Jakob leaned across the table, looked me in the eye and said: ‘Rock music is a religion. One of the slogans from sixty-seven. Rock is rhythm. And rhythm definitely has something religious about it. Rhythm and rituals. The basis of all religions.’109

‘Yes, but…’

‘Music is with us all the time. It’s the rhythm of our lives. The beating of your mother’s heart when you’re in the womb, the regular throb of blood through the umbilical cord and into your body. That’s the first music you hear. Later, if you’re lucky, the same mother sings you to sleep at night. Circus music. The school band on the seventeenth of May.’

‘The drums of the marching bands in spring?’

‘Christmas carols, hymns.’

‘Pop.’

‘Exactly. Pop! Sounds like the noise the cork makes as it’s released from a bottle of champagne. But pop is every generation’s popular music, from Strauss to Tchaikovsky, from Debussy to Gershwin, from Richard Rodgers to Lennon and McCartney. Viennese waltzes in one era, music hall songs in another. Languorous evergreens one decade, swing jazz another…’

‘And rock music in quite a number of…’

‘Yes, but there’s rock and there’s rock, Frau Beethoven. It’s a long way from fifties American rock ‘n’ roll to today’s synth rock.’

‘I thought it was electronics you worked on?’

‘Yes, but in its own way. What I do is research various forms of musical expression and combine them in new contexts. Create soundscapes.’

I nodded. At the neighbouring table a heated debate about meta-literary devices in eighties European films had broken out and names like Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Betty Blue were being bandied about over beer. I knew nothing about any of them and had my hands full coping with Jakob’s music machines.

After Wesselstuen we set out for Holbergstuen. Holberg’s comedies were still read and performed and he’d had a rich and 110varied career from slave-trader to baron. The clientele in his drinking parlour was a lot less studenty than it had been fifteen years earlier, apart from on 8^th March because the female activists with their roots in the seventies still believed this was where it all happened. Or perhaps the change of style was more an illusion, because, judging by the level of drunkenness, most of those present appeared to have been supping steadily since 1968, so there was no reason to believe they weren’t the same people. Those who had once been students had advanced to becoming Masters of Alcohol with a variety of subsidiary subjects.

Jakob had started to slur his ‘s’s and there appeared to be a loose connection up top. He leaned forward between two beer glasses and said: ‘The problem … The problem is combining the necessary with … the necessary.’

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘What you have to do … with what you have to do,’ he continued.

‘Right.’

‘The useful with … the useful.’

I nodded wearily. I had a strange feeling in my head, as though I would never hold it upright again if I continued nodding.