Not so slight return

Gangway are back, back, back! The Danish pop group, who split up in 1998, release a fantastic new album, Whatever It Is, on 5 April. Fêted with multiple awards in their home country, their biggest moment in the UK probably came with dissolute single My Girl and Me (1986).

Gangway's first album The Twist, with its echoes of The Smiths, came out back in 1984; Whatever It Is feels appropriately like the follow-up to the band's final, seventh, That's Life (1996). In the spirit of experimentation on that album, Whatever It Is is completely contemporary - as if That's Life had been moved forward in time.

The songwriting is as lovely as ever, as evidenced on first single Colourful Combinations, augmented by some fascinating sounds: there's a great mix from track Whatever… to the penultimate Exit, with its sample reference to where they left off 23 years ago - a hiatus worthy of filmmakers Whit Stillman, Terrence Malick or Roy Andersson. Second single Don't Want to Go Home, reworked from songwriter Henrik Balling's The Quiet Boy side project, sits particularly well here (I love, again, the odd noise at the end).

The band intend to back up this tremendous achievement with a series of live dates throughout the year. You can find links to the album and more on the band's Facebook page.

Gangway's Henrik Balling on pop

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
Over the past two years on this blog I have intermittently celebrated Danish pop band Gangway. This should be the last post based on an interview with the group's main songwriter, Henrik Balling, in Copenhagen.

On writing for popular Japanese actor and singer Masahiro Takashima: 'I never met him because he was doing a movie and he didn't have time. The funny thing was I don't think he had a clue what he was singing about, because he did it in English… [One song was] called The Language of Love and the chorus goes: "It's a shame that the language of love was invented by fools and handsome charlatans/ And people like me who were brought up differently/ On mineral water and Hector Berlioz/ We don't have a chance when we meet up with girls at the local disco." And then there's a line I made him sing: "And I'll never be drunk enough to win the Nobel prize." I thought that was funny because there's a couple of alcoholics who got the Nobel prize like Hemingway, and I thought it was great to hear [Masahiro] sing that.'

On playing Japan in 1995: 'It was quite expensive to go and see us. It was something like £50 for a ticket so people were very quiet during the actual songs - they did applaud and everything - because they really wanted to get everything. I think that's a good idea to have really expensive tickets because then people are very quiet and tend to listen. It's like if you go to see, well, he's dead now, but Frank Sinatra - £200, £300 for a good seat, how can that be a horrible show? It has to be good, no matter how shitty it is, and if he can't sing the high notes, who cares, it was the best show you've ever seen because it was expensive.'

'I really don't want to buy pop albums if the artist is over 35 because I think they tend to get boring. I like that whole battlefield of youth: from 20 to 30 you go out there, fight everybody and get your piece of cake. From 30 to 40 you say, "How much did I get?" You count your money and you try to repeat yourself and get more money and after that, then it's over. I've got nothing against Pink Floyd but I think that's a good example; there's a huge difference between the first and the last album in that sense. They're very popular and people buy their albums whenever they release something; it's a secret career somehow because nobody writes about Pink Floyd do they?'

'CDs are the most horrible way to put out music, even DVDs are better because the cover is soft plastic that won't break. How many of us know the sound of a CD smashing on the floor, and you know that the lid comes off and it's difficult to get the booklet out: you have to squeeze it and you can't really get it. It's a horrible format, I hate it, the covers become blurred after a while, really horrible.'

On trying to write songs in a different way: 'Belgian Lovers [from album That's Life, 1996] is a weird song, I like the music. I did an experiment with the lyrics, trying to write like an idiot, in the sense you start here and then all of a sudden you start to write something else because you can't focus. I thought that was so funny at the time. It's a bit embarrassing now because I come across as an idiot.'

On gig-going in London: 'Just before we started the band, Allan [Jensen, Gangway's lead singer] and I went to London for two weeks to see a lot of bands and we bought Time Out. We saw some bands that we'd read about or knew about and then we just looked at the names - that looks like an interesting name let's go and see them. We went out almost every night to see bands and that was really, really good because we thought of England as this fantastic country for music - pop music, rock music - and it was actually good to see all these bands were crap. Hey, we can do better than them. Of course, all the good bands were there but it was great to see that not all of England was good. If we'd gone to see bands that hadn't released anything and they all were completely great, that would have been horrible. We saw bands that were nothing, just crap from the word go, and that was really good. We enjoyed our stay in London very much.'

