrand: "Pladeselskab med mere", JAM MAGAZINE #61 (oktober 1996). [Record company and more]
Torben Bille (red.): "Politikens Dansk Rock 1956-1997", Politikens Forlag 1997. ["Politiken"'s Danish Rock 1956-1997]
Morten Buschmann: "Made In Kasper©", GAFFA #3/96 (marts 1996).
Per Juul Carlsen: "Uheldige forevigt?", LEVENDE BILLEDER #7/92 (oktober 1992). [Forever unlucky?]
Kim Flyvbjerg: "De vilde 80'ere - Sex, drugs & parforhold", EUROMAN #26 (april 1996). [The wild eighties - sex, drugs, and relationships]
Søren Frank: "Gangway", MM #2/86 (februar 1986).
Morten Friis: "En popfugl taler ud", EUROMAN #41 (juli 1997). [A pop bird sings]
Garland: "... Så får det briste eller bære ...", JAM MAGAZINE #40 (oktober 1992). [...It's kill or cure...]
Garland: "Det går meget bedre nu end det gjorde før!", JAM MAGAZINE #49 (april 1994). [We're doing much better now than before!]
Peter Genild: "Hej verden!", MM # 6/7, juni-august 1988. [Hello, World!]
Peter Genild: "Herremoderådets mareridt", LEVENDE BILLEDER #9/86 (december 1986). [The nightmare of every man of fashion]
Jens Jørn Gjedsted (red.): "Dansk rock", Politikens Forlag 1985. [Danish rock]
Jesper Nykjær Knudsen: "Pop from the Deep End", CHILI # 10/96.
Jakob Lambertsen: "Gangway på vej op igen", Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten 13.11.1992. [Gangway rises again]
Per Reinholdt Nielsen: "Man bliver begavet af at lytte til min musik...", OPUS #3/91 (maj 1991). [Listening to my music makes people intelligent...]
Niels Pedersen: "Danskerne mangler dødsangst", CHILI # 5/94. [The Danes' lack of mortal fear]
Niels Pedersen: "Poppet pop-plade", Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten 22.9.1996. [Popped up pop record]
Bjørg Tulinius: "Vi sover ikke mere", Fyens Stiftstidende 24.4.1991. [We're not asleep anymore]
"All Music Guide", http://www.allmusic.com/index.html
Martin G. Houlind: "Compendium - interview med sangskriver Henrik Balling", ../albums/COMPENDIUM/BALLING1.HTM [Compendium - interview with songwriter Henrik Balling]
Nikolai Molbech: "Gangway", BMG video PR-materiale 1996.
Mik Schack: "Musikeren og tv-værten Henrik Balling i snak med Schack", Danmarks Radio P3 8.4.1996. [The musician and TV host Henrik Balling in conversation with Schack]
Thanks to Cai Bojsen-Møller, Annette Bork, Jeppe Moesgaard, and Gorm Ravn-Jonsen for their help; extra special thanks to Henrik, Allan, and Torben.
© 1998-2003 Brian Iskov for THAT'S GANGWAY.
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