‘We played to 8,000 Mexicans who knew every word’: How the whitest boy conquered the world | culture

IIf you imagine the recent development of the musical in Europe as a series of scenes from a Where’s Wally-style mystery book, a lanky, bespectacled figure will appear on almost every page. Here he was in London in the mid-90s, handing out flyers for his first band, Peachfuzz. Here he was at the NME at the dawn of the new millennium, fronting folk duo Kings of Convenience and leading the new acoustic movement. There he plays his guitar at the forefront of the Norwegian “Bergen Wave”. He then sets records in Berlin nightclubs during the city’s “poor but exciting” post-millennial years. By the 2000s, he was leading an Italian pop renaissance as part of La Comitiva, whose bandmates hail from the southern tip of Sicily.

It’s hard to think of a more universal figure musically than Erlind Autry Uy, who connects the dots across a continent whose national scenes rarely overlap — and makes magic happen. No wonder his first solo album, which included 10 songs recorded in 10 different cities, was called Unrest. Of all his incarnations, the best you’ll find (if you go on Spotify) is his four-piece, The Whitest Boy Alive. In the spring and summer, they will reunite to tour South America and Europe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut album, Dreams.

After the success of Quiet Is the New Loud, the debut album from Kings of Convenience, fellow harmonist Eirik Glambek Bøe suffered a breakdown and chose to stay in Bergen to study psychology. “Eric was never interested in music as a way of living,” says Uwe, via video call from a beach shack on Mexico’s Pacific coast, his sun-kissed hair and shorts announcing his distance from rainy Norway. “He was into it as a nice thing to do. I was making it a career.”

Thus, at the beginning of the millennium, Uwe moved to Berlin. Despite its great reputation, the German capital was “more of a wasteland for the music that was actually played. A lot of the people who went there became DJs, wiped their chins and talked interestingly about the musical references they made. They didn’t strive to really convince, or really produce.”

He befriended Marcin Oz, a Polish DJ at the since-disbanded club institution WMF. Although they didn’t share the same taste in electronic music – Oz played minimal techno, Øye played with breaks – they were both driven. “We were two ambitious people and had plenty of gasoline to go places.” At the rehearsal space on Karl Marx Allee, they met keyboardist Daniel Nentweg and drummer Sebastian Machat. “We realized that Maskat was a really good drummer: he could play house music beats on an actual drum kit, which in 2004 there were very few bands that could do that, other than maybe Rapture and LCD Soundsystem.”

Dreams still sounds great: unashamedly melancholic indie pop, drilled into deep house’s patterns of build-up and release, its whispered tales of friendships made and loves lost backed by a rhythm section that’s as stripped-back as a garage band and as tight as a gang of musicians. Think Joy Section fronting Art Garfunkel. In terms of mood, not music, this was the 21st century’s answer to Everything But the Girl: music to which an entire generation could dance but also mourn.

However, the reception in the English world was lukewarm. The Guardian was reminded of Jamiroquai’s “most soulless moments”. Pitchfork called Dreams “toothless,” as if “Kraftwerk had produced Fleetwood Mac.” Did he mind? “If you look at it now, all the bands that the critics loved didn’t make it that far,” he shrugs. “So they were a little bit wrong.”

Maybe the problem was in the name. The Whitest Boy Alive was the result of a quip Øye made in an interview with a German music magazine to describe his own musical tastes. Oz thought it was funny. “It prevented us from having any success in the US at first, because people in the US are afraid of anything that could be associated with racism,” Ooi says. “Which is ironic, because in many ways the music is not white at all.”

This may be a familiar tale: the most obvious musical inspiration for Kings of Convenience was not folk but Brazilian bossa nova. The Whitest Boy Alive’s most famous song was 1517, and it is almost certainly the only love song about reform to ever appear in a FIFA video game. It develops around a tresello (not very white) rhythm that is typical of reggaeton.

Their tour will include Potsdam, Paris and Copenhagen. But the one country where the band had the biggest impact is not in Europe. “It’s definitely Mexico,” Uy says. “We played a festival in 2021 – and there were 8,000 people there who knew every word to every song. It was an amazing party.”

The Whitest Boy Alive broke up in 2014, with a statement that hinted at internal conflict and cited their song Golden Cage (“You knew what you wanted and you fought hard / Only to find yourself sitting in a golden cage”). “We were trying to make a new album, but with a lot of democracy. You could say that was the shackle, the golden cage,” reflects Uwe.

The main reason the band took a hiatus is that it’s less dramatic, though tragically ironic given Øye’s love of soft vocals and clean, undistorted guitar sounds. He has tinnitus and hyperacusis, the latter of which causes an unusually low tolerance for environmental noise that makes rehearsal studios and indoor gigs almost unbearable.

“It’s a constant chirp,” Barzak says. “You get used to it after a while. It’s not annoying anymore, but if you keep being in noisy situations, it will start to get louder.” He jokingly blames it on a gig the British alternative rock band Swervedriver attended in Bergen in 1997.

In early 2010, Uwe bought a house in Syracuse, Sicily, and moved in with his mother, who died in 2016. He has spent six months a year there ever since, a period that seems remarkably long in Uwe’s time. Have you finally discovered stillness? “Where I live in Syracuse, it’s green all year round. That’s great. But having grown up in Norway, almost any country would be an improvement. People think Norway is full of snow. To me, Norway is just trees with no leaves. Autumn is two weeks long and the rest is just barren, lifeless, grey. It’s very bleak.”

I’m skeptical about anti-nationalism. Surely his homeland is the biggest cultural superpower Europe has at the moment, with the sentimental value of Joachim Trier and its star Renate Rensef sweeping the film awards, Karl Ove Knausgaard driving the contemporary imagination, and Erling Haaland breaking record after record in the Premier League? Norway is even going to the World Cup.

Øye can’t hide his excitement when I mention football. “It’s interesting to talk about Haaland because he’s not exactly Norwegian. He’s not the typical humble Norwegian prime minister. He’s a star who wants to be treated like a star.” He cites Jante’s Law, a code of conduct first outlined in a 1930s novel that still has some influence on Scandinavian etiquette: Don’t think you’re special.

“I am very proud of Norwegian equality,” he says. “But I feel that, culturally, we have taken a big step forward by allowing Haaland to be the star and play around him. We finally have a good team, because we allow people to be a little different.” Is there a bit of Haaland in European indie music Wally, who is forever wandering around the continent because he also wants to find a team he’s happy to play around?

Øye dismisses the comparison, but I wonder if this is just more my janky. Because when I asked him why he got his old band back together, he said, “The main reason is because no one else can play our music. I mean, it’s not like other bands have come along and done it much better than us. No, The Whitest Boy Alive is still the only one who can play The Whitest Boy Alive.”