On meeting Robert Palmer: 'He sold millions of records all over the world compared to our 100,000 maybe, so I asked him if I could show him one of our videos and get his advice. He said: "It's the snare sound." Isn't that great?'

Merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

A Gangway riddle

This is my 100th post on this blog, so I thought I'd return to Danish band Gangway. After our informal interview, songwriter Henrik Balling and I headed for a floating bar set atop one of Copenhagen's western Lakes and, later, dinner in Christiania.

Balling tells me he used to present a pop programme on Danish TV and had the chance to interview Meatloaf. Knowing Meatloaf is a clever guy, Balling decided to ask him, should there be a different law for the infinitely big and infinitely small?

A Belgian woman who smoked throughout her pregnancy gave birth to twins. All that came from her breasts was smoke and the twins remained absolutely tiny [the narrator holds his fingers no more than a few millimetres apart]. In the struggle for survival, one of the twins kills the other.

In Finland, a pregnant woman walks through something like a nuclear cloud and gives birth to a giant. One day the giant causes an accident that kills hundreds of people. Now, the miniscule twin is never going to harm anyone else; should there be a different law for the two?

Meatloaf's answer was this: you lock the two in a cell together and make the tiny man cook for the giant, who in turn must mend his cellmate's clothes. Lord knows what the ratings were like that night.

To come: Henrik Balling on pop. (Pictured: HB's bicycle.)

Gangway: The sequel, finally

As this is my 100th post over the two blogs (my, erm, 'stronger', film site is here), I thought it was about time I followed up my first effort. Having become fascinated with Danish pop group Gangway, I decided to go to Copenhagen and meet the group's main songwriter, Henrik Balling, helped by the generous email introduction of Brian Iskov, the man behind fan site That's Gangway. At no point did Balling ever question what made me track him down; he probably figured it was best left unasked.

He met me at my self-proclaimed 'sweet' hotel, though there was something about the area that made me uneasy. 'This used to be the red-light district,' Balling announced as, dark coat flapping round his knees, we walked to a nearby café. Drug addicts sunbathed on the stone square in front of us, where a bright yellow box was marked with a pictogram of a needle and syringe. Balling laid out a cigarette packet and lighter, and wrenched off his coat to reveal a white T-shirt, holes at its shoulders. At first he was reticent, not unreasonably in the circumstances, but soon he opened up, revealing someone passionate, knowledgeable and deeply thoughtful about pop.

Balling was given his first guitar when he was 11, on the day The Beatles split up; you might think they were a huge influence but his passion was heavy metal. 'The first time I started buying albums, that was Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and a lot of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin and all that,' he says. 'I still like hard rock a lot.' He puts the contrast between his influences and songs down to Gangway vocalist Allan Jensen: 'Allan has a very soft voice so I couldn't really write hard rock for him. If he'd been a different singer I would have written different songs.'

Structurally, Gangway's songs are classic pop songs but the perspective is unusual: they are novelistic, often written in a voice, and about characters (take the cavalcade of oddball neighbours in track Here's My House, for instance, from the 1988 album Sitting in the Park: 'The man next door's playing games with his daughter/The girl upstairs is always shouting 'bout demons'). It's a unique way of writing that seems to have sprung from a frustration with homogeneous pop product and as a way to turn around any shortcoming Balling may have felt as a songwriter. 'I realised very early on that I couldn't actually write songs like the really good, clever songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or John Lennon. I'm not a poet so I had to do something else.'

Balling was reading Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Thomas Mann, who had an advantage over him. 'Sometimes it's a problem if you're writing rock'n'roll, if you say "I" it's always yourself. When you write a novel it's normally someone else, so you can have someone who's a sadistic, right-wing doctor [but] if you do that in a rock'n'roll song, everyone will think that you are a sadistic, right-wing doctor. That annoys me sometimes.'

To the consternation of their contemporaries, Gangway sang in English: 'Everybody else was singing in Danish in those days and we thought they were uncool. It was not a conscious decision to sing in English it was just that everything we'd ever listened to in our lives was English. It's weird but it didn't sound natural if we tried to sing in Danish.'

Balling is also interested in classical music, reading biographies of composers he likes such as Stravinsky, Delius and Purcell. 'I've always listened to a lot of classical music and that's where a lot of my music writing comes from. I think Neil Tennant [of Pet Shop Boys] does that as well, and I think Paul McCartney did that. I'm not saying I'm as great as them but there's some similarities that come from that somehow.'

