By Klaus Riis of the Workers' Communist Party of Denmark (APK). Translated and published with kind permission from Klaus Riis. Translated by Frede Jensen.
Annisette and Thomas Koppel are often mentioned as being a couple of strange birds or rather: a couple of rare plants in an extreme commercialised music world obsessed with stardom, pomp and fast money, with the power of multi-national companies, with fashion police, cultural imperialism and ideological aggression. It is of course quite the reverse. It is the commercial music industry that is obsessed in its eternal worship of the golden calf.
There is nothing odd about Savage Rose or their development.
From start to finish a red thread runs through their life and their music: The exposure towards reality, the respect for the multi-facets of life, the solidarity, the tenderness and belief in the suffering and struggling human beings all over the world. A belief that art has a revolutionary role, that the music can be a portal to the sacredness of life, to paradise on earth, to hope and to action. That it is made for the many, for the living.
What strikes you when you listen to one spellbinding and magical album after another, is that the Roses have moved on with the times, on the wide road of life, in the middle of reality, in the middle of man. Without falling into the wrong trenches, without ever being extreme, supported by sharp senses, pure feelings and the simplest sense of all: humanity. And with it the sense of rebellion and revolution.
In that, they are similar to one of the great from our own history and the history of world culture: Martin Andersen Nexø.
Since ’68 music has occupied some of the space that in previous generations, without doubt, belonged to poetry and great novels. More than anything else music writes the history of our time. And Savage Rose has occupied a transcendent chapter in Danish history ever since.
This huge re-release of their first 16 CD’s – from the debut ‘The Savage Rose’ to ‘Månebarn’ in ’92 – is exemplary. The ‘right’ sound has been recreated, the original covers re-printed, dedications and accompanying comments preserved and the lyrics re-produced in their entirety, those in Danish translated into compressed English.
Thus, together with the music you also get the following statement from the 80’s – taken from the cover to ‘En vugge af stål’:
High masters in East and West: We do not appeal to you for peace, freedom and justice. In the West you call yourselves democrats, advocates of human rights. In the East you decorate yourselves with the stolen name of socialism.
Your true faces behind the worn out masks carry the same nauseating traits: Exploitation, oppression, fascism, war.
No! We do not send any appeals. We find our own place in the huge crowds of the Earth’s struggling proletariat, who, united by mutual experiences, will put an end to your Era of tyranny.
Nothing is deducted, nothing is added.
The narrow-minded Danish music industry has for obvious reasons (they had to) been prepared to give Savage Rose an important place in Danish music history for their unique art, and an even bigger place, if only they would show a tiny bit of humble regret. And the newspaper critics are not the only ones who have been waiting – and waiting in vain. The Roses have long since moved past that kind of small-mindedness.
What is there to regret anyway?
The best answer to the so-called democrats’ hounding of left-wingers is to throw the facts in their faces. The Roses’ facts are their music, dozens of pearls glued together on a large string called song for life: Should they ‘regret’ their support for the Palestinians, often stated musically? But the Palestinians still haven’t gotten their land back, Palestinian children are still being slaughtered, they are still rising in the Intifada. Should they ‘regret’ their solidarity with a socialist Albania? The contra revolution made it into a gambling den with prostitution and drugs and a base for aggression towards others.
So intensely have the Roses lived in their time, that even their more dated songs become universal valid. The whole world is presented with the facts. Let the people judge for themselves! They have a large audience also outside Denmark, not only from the time when leading American critics called them the most important musical export to come out of Europe ’68 but also created throughout the 70’s and 80’s outside the commercial music industry. Their stay in the US is also a good starting point as an opening to the world. This release, conversely, shows the same world exactly who they are.
Sure, we live in a ‘different world’ – under a ‘new world order’, where one third (2 billion) of the world’s population live on less than 1 dollar a day, where 40,000 children die from starvation every single day, where poverty again and again secures the triumph of Death. And of course the conscious artists have to express themselves according to the times, and often with great skill.
Right-wing critics call their orthopaedists to have their toes straightened after having come into touch with the songs from the 70’s and 80’s. That is their problem, even if they are trying to make it general. Just remember that the explicit songs from Eisler and Brecht from the early 30’s didn’t get their big renaissance in the West until the 70’s.
If the English songs from the 60’s and the first half of the 70’s are a brilliant contribution to a whole generations search of an identity (culminating with albums like Babylon and Wild Child), a large part of their revolutionary songs from the 80’s and early 90’s, when they as the first Danish artists caught the obvious character of the newly established global disorder (on the outstanding ‘Gadens Dronning’ and ‘Månebarn’), will become classics, mature artists potent expressions.
Everybody knows that Thomas Koppel is an exceptional composer. That Annisette, apart from being a world-class singer is a considerable Danish female poet, a fact that many Danes and the rest of world have yet to discover. Her songs are glowing the brightest in the string of pearls.
The two latest CD’s ‘Black Angel’ and ‘Tameless’ will later be included in the series. There are also plans to release a box set with rare and unreleased recordings with amongst others the music to the ballet ‘Dreamland’ – the last recording with the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster. Denmark’s best live band through the years has strangely enough never released a live album. I don’t know if that is included in the plans – it ought to be. 2001 is going to be a remarkable Savage Rose-year. There will also be a brand new CD in the fall.
The 16 CD’s - eight in English and eight in Danish – can be purchased one by one for around DKr 100 a piece. However, it is a series and is recommended as a whole. Even those who know them well will make new discoveries, and those who don’t, have a unique musical experience in store. Producer Jens Andersen has secured the high quality throughout. The quality of a previous CD release of the English albums was poor and has been withdrawn.
At least four of the Danish albums have never previously been available on CD: ‘Solen var også din’, a pivotal album in the band’s development as it signals the beginning of a break with the rock musical thinking of the time and the development of a sound that doesn’t sound like anything else in the world, and which is as easily recognisable in Copenhagen as in New York and Ankara. The others are ‘En vugge af stål’, ‘Vi kæmper for at sejre’ and the ice-skating ballet ‘Kejserens nye klæder’.
The release comes with an enthusiastic introduction by David Fricke, editor on Rolling Stone, and the history behind the series by Jens Andersen. Each of the CD’s has a chapter of Thomas Koppel’s ‘My Savage Rose Story’. A pleasure to read, a vivid and warm introduction into their life and art.
This collection is a central piece of Danish period, music and cultural history. A critic from a conservative newspaper (Jakob Levinsen in Berlingske Tidende 02/23) was on to something essential when he wrote that the development of the Roses was a mirror image of the changing priorities in the spirits of the times: "Only, the whole time they have lived their lives and their music more radical than most of their sheltered contemporaries."
We are proud of them. It is Danish art at its best, a long period of creativity, which the whole time has been able to renew itself, to absorb and to develop. The music is alive, still effective where otherwise the dust has settled on most vinyl grooves and book pages. We are prouder still because they chose to side with the large majority, against those that rule, against the oppression. They are songs of rebellion; they will never die. They will also create excitement today. That is the core of their popularity, of their mass appeal. That is why they are loved by the masses: by the female workers, by the fighting youth, by the immigrants fighting for a new existence. That is why language problems become insignificant and Palestinians, Albanians, Kurds, Germans, Basques and Americans have taken them to their hearts.
Don’t think it is too late for them to win the world with their music!
Its secret: It makes us whole, put us in touch with our deepest feelings, hopes and yearnings. It lifts us up towards Heaven and puts us gently down again filled with renewed strength.
-If our stories contribute a little towards giving sensibility a little confidence. Well, we can live with that says Thomas Koppel.
That they do and much more.
Kommunistisk Politik, No. 5, March 9, 2001