After the success of psychedelic folk outfit The Migrant, frontman Bjarke Bendtsen is ready to transcend furthermore into electronic folk-rock territory with the release of his latest project Rainbrother’s debut album Tales From The Drought, out on 3rd February 2017 via General Bird.
We caught up with the band to find out which songs are the most important to them.
BROTHERS IN ARMS – DIRE STRAITS
When I was a kid my father used to listen (amongst other things) to a lot of old and newer British pop and rock bands of which The Beatles was the primary choice. As a 10-year old I began my journey from the acoustic guitar to the electric. Having a hard time figuring out what the deal was about this new electric instrumental sound and where to go with it, I suddenly heard something new – this tune coming out of my fathers stereo one afternoon. It was the first time this instrument made perfect sense to me. Didn’t understand a word of what he was singing though.
LOVE OR PRISON – BLONDE REDHEAD
A good friend introduced me to this one about two years ago in a time where the title seemed to make good sense to me. It was also the first piece in a long time that got me musically inspirered and motivated again after a longer period of creative idle. The mood set by the instrumentation and the way she complements it by singing and repeating the words the way she does. Nothing like it.
ROLL WITH IT – OASIS
A couple of years ago I moved into a flat with my best friend. I remember getting a call from our landlord the 1st of December, telling us we had a month to find another place to live. Merry Christmas! At New Year’s Eve we hosted a party, trashed the apartment riding along the night. The day after, I woke up another place where I got a call from the landlord, who was pretty mad. We used the first day of the new year cleaning out the apartment, meanwhile blasting Oasis out the windows.
OUR HOUSE – MADNESS
I got into the culture around ‘Ungdomshuset’ in my early teens. ‘Ungdomshuset’ was a political building, home to young people who culturally or politically distanced themselves from the established society. The house was bought by an extremist Christian church, who thought it was a bad place. They tore the building to the ground. It caused a wave of demonstrations the following year. I attended them all, and ‘Our House’ was heard down the streets of Copenhagen every time.
SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND – PINK FLOYD
I’d been travelling for a couple of weeks with a couple of friends (sooner to become my rainbrothers) through the Moroccan desert in an old dusty jeep. We’d been visiting different little villages and everyone had been really kind to us, cooking us great local food even though we only had cigarettes to pay with. But then that day in the desert we ran out of luck, and cigarettes, when suddenly the jeep broke down. However, we’d been smoking a lot of weed and didn’t really care, and the car stereo was still working and the only CD we’d brought (bought in Marrakesh where we rented the car) was Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. And the weird thing was we just enjoyed this album so much, especially the opening track, that we just accepted that it was all good, that if this was going to be the last album we listened to it was alright.
Then later it got freezing cold and we sort of changed our minds when we had to walk 50 kilometres to the nearest town to get help.
ADDIO A CHEYENNE – ENNIO MORRICONE
7 years ago I watched Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in the West for the first time. I love it so much, and still love it, everything’s so cool and slow and understated. Epic. And Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack is amazing as well, and then when I got this funny old school juke box alarm clock at the following Christmas it turned out that one of the songs it could play was “Addio a Cheyenne”, the closing song of that film. Since then I’ve always been woken up by that alarm clock and usually by that song. It’s just great for being sleepy, brushing teeth and making coffee.
TONIGHT, TONIGHT – SMASHING PUMPKINS
That song (and album) takes me back to the summer days when I’d just finished an amazing year in 9th grade at boarding school. It was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time, experiencing something else than the small country town I grew up in where in the teenage days I didn’t really have anyone I felt close to and could play music with. It had all changed that year and I remember coming back from the school feeling that anything could happen and I wanted to play grunge rock forever.
TWIN PEAKS THEME – ANGELO BADALAMENTI
In 2008 I spent 3 weeks in a van with my old band The Elephants after the release of our first album. It was a tour through Germany in the month of March and everything looked grey and foggy. I had a lot of things stirring in me and then there happened to be a Twin Peaks DVD box set in the car that I swallowed like a famished bear. I had just been travelling in India, first time out of my Western comfort zone, and Twin Peaks just filled a big empty spot inside me, made me curious and light-hearted. Getting in the van every morning, listening to the Twin Peaks opening theme, it really made me relax and wonder.
FAMILIEN SKAL I SKOVEN – KIM LARSEN
Oh man, I love that track (in English: “The Family is going to the forest”). It’s written by Denmark’s grand old troubadour Kim Larsen and reminds me of moving to Denmark with my family (I’m originally from Birmingham). My dad always took us for a ride to the countryside on Sundays so we could get to know our new country. He’d just bought a big new BMW M5 and I constantly begged my dad to drive faster. He usually did and then my mom and little sister were sitting in the back seat screaming like pigs. We usually ended the trip at an old Danish amusement park called “Bakken” where we got huge magic ice cream cones.
LONDON CALLING – THE CLASH
When I got a little older I got really fed up with society and wanted to burn down everything. I was in a group of boys that ran around setting fire to cars in Copenhagen, busting windows at the local McDonald’s and so on. At some point we heard that the police was finding out about us and I moved to London, stayed for a few years. I guess now I sort of regret being a part of those riots, especially because I just got a car myself (Impala ’67) and would cry my eyes out if someone layed hands on it. But anyhow, I still think you need to react when you think something’s fucked.
Tales From The Drought by Rainbrother is out on 3rd February 2017 via General Bird.
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