Success at home came quickly, peaking with their fourth album, Happy Ever After (1992), which sold around 40,000 copies (pretty good for a country whose population is one tenth the size of Britain's). By the time of seventh album That's Life (1996), sales had tailed away, leaving only a greatest hits Compendium (1998) to follow, for which the group got back together to record two final songs: 'That was a nice way to end it.'

Though there was never any conscious plan to their career, the band's failure to break the English-speaking market grates, 'because I think we were very close,' Balling says. You can sense how frustrating it must have been not to receive the acclaim they deserved from a territory in whose language they were singing, whose very best pop music they were emulating and to whose contemporary bands they were the equal, if not better. 'One of the reasons I think we didn't do it was it was very easy for us in Denmark. We should have moved to England, at least to show the record company that we really wanted it, like A-ha did, like all the bands that made it.'

We decide to head for a floating bar Balling suggests, to make the most of the summer evening. 'It's not something that keeps me awake at night, it's fine. But sometimes when I talk about it, I think we could have done more.'

POSTSCRIPT A few years ago, Balling and Jensen staged an intimate reunion gig in a Copenhagen bar, where they ran through an extensive set covering Gangway's 14-year career. In part due to the group's success in Japan ('I don't know how that happened'), there tends to be sporadic talk of a box set or reissued greatest hits but nothing has so far come to pass. Jensen made a very poppy solo album, One Fine Day (2001), and Balling continues to write new material, as well as producing. The Myspace page for his brilliant new band, The Quiet Boy, is here.

Probably the best pop group in the world?

I'm sure that most of my friends, if asked, would say that my favourite band is either Pet Shop Boys or Depeche Mode. There's something about the former's clever lyrics or the synthesiser sounds of the latter that represent all the things I look for in pop music.

But one of my favourite pop groups is a little-known bunch of Scandinavians that split up 10 years ago. My friends, if asked, would no doubt say this is typical of me, just me being difficult, and pretentious.

It was thanks to the Pet Shop Boys that Gangway first came to my attention – and maybe even yours. It was the summer of 1988 and the Pet Shop Boys were standing in for DJ Simon "Our Tune" Bates on his mid-morning Radio 1 show and most days they played a new single called My Girl and Me by a group called Gangway.

My Girl and Me is a jaunty three-minute number with an insistent, chugging beat, some very tight string arrangements, and what sounds like an oboe in the background. Fine, a rare but deservedly Top 20 tune, you might think. But the song is made all the more interesting by its unusual lyrics: instead of stage-show jollity, My Girl and Me is a rather bleak, abusive, alcoholic romance.

"At night you know that I will find you/It's been the same way for three years/I know every bar in this town/I just have to find the right one," sings an unadorned male voice. And this is the chorus: "My girl and me/We hang around in bars/And we're usually drunk/But never too drunk to fight/Like cats and dogs all night."

The only other group doing something similar lyrically at the time was Furniture (barely remembered for their own three-minute wonder, Beautiful Mind), who came up with such pearls as: "The one who wants me, I don't want/The one I want, don't want to know." Two years later Pet Shop Boys released my favourite single of theirs, So Hard, with the wonderful couplet: "I'm always hoping you'll be faithful/But you're not I suppose/We've both given up smoking/'cause it's fatal/So whose matches are those?"

That's not all, though. My Girl and Me manages to squeeze in a quote from the Bible, verbatim. That scans. With the full reference. "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging/And whomsover is deceived thereby is not wise/Proverbs, Chapter 20, Part 4: Warnings and instructions." It's all there, I've checked.

I won't say the usual things about pearls before swine, media attention (though the NME was especially positive, describing the sound as Pet Shop Boys meets Madness!), the charts or their record company; the single tanked and that would have been the last I heard of Gangway but for a fortuitous trip to Paris one year later, in 1989. In the big, new Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées I found the album from which My Girl and Me was taken. As far as I know, Sitting in the Park was never released in the UK, so this was a stroke of luck.

The album, which became the soundtrack for an 18-year-old's Parisian adventure, is notable for its inversion of the boy meets girl, girl and boy live happily ever after theme. Contrast simply the titles of Madness's bestselling It Must Be Love with This Can't Be Love ("And if you ever leave me/I would feel as sad and lonely/As Mr Carter when he arranged that mission in Iran/And everything that could go wrong went wrong"). Out on the Rebound from Love, a great putative radio single, could just as well be titled I've Finally Found Some Love – it scans – but isn't.

