Wigwam in Denmark

 Released in 2026, feb. You can only get it from:

https://svart.ochre.store/?lang=en_GB

if you live in the US or Canada. Cover below. More details when I have it.

I think fans have had these tracks, or most of them, for years now. At least we had some from 1975. We get a professional attempt by Svart to get the best out of a reel to reel tape. The concert was in 1976. The odd thing was that the studio album Lucky Golden Stripes And Starpose had been recorded in January of 1976. Reviews of it came out April and May. How this fits in with what we hear, I don't know.

Anyway, the tracks are from a short Danish tour late that year. The vocals are decent and the guitar comes through pretty clearly. However, the overall sound has some muddyness left from what was available. I can hear all the instruments at times, other times it blends into a bit of a distorted noise. The drums do not come through as well as the Töölöranta concert recorded by YLE. 

Grass For Blades has the final vocal verse come in at 8 minutes and there is yet another guitar solo to the end. Do or Die runs longer than the version we had in the Töölönranta live a year earlier. The Danish shows did not have time limits, apparently. We get more of Pedro on synth this time. We get a version of A Better Hold, which was recorded with these lyrics, more or less, with sweet Igor as the random character thrown in (recorded in 1977 with much of this line up). It really is not better than the earlier live version of this song in the Töölönranta disc. Never Turn You In is developing here. But not quite the precise arrangement it got in the studio in 1976 (recorded at Virgin). Colossus is surprisingly finalized here, and even the recorded sound is good.

Lucky Golden Stripes And Starpose is mostly there. Or it actually is a slightly different arrangement. After about three plays this has become my favorite track. The guitar parts have a surprize tremolo bit in the middle that never made it to the record. The title of the song has always been a mystery, as it really was a meaningless phrase to start with. Jim explained it a bit in his book. Mats Huldén tried to help us with the cover of the album. It was equally a mystery but fun nonetheless. In his book Jim says he never asked Rekku about the mystery title. He says that it definitely had nothing to do with the American flag that Virgin put on the cover. The Huldén cover had been rejected, perhaps as too confusing. No New games was standard in their sets. I can't say this is the best. Again, Töölönranta beats this one.

So what is the typical fan likely to get from this? It features songs that had come out on Lucky Golden Stripes And Starpose with the 1975 Wigwam lineup. There are moments of hearing some fun happening on stage. Jim's stage banter is surprisingly minimal. Occasionally he would speak at length in other concerts. One slip is amusing, a song is announced as "Lucky Golden Stripes And Star Noise." So since we cannot go back to 1975 and 76, it will be a fun disc to play a few times. I will probably play it more than the 2001 live album, which had a compressed sound I really could not stand.

I myself just added a few songs from this to my Wigwam 75-76 playlist, the ones not in the Töölönranta set. But leaving out Grass for Blades. There is a difference in the recorded sound from the Töölönranta set. I will play the Töölönranta set on headphones, but the Denmark set took a bit of testing to get the right headphones to be comforable.

We have the next live album from 1991 at Provinssirock. I think the band was a bit better rested that day and perhaps enthusiastic about that brief reunion period. They had not played for Finnish fans for a while. Drummer Ronnie was gone and Pedro appeared but did not stay to record the next studio album. Here we see the move to some accordion from Pedro. The version of Grass for Blades there is far better than the one here. Though my favorite of that song live is the four man band that played at Liisankatu studios ("Pop-Liisa 3").

Aside from that song, where I probably favor Jukka Gustavson to any other keyboard player, I have to say Pedro Hietanene did quite well here. The parts he plays are not too long and he is playing quite well together with Rekku. That did not always happen. He did well on the studio album too. His contribution to Dark Album varied, depending on the track.

There is a booklet describing the Danish end of things and how we got these tapes at all. But sorry to say, very little of Denmark comes through in this recording. Probably a rather small audience. If we had a recording of Roskilde in 1976, that probably came across a bit stronger. I was only at Roskilde only once. I think the tendency was to put the Finnish band early in the morning, when drunk Danes were still recovering but Finns always show up for their band. Mine was Pelle Miljoona.

A note on lyrics:

Jim's lyrics are well known for most of the songs. I would just add that there was usually a satirical look at great powers. My other blog entry sheds light on the content of Lucky Golden Stripes And Starpose. Not directly, but the flag business.  I had asked about Cheap Evening Return:

"Yes, in eighteen twenty-four

 Somebody had won a war for sure, he thought

           And there'd been flags and ribbons waving."

Here the wars could be these according to Google AI:
This likely refers to the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826) or the final stages of the Spanish American wars of independence (such as the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824). The lyrics depict a distant, "heroic" era of flags, ribbons, and statues of lancers.

Jim probably did not refer to a particular war, but just the coloneal era and the British Empire. The steam shovel in the next lines gives us an idea. But AI has the idea, roughly.