In person: Ida Maria
Untamed Melody
Norway’s indie rock chick Ida Maria is about to be unleashed on the international pop scene. Sterling meets a girl who takes no prisoners
words by Johnny Lewis
Ida Maria is rather excited. She’s just appeared on Britain’s top music programme, Later With Jools Hollandmeets a girl who takes no prisoners, alongside her hero Morrissey.
“I was ushered into his presence and he very politely shook my hand, and said some nice things about my music,” says Ida Maria. “I was a bit thrilled – it’s Morrissey, isn’t it, and he’s like a l iving God – but I was rather shocked that he smelt like he’d dived into a b athtub of aftershave. There was like a wall of fragrance around him. Woooof! It was actually pretty disgusting…”
As it happened, 23-year-old Ida Maria Sivertsen and her band blew the fragrant Morrisse y and the rest of the guests on the show off the stage that night. With her astonishingly catchy power pop (“Blondie fronted by Björk” says one critic; “J anis Joplin jamming with The J am” says another), big things are being tipped for Ida Maria.
The singer-songwriter is already something of a star in her home country of Norway and in her adopted home of Sweden, having scored a few hit singles and won a prestigious by:Larm award. Now she looks likely to make it in Britain, with a series of fanatically well-received support tours, a ton of favourable reviews and a BBC poll naming her as one of the top pop hopes for 2008. A recent knee injury she suffered during a typically manic stage performance was even a headline news story in the British music weekly, NME.
Supporting The Guillemots
in London this April“It was just a graze,” she shrugs. “Although I couldn’t walk for a few days
afterwards. But I do go absolutely f***ing mental during gigs.” She’s not
joking. Spinning, slam-dancing and pogoing on stage, she once damaged her ribs so badly that she couldn’t walk for weeks; another time she head-butted a bass guitar so hard that blood was streaming down her face for the rest of the gig – she thought that someone in the crowd had sprayed red wine from the moshpit.
“Being on stage feels natural to me in the way nothing else does,” she says. “It’s physical. Every time I play live I go into a trance and I want to smash things up, with words and music. I want to live the music with my whole body. People ask me about whether I agree with downloading music, and yes, it’d be great if all music was free. But not live gigs. Playing live should be hard, physical work, like being a fisherman or a carpenter. You should put everything you’ve got into it.”
She expects every single band on the planet to do exactly the same. One unfortunate act who fell short of her requirements were Swedish electro-popsters Zeigeist.
“They were on stage trying to look cool, just so they could say they’re in a band. I saw them and felt this instant, physical reaction. I jumped over a fence, ran past the guards and suddenly I was in this big light show with all these Ku Klux Klan-looking electronica people from Sweden.
I ran to the front and bit the singer’s ass hard. They looked terrified. I was really happy for the rest of the night!”
Ida grew up in Nesna, a tiny university town in the north of Norway, population 1,776, with one gas station, one pub, one closed-down shoe factory and lots of mountains. Her dad played guitar and bass in jazz and ska bands, her mum sang at weddings, and her family doctor introduced her to Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
Aged 16 she moved to Bergen, on the south-west coast of Norway, to study music. “I used to have a thin, girlie little voice,” she laughs, “but in Bergen I discovered the inner beast that was hiding in my vocal chords.” It came when she was watching Erlend from the band Kings Of Convenience doing a solo set at an open-mic night. “He was a bit boring, and it pissed me off. So I went on after him and I let out all my anger and my emotions in a way that shocked me.”
“Playing gigs should be
hard, physical work”
The music course was a disappointment (“it was run by these mad, fundamentalist Christians, who declared that dancing was like sex standing up”). But Bergen was also host to a thriving music scene, home to the likes of Kings Of Convenience, Sondre Lerche, Annie, Röyksopp and Datarock, along with a host of black metal bands.
“It was a fantastic place to be a musician,” says Ida. “You’ve got the death metal scene, you’ve got people playing country, bluegrass, electronica, jazz, folk, all working in the same bands, sharing ideas. It wasn’t like a little indie ghetto, like you get in some countries.”
After three years, she became sick of the tiny, condemned apartment that she shared in Bergen and followed her boyfriend to Uppsala in Sweden, where she enrolled to study at the city’s prestigious university.
“I studied classical music history, pop music history, rock mythologies, ethnological music – all really cool subjects. And I loved it. But I quickly got a band together with some Swedish guys and, instead of being in lectures every Monday, I’d be out doing gigs.”
In her element:
Ida Maria in
the
spotlight
She started releasing singles on her own label, Nesna Records, but it wasn’t long before a bigwig from Sony/RCA in London saw her playing in Stockholm and offered her a recording contract immediately. Now her debut album – with every track written by Ida herself – is due for release around Europe this summer.
It features ten exquisite three-minute punk-pop songs about God (“Stella”), depression (“Drive Away My Heart”), sexual politics (“Better When You’re Naked”), partying (“Queen Of The World”), drinking (“Oh My God”) and love (“Louie”). All of them are sung in English – “You can’t sing pop in Norwegian,” she says. “Our poetry is brilliant but there are too many consonants for you to sing it” – and every one of them could potentially be a hit single.
“Just before I wrote the album, this producer who I was working with in Norway said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a kind of arty punk singer, you’re not a pop singer, are you?’ And that drove me mad. I was like, screw you, I can write pop music. So I started writing these pop songs, and thought, this is f***ing fun. I love how really great pop songs get an instant, visceral reaction.”
It’s a very upbeat album for someone who declares herself a nihilist. “I describe my music as melancholy goes partying,” she says. “I think that comes from growing up near the Arctic Circle, and living in perpetual darkness for half of the year. As soon as autumn comes everyone curls up and goes into a seasonal depression without noticing it. Maybe we’re all a bit bipolar.”
How does it feel to be a Norwegian living in Sweden? “There’s a bit of animosity,” she laughs. “Sweden used to own Norway until 1905. And then Norway discovered the oil in the 70s and got rich, but we don’t really have any culture. We don’t have castles everywhere, like Sweden does. We’re just farmers and fishermen. So I think that Swedes are a bit suspicious of us Norwegians. They think we’re a bit… backward. Ha ha!
“Sweden is actually the one country where people don’t go mad when we play. England, Scotland, New York, Germany, Spain – the audiences go absolutely mental. In Sweden they’re a bit cool. I think that makes me want to go even more mad!”
Ida Maria’s debut album is released in May (Norway), June (Sweden) and July (UK and the rest of Europe). She will be playing in Norway in Lunde on 5 June, Rjukan on 6 June and Oslo on 6 August.
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