{"id":244772,"date":"2026-01-21T18:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T18:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/244772\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T18:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T18:32:08","slug":"we-played-to-8000-mexicans-who-knew-every-word-how-the-whitest-boy-alive-conquered-the-world-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/244772\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We played to 8,000 Mexicans who knew every word\u2019: how the Whitest Boy Alive conquered the world | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you were to imagine the recent evolution of music in Europe<\/a> as a series of scenes from a Where\u2019s Wally?-style puzzle book, one bespectacled, lanky figure would pop up on almost every page. There he is in mid-90s London, handing out flyers for his first band Peachfuzz. Here he is in NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and spearheading the new acoustic movement. There he is strumming his guitar in the vanguard of Norway\u2019s \u201cBergen wave\u201d. Then he\u2019s off spinning records in Berlin nightclubs during the city\u2019s \u201cpoor but sexy\u201d post-millennial years. By the 2010s, he\u2019s driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop as part of La Comitiva, his bandmates hailing from the southern tip of Sicily.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to think of a figure more musically cosmopolitan than Erlend Otre \u00d8ye, connecting the dots across a continent where national scenes rarely overlap \u2013 and making magic happen. No wonder his debut solo album, with 10 tracks recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his reincarnations, though, the one that has best endured (if you go by Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. And this spring and summer, they\u2019re reuniting for a tour of Mexico<\/a> and Europe<\/a> to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dreams, their debut album.<\/p>\n

No other band has come along and done it better than us<\/p>\n

After the success of Quiet Is the New Loud , the first album from Kings of Convenience, his congenial bandmate Eirik Glambek B\u00f8e suffered a breakdown and opted to stay in Bergen to study psychology. \u201cEirik was never into music as a way of living,\u201d says \u00d8ye, via video call from a beach cabin on Mexico\u2019s Pacific coast, his sun-kissed hair and peach shorts announcing how far he has come from rainy Norway<\/a>. \u201cHe was just into it as a nice thing to be doing. I was into making it a career.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, at the start of the millennium, \u00d8ye moved to Berlin. Despite its cool reputation, the German capital \u201cwas a bit of a wasteland for actual played music. So many people who went there became DJs, stroked their chins and talked interestingly about the musical references they made. They didn\u2019t strive to really convince, to really make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joy Division meets Art Garfunkel … the Whitest Boy Alive in 2006. Photograph: Scruffy Bird PR<\/p>\n

He befriended Marcin \u00d6z, a Polish DJ at the since dissolved clubbing institution WMF. Even though they didn\u2019t share the same taste in electronic music \u2013 \u00d6z played minimal techno, \u00d8ye beats with breaks \u2013 they were both driven. \u201cWe were two ambitious people who really had a lot of petrol to go places.\u201d At a rehearsal space on the Karl-Marx-Allee boulevard, they met keyboard player Daniel Nentwig and drummer Sebastian Maschat. \u201cWe realised Maschat was a really good drummer: he could play house music beats on an actual drum set, which in 2004 very few bands could do, other than perhaps the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dreams still sounds gorgeous: unashamedly melancholy indie pop, drilled to the buildup-and-release patterns of deep house, its whispered tales of friendships made and loves lost propped up by a rhythm section that is both as stripped-back as a garage band and as tight as a gang of session musicians. Think Joy Division fronted by Art Garfunkel. In terms of the mood, rather than the music, it was the 21st century\u2019s first answer to Everything But the Girl: music that a generation could dance to but also be sad to.<\/p>\n

Yet their reception in the Anglosphere was lukewarm. The Guardian was reminded of \u201cJamiroquai\u2019s most soulless moments<\/a>\u201d. Pitchfork called Dreams \u201ctoothless\u201d, as if \u201cKraftwerk had produced Fleetwood Mac\u201d. Did he mind? \u201cIf you look at it now,\u201d he shrugs, \u201call the bands the critics did like haven\u2019t really made it that far. So they were a bit wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the problem was in the name. The Whitest Boy Alive was the result of a self-effacing quip \u00d8ye made in an interview with a German music magazine to describe his own musical tastes. \u00d6z thought it was funny. \u201cIt stopped us from having any success in the US in the beginning,\u201d says \u00d8ye, \u201cbecause in the US, people are afraid of anything that could be racially connected. Which is ironic, because in many ways the music is not that white at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breakdown crisis … \u00d8ye, right, and Eirik Glambek B\u00f8e, AKA Kings of Convenience. Photograph: David Sillitoe\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

