Kings Of Convenience
The Double Door
22 February 2005

There’s something about the Double Door that I’ve never liked. Despite its proximity to my apartment, I haven’t seen many shows there. It seems like a venue of its size and notoriety could be booking a greater proportion of popular indie acts, but it doesn’t indulge my musical tastes as consistently as the calendar at the Empty Bottle. Inside, the atmosphere can be rather cavernous, and the crowds often skew towards the unruly side. Which is why I was a bit wary about seeing a quiet, Norwegian acoustic-folk duo play there last night.

Anyone who’s been to a sold-out show at the Double Door knows how crowded that long, narrow room gets, and how tough it is to move around once you’ve claimed a prized spot near the stage. A good half hour before the show, I found myself sardined amongst representatives of a demographic with whom I aligned a bit too well for my own taste. To my left, a group of scraggly men in their late twenties were discussing Pavement and trying to remember what song and album contains the lyric “You’re my fact-checking cuz.” (It’s “Stereo”, from Brighten The Corners, gentlemen. I guess you could say I’m your—never mind.) Directly in front of me, two young women were chatting excitedly about an upcoming wedding. This didn’t bode well. Could I really expect these boisterous peers of mine to quiet down when Kings Of Convenience took the stage? I thought of the disasterously cacaphonous crowd that greeted Low when I saw them at Logan Square Auditorium two years ago. Would it be like that?

When Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe finally did shuffle onto the stage, the crowd erupted in cheers. Øye was toting a large UN flag, which he draped across the small drum kit at the back of the stage. They sat down and, very slowly and deliberately, set about tuning their guitars and adjusting their mic stands. They were in no hurry. Eirik very softly asked, “Are you ready for some Norwegian country music?” in endearingly accented but surprisingly smooth English. The crowd erupted again, and I was worried. But then Eirik asked, “Are you with us? We need you to be with us.” This was a very subtle way, I realized, of asking the crowd to be quiet so they could commence playing. And amazingly enough, for the first time ever, I witnessed a sold-out crowd at the Double Door quiet itself until it was completely silent.

That more or less set the tone for the evening: a series of events I didn’t think possible in Chicago, especially in Wicker Park, especially at the Double Door. They were, in order: an ninety-minute set of acoustic folk music from Norway, greeted by a respectfully quiet capacity crowd; a very skinny Norwegian man with impossibly huge Coke-bottle glasses stage diving, then wearing a giant blue UN flag as a cape and declaring himself “Captain UN”; that same man coming back into the room half an hour after the duo had finished playing, and DJing a dance set for the sizable crowd that remained; and, perhaps most surprising of all, a room full of people at the Double Door actually dancing. That’s not a typo: people in Chicago were dancing.

The set itself was the perfect length, consisting of well-chosen favorites from the duo’s two studio albums and a couple recently-written new songs. Erlend Øye has parlayed his career with Kings Of Convenience into success as a DJ, and has also released an excellent solo album, Unrest, so it’s inevitable that Eirik Glambek Bøe might slip into the John Oates role, playing the Kyle Gass to Øye’s Jack Black. But Bøe acquitted himself wonderfully as an adept guitarist, picking out articulate and crystal-clear acoustic lines, and I was surprised at how many of my KoC favorites he sings lead on. He was the more reserved of the two, remaining seated while Øye pranced around during the encore (“I’d Rather Dance With You”, for which they were joined by a bassist, keyboardist, and drummer) in the aforementioned flag-cape, but his onstage banter was funnier, and included a humorous anecdote about the culture clash that occured earlier in the tour when the duo found themselves in a Disneyfied Orlando suburb called Celebration. “It’s what happens when corporations take over the city planning. The citizens voted for the politician who would give them lower taxes,” Bøe explained, “So there’s not enough money for the city planning, which is where Disney takes over. ”

The between-song banter also got in some digs on the reputation Chicago’s music scene has earned for taking itself too seriously—”We were going to have you sing along, but then we remembered that people in Chicago are very serious about their music”—a declaration met with good-natured boos from the crowd. “Come on, Chicago! Don’t be afraid to snap your fingers!” Øye exhorted during “Singing Softly To Me”. But ultimately, they expressed their admiration for the city. “Some of my favorite artists are from Chicago,” Øye said near the end of the set. “I recommend you all check out the solo album from Sam Prekop.” He then added, “In Bergen [Norway], it is very popular to say you are a fan of the Sea & Cake.”

All in all, it was a memorable night, not only for the performance itself, but for the refreshingly celebratory attitude of a normally staid Chicago audience: Hearing them fall into a reverent hush while the duo were playing, watching them actually dance when Øye’s DJ set began, seeing them embrace his insertion of “Dancing In The Dark” among the hipper selections in his DJ—I was inspired. Whereas I am often annoyed with my fellow Chicago music fans, I was proud; when a typical night at the Double Door would find me jamming my earplugs in tighter and moving to the back of the room, I was happy to be standing in the middle of the dance floor, watching everyone happily defy expectations.

Photos by Joseph Mohan