‘You know before the Beatles there was never any talk about groups. It was all singers with bands. It was Johnny Solheim and the Harpers, Rune and the Stringers, Tom de Lange and the Rhythmic Six and Stig Madsen and the Badboys, to mention just a few. But they bent with the wind and followed the fashion. Take The Harpers for example. First it was Elvis songs, with a bit of Tommy Steele and Paul Anka thrown in. Then there was the smooth transition to The Everly Brothers and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The bands that didn’t have vocalists were only Shadows bands and stuck to instrumentals. But The Harpers had both Johnny and good backing voices, and after a while sang self-penned 181stuff with real drive. Songs with oomph that were catchy. The boys could have gone far if they’d had better PR. They did weekend gigs in the region, and a tour in northern Norway and two in Østland, made two singles and an LP, later a solo LP with Johnny, but they never actually had a career. The Pussycats overshadowed most groups at that time. Shit, though, did those boys have fun! For as long as it lasted. At dances outside Bergen the girls prostrated themselves and screamed and howled, the way they’d seen girls doing on news reels. The boys could take their pick. They had so much lamb in those years they’ve barely touched the national mutton dish since.’

‘But when were they really at their peak?’

‘Their heyday – what I’d call a heyday – was from 1960 to 1964. Afterwards they lived on their reputation – topped the local charts right through to 1970 when they jumped onto the Norwegian-wave bandwagon, wrote lyrics in Bergen dialect and changed their name to Harpegjengen. It was never quite the same. They began – at least in pop-star years – to age. Slowly but surely they all passed thirty and by 1975 it was all over.’ He looked at his second card. ‘Johnny carried on in a variety of groups and different line-ups, in later years sometimes teaming up with Stig Madsen of The Badboys. The others disappeared from the scene. Jakob Aasen’s an organist as far as I know. The others…’ He shrugged.

‘Tell me – who were they really?’

‘The Harpers – in close up do you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Johnny Solheim, as I said. The front man on the stage. Elvis, Cliff and John Lennon, if I can put it like that. Well, a non-creative John Lennon. He never wrote a song himself until his solo LP, and that was, in all honesty, a fiasco. He played the guitar and 182sang. He had a raw, husky voice that was far bluesier than most of the other crooners of the period. But the brain behind the group was Jakob Aasen. At the beginning he was more anonymous, played the guitar beside Johnny, did some backing vocals and gave them drive, but never did anything in his own right … until they started making their own material. It was Jakob Aasen who wrote everything, the lyrics and the music, and it was pretty darned good. Without him they’d have been a run-of-the-mill dance band covering hits. Now they had their very own personal sound – not least because Jakob Aasen switched instruments, to piano and organ. They had a sound and a feel we hadn’t had here until Saft came on the scene, almost ten years later.’