This would be a familiar tale: Kings of Convenience\u2019s most obvious musical inspiration wasn\u2019t folk but Brazilian bossa nova. The Whitest Boy Alive\u2019s best-known track was 1517, almost definitely the only love song about the Reformation ever to have featured on a Fifa video game. It evolves around a (not-very-white) tresillo rhythm that is typical of reggaeton.<\/p>\n

Their tour will take in Potsdam, Paris and Copenhagen. But the one country where the band has had the greatest impact is not in Europe. \u201cIt\u2019s Mexico, for sure,\u201d \u00d8ye says. \u201cWe played a festival in 2021 \u2013 and there were 8,000 people who knew every word to every song. It was an incredible party.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Whitest Boy Alive broke up in 2014, with a statement that hinted at internal strife and cited their song Golden Cage (\u201cYou knew what you wanted and you fought so hard \/ Just to find yourself sitting in a golden cage\u201d). \u00d8ye reflects: \u201cWe were trying to make a new album, but with too much democracy. You could say that was the straitjacket, the golden cage.\u201d<\/p>\n

He blames his hearing problems on the British band Swervedriver<\/p>\n

The main reason the band stopped is less dramatic, although tragically ironic given \u00d8ye\u2019s love of hushed vocals and clean, undistorted guitar sounds. He has tinnitus and hyperacusis, the latter causing an unusually low tolerance for environmental noise that makes rehearsal studios and indoor gigs almost unbearable.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a constant peep,\u201d he says stoically. \u201cYou get used to it after a while. It\u2019s not so troublesome any more, but if I continue being in loud situations, it starts to go higher.\u201d Half-jokingly, he blames a gig he attended by the British alternative rock band Swervedriver in Bergen in 1997.<\/p>\n

In the early 2010s, \u00d8ye bought a house in Syracuse, Sicily, and moved there with his mother, who died in 2016. He has spent six months a year there since, which seems a remarkably long period in \u00d8ye time. Has he finally discovered stillness? \u201cWhere I live in Syracuse, it\u2019s green all year round. That\u2019s fantastic. But having grown up in Norway, almost any country will be an improvement. People think Norway\u2019s full of snow. To me, Norway is just trees with no leaves. Autumn is two weeks and the rest is just barren, lifeless, grey. It\u2019s so very grim.\u201d<\/p>\n

Driving a renaissance of Italian chamber pop \u2026 performing as part of La Comitiva in 2021. Photograph: Rodolfo Sassano\/Alamy<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sceptical about the anti-patriotism. Surely his homeland is the biggest cultural superpower Europe has right now, with Joachim Trier\u2019s Sentimental Value<\/a> and its star Renate Reinsve sweeping up film awards<\/a>, Karl Ove Knausg\u00e5rd<\/a> leading contemporary fiction and Erling Haaland breaking record after record in the Premier League? Norway is even going to the World Cup.<\/p>\n

\u00d8ye can\u2019t hide his excitement when I mention the football. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to talk about Haaland because he is not very Norwegian. He\u2019s not your typical modest Norwegian prime minister character. He\u2019s more of a star that wants to be treated like a star.\u201d He cites the Law of Jante, a code of conduct first articulated in a 1930s novel that still has some effect on Scandinavian etiquette: don\u2019t think you are anything special.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very proud of Norwegian egalitarianism,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I feel that, culturally, we\u2019ve taken a huge step forward by allowing Haaland to be the star and just playing around him. Finally we have a good team, because we\u2019re allowing people to be a bit different.\u201d Is there a bit of Haaland in Europe\u2019s indie-music Wally, forever wandering around the continent because he too wants to find a team happy to play around him?<\/p>\n

\u00d8ye rejects the comparison, but I wonder if that\u2019s just more Jante. Because when I ask him why he got his old band back together, he says: \u201cThe main reason is no one else can play our music. I mean, it\u2019s not as if other bands have come along and done it much better than us. No, it\u2019s still only The Whitest Boy Alive who can do The Whitest Boy Alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Whitest Boy Alive play Waschhaus Potsdam on 25 August; Vega Copenhagen on 27 August and Cabaret Sauvage in Paris on 31 August.<\/p>\n