Here at Lowcut the complaining about the Danish music scene just won’t never stop. It’s so deep in us after so many years of feeling alienated and being a laughing stock among our brothers in Norway, Sweden and Finland. WHY DON’T THE DANISH POPULATION UNDERSTAND REAL ROCK MUSIC??? I guess the Danish rock scene is in better shape than ever now so it makes sense to dig out one of those few Danish rock bands that stood out among heaps of crap in the mid 80’s. The Sandmen played rock when almost everybody else were trapped in some godawful schlager-like pop music that was polluting the airwaves and turning people into zombies. The Sandmen has just released a double Best Of album and will be touring in Denmark again this winter. Here’s the story about how they met, what music formed them and why they are back in 2003 as told by bassplayer Ole Wennike.

Lowcut: Could you tell the readers how The Sandmen started? Few people probably know about The Sandmen' background in punk rock and association with people from Before and Sort Sol among others. Please enlighten us with details about that pre-Sandmen period.

Ole: I was always into music, loved it from an early age: the 60's girl-pop, Beatles, Elvis etc.
But the one band that really at the age of 11 in 1969 made me a big fan was Creedence Clearwater Revival.
I had posters everywhere in my room and all that and they where my first concert experience in K.B. Hallen in 1971 and I was horrified by the volume! I also loved The Doors and Steppenwolf and a little later after hearing "Band Of Gypsys" I became a big collector of Hendrix. The more far out psychedelic music for a 12 year old is quite strange but through the popularity of the Easy Rider movie we gradually got used to it.
I also saw Antonioni's Zabriskie Point when I was 13, holy shit! All the rare 60's psych and garage came later on when you dig deeper, besides these things where pretty hard to find until the garage revival in the early 80's and the invention of CDs.

I started playing bass at the age of 14 in 1972 and pretty quickly through Hellerup Youthclub I got to know Jan Ørslev, Peter Roed and Poul Møller. Hellerup Youthclub was quite a place in those days and all the big names played there including Gasolin. Other places to hang out for teenagers (from the northern part of Copenhagen) in those days would be Gladsaxe Beatforum, Be-In in Dyrehavsbakken and Fælledparken who had Beat (!) music every Sunday during the summer. The late 60's early 70's bands was still very psychedelic and freeform jazzy up until 1974-75 and I saw all these bands from 1972 and up and apart from Gasolin' and Alrune Rod everybody sang in English more or less, nothing remarkable about that. Poul was also a bassplayer so we could not be in the same band but I played with Jan and Peter and the names we talked about in the rehearsal room where names like Velvet Underground, Burnin' Red Ivanhoe (who's bassplayer Jess Stæhr has been a big influence on me) and some of the westcoast bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service, I sure would like to hear a tape from them days!

There was quite a lot of jazz (Miles, Coltrane) jazz/rock (Colosseum,Burnin', Kraan, Weather Report) that I liked also and the improvisation connection to psychedelia has always been very evident to me. Don't forget that the Roger Mcguinn guitarsolo in The Byrds´ "Eight miles high" is Mcguinn trying to play like John Coltrane. Eventually we went seperate ways and I would play with dozens of other musicians in rehearsal rooms all over Copenhagen for the next 10 years with very little live shows.

One day in the early 80's I met Jan Ørslev who by then was a member of Sods/Sort Sol. I think at the time when they where involved with Billedstofteatret. Jan at that time had apparently had it up to his neck with The Grateful Dead etc and was on to something else, I remember being a bit chocked as I have always loved the 60's music (I'm sure Jan does too it was just his frame of mind at the time). But somewhere I could also see that there was no point in spending your whole life in rehearsal rooms changing this and changing that part in a musical piece for some concert that would never be, the music in the late 70's and early 80's for us who did not play punk music was getting pretty technical oriented and for what?

I was aware of the punk scene of cause and liked The Stranglers pretty much and The Pistols´ "God save the queen" was great fun but all in all I was, to say it straight: not into looking like THAT! Cool to me was and still is I guess: Jim Morrison, Bob Weir and John Kay style. I remember meeting Sods at a musicshop asking them if they seriously disliked The Doors? I think Knud said: "Man we love The Doors" so I was gradually getting rid of my hang-up : "they can't play" etc as I got to realize that this was neither the case or the point.

