January 10 - Fergus Laing

So it should start to be pretty clear that my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, to put it mildly. Some of it mirrors bands I have followed, while others mirror tastes of friends - and my interest in folk music from all around the world has been largely influenced by Thomas Ekrene with assistance from Johan Ludvig Brattås. The backstory for this interest is found under Radio Days: Resurrection - but the part I believe is missing is the fact that when I first moved to Bergen in January of 1995, the very first day in my student apartment I could hear the unmistakable guitar intro to La Grange by ZZ Top. I had no idea who lived next door, but I took La Grange as a good sign.

As I started working in Studentradioen - and more specifically as I started working with Thomas in Plog - I would frequently take one of the last busses home, and it turned out that Thomas was on the same bus. We walked separately - he had a gruff personality, and I had not yet established much of a rapport with him - and sat apart from one another on the bus, each listening to our own music. However, my jaw dropped when I saw that his key fit perfectly in the lock of the student apartment next to mine - the one that had played La Grange when I first moved in.

Eventually we started talking more, and we became friends, first and foremost united by a love for music, and he really started pushing his main drug: Richard Thompson. At first I was lukewarm, but I started warming up, and after I moved back to Trondheim for a while, he sent me a tape (or was it two) with some of his favorite Richard Thompson songs in good old-fashioned mixtape mode. And it worked... In addition to being one of the best guitar players I ever have heard (electric or acoustic), he is also a great songwriter. He has a very typical British dry humor, and his songs often appear depressive - but they are filled with very dark humor that you have to see through the grim depressive material. Add to that that he has written good old fashioned nidviser - very critical and satirical songs about living and real people - Madonna's Wedding about her renting a Scottish Castle to marry Guy Ritchie and Dear Janet Jackson about the infamous exposed nipple.\As one of the bonus tracks of his last album, Still, which came out last year, he wrote another song about an existing person, but since this person is a litigious current frontrunner for the Republican Party, the name was changed to Fergus Laing - but there is little doubt about who it is written...