A perfunctory second attempt at success came a couple of years later with single Biology, alongside a positive reference to the album from which it came, The Quiet Boy Ate the Whole Cake (1991), in a review of another band in Time Out. It was only with the development of the internet that I was able to find out more about this band.

Cut forward a few years and a quick Lycos search calls up a rather wonderful (English-language, like the band) website: That's Gangway. And by then it was Gangway, as they had split up. But what a wealth of material they left behind: six other albums on top of the one I already had (including an earlier version of that same album), as well as a greatest hits compilation, Compendium. The FAQ section ("Everything you always wanted to know about Gangway but were afraid to ask") told me who the trio were (songwriter and guitarist Henrik Balling, lead singer Allan Jensen and keyboard player Torben Johansen), how many drummers they had (four), and how many record companies they had been with (again four).

There's a huge section of their lyrics, which became like prose poems to me. There are strange songs like Belgian Lovers, where the narrator, provoked to find out more about the horrors of war, is thwarted by petty bureaucracy: "Belgian lovers standing tall in the fields of Flanders/Belgian lovers take a fall in the house of horrors/I went straight to my local library/Read a book and asked for some help/No one seemed to really care/I got mad and I yelled at them/With no luck and that made me sad/'Cause we pay a lot of tax." He finishes: "Oh how it frightens me/How little we all know/Of Flemish history."

There's the dry humour of the stand-up at work here: "I really hate those pins/That they leave in new shirts/'Cause you never get them all" (Nothing's the Matter); "I think I'll buy some new CDs/And watches without warranties/'Cause they'll never break" (Think of Spain).

Among the whimsy is some lovely use of English idiom: "You make me sick/You're such a prick" (Don't Ask Yourself); "I'm a fairly quiet guy but I like to laugh and that's okay/But when I'm laughing I look just like a twat… Just the other day I went to a concert on my own/I forgot to read the programme and I felt so alone/All they played was an overture by some Russian git" (She Keeps Telling Jokes).

But what did these songs sound like? I already had a clue from the single Biology that since Sitting in the Park the band had moved further towards using synths and programming. I went to Boxman, a music site at the time that had a branch in Denmark, and ordered all seven albums.

According to the That's Gangway site, debut album The Twist (1984) was "the first Danish record with English lyrics that sold over 10,000 copies in Denmark". Surprisingly, considering the Pet Shop Boys/Madness comparisons, the album sounds more like The Smiths. The influence of Morrissey on the vocals is telling, though the first indication of the clear, unforced style Jensen takes up from then comes on a short, faux nightclub number, The Idiot. (The song's entire lyrics are: "I'm an idiot, I'm a fool/Because love has me wrapped around her little finger/And I don't know if that's good").

The group's most popular album, Happy Ever After, includes the surprisingly frivolous Mountain Song (Denmark's seventh bestselling single of that year); a near sell-out (domestic) tour followed and four Danish Grammys, in February 1993 (Best Danish Band, Best Danish Songwriter, Best Danish Rock Album and Best Danish Music Video). A darker fifth album confirms Balling's songwriting ability, as well as including some numbers by his bandmates, but seems surprisingly lacklustre. It's called Optimism.

The band saved the best for last. That's Life was recorded in four weeks in London during the winter of 1996 and features many songs I've already mentioned: Nothing's the Matter, Belgian Lovers, She Keeps Telling Jokes and Think of Spain. The other tracks are equally worthy of note; there's both a poignancy and almost viciousness at play here, a last throw of the dice – this is all and nothing.

The impression the band quit on a peak is confirmed by two new numbers on 1998's valedictory Compendium. Much as Gangway employed unexpected, heavy hip hop beats on The Quiet Boy… so on track Don't Trust Me Balling's lyrics are underpinned by drum'n'bass programming. You've got to love a band whose final track on their last album is called Goodbye. (The track is full of advice: "Leaving your girlfriend is always a pain/She'll be upset and you'll be just the same/But to make things more easy, don't say a thing/Just pack your bags, leave without saying goodbye." It's set to a disco beat.)

I now possessed their complete oeuvre and could gauge their full achievement: here were a very, very good band with a back catalogue to match any pop group you could name – sustained over a period of time – who stopped at the highpoint of their career, not commercially but certainly artistically. (Which begs a question: can a proper pop group ever separate success and artistic achievement?) There was only one thing for it: to go to Denmark and track down this band they called Gangway. But that's for another (hopefully shorter) post…