In the wake of that I went to see Before at one time and instantly realized after seeing Michael Rasmussen that: "This is the drummer for me" and of cause it dosn't take a genius to hear that Michael is indeed a great drummer. This guy I could play some mean bass with if given a chance so he stayed in my mind. Poul Møller phoned me up around 1983 asking if I would play bass in his new band that we named Waterfront Connection and among the members where Henrik Liebgott who 11-12 years later played on Sort Sol's "Unspoiled Monsters", nowadays he's in Alive With Worms and Butterfly Banquette I think. Our style we're psychedelic singer/songwriter stuff or something like that. We played Huset's Musikcafe' quite a bit and had Before's Fritz "Fatal" Bonfils on stage with us a few times playing manic versions of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful"

At that time Before was breaking up and a little later Fritz together with my old bandmates Peter Roed and Jan Ørslev (who was out of Sort Sol again) would form Mental Midget who nowadays is known as Strejfer and plays a completely different kind of music without Fritz.

Around the same time I went to Lisbon and as I was sitting in a restaurant eating and watching "The Great Rock'n'roll swindle" on a TV with the sound turned off and while watching the images of Sid Vicious walking down the street with a gun in one hand and a piece of a birthday cake in the other I started laughing my ass off....just like that! I guess this was the point when I realized that you should't take yourself too seriously as a musician, it is also about having fun and for Gods sake don't forget the humour!

I lived in Studie Str. and was a known face in the "Pisserenden" area (the bohemian quarter of Copenhagen) I'd been going there since the early 70's to visit the Superlove record shop. In the early 80's I got to know some of the post-punk musicians who by now could play more than three cords! Everybody was hanging out in the bar Floss in Pisserenden. I was always a bit of an accepted outsider as I had never been a punk.
At a gig with Waterfront Connection Stefan Jensen really enjoyed my bassplaying and as he was shifting from drums to guitar and was thinking of forming a new band after he and his brother Filip was breaking up their band Warsaw he asked me to think about it. In the meanwhile I recall that Poul Møller played bass with Warsaw. Incidently Poul now has a studio in Sydhavnen called Waterfront Connection. My father died in 1985 and I took at trip to Rome with my sister to regain strength and while in Rome we saw a Cramps concert that really gave me a kick in the right direction it was totally crazy and wonderful. I knew that I had to approach the whole playing music thing different. All the bands I had played in had never really gone anywhere because of too much seriousness.

Right up until then I had been a member of a tradeunion and had never really had big financial problems with paying barbills when unimployed. I needed to get "down and dirty" and quit the whole establised part of my life and so I got on the dole, got poor and desperate. Around that time I met Stefan again and we started looking for a drummer. I mentioned Michael Rasmussen the former Before (and Radar) drummer and Stefan knew him a bit so he asked him and he agreed to give it a try. Crashmussen and I would swing from the word go…never had to talk about drum and bass…we read each other pretty good!

Stefan insisted on singing but not much volume came out so he mentioned a young chap he used to play with in a band called Girls Girls and so one day a tall bit shy long-haired guy called Allan Vegenfeldt came by to sing. I remember being a bit pissed off and puzzled at actually having played a few gigs (as The Passengers) with Stefan singing when all the time he knew this guy! However it sounded good by then and what glued us together was exactly that factor. I had learned by then not to get a heart attack if some of the other guys would mention some glam-idol (I hate glam!) or being too pissed off having to put Stefan's guitarstrings on his guitar as this seemed to be higher science to him.

We got to learn what we liked and disliked :

Allan was very much into Stones, glam, Dylan, Black Sabbath and New York Dolls
When I think of Michael I know he really loves Lou Reed and T-Rex.
Stefan said : "Es klingt oder es klingt nixt"
I'm into nearly all genres except "glitter" glam (that being Gary Glitter, Sweet etc. total wank, excuse me)
and I was the jazzer of the bunch.

We all liked: Creedence, Doors, garage, Roky Erickson, some country/folk /rockabilly etc. Oh and let's not forget Joy Division but in any case we where not very much into namedropping at rehearsal, what would be interesting was what we could do together

One day Michael suggested that we changed our name to The Sandmen. We did some support gigs: Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Long Riders and Nico. And then the crowd grew steadily with Barbue in Huset being our base.
And it would be fair to comment that had Michael, Allan and Stefan not been a part of the former punk related scene I don't think that so many people would have shown up from the beginning there was definitely a connection there.

In 6 months I played more gigs than I had been playing in the previous 13 years all together and we only knew about 8-9 songs! But this is precisely the point: it didn’tt matter shi ! It was the energy and the chemestry that was important!

Lowcut: How would you describe the Danish rock scene in the early Sandmen days? I remember seing The Sandmen when I was a pimple faced teen when The Sandmen played my small hometown and I was very impressed, but I don't really remember other good Danish bands from that period. Was it lonely being in Sandmen back then?

Well we came from the in-crowd underground of "Pisserenden". Misfits really in the Danish music scene of that time where all the "big" Danish names sang in Danish and played fucking boring stuff. Sort Sol where underground at that time as was Before where Michael came from, then of cause there was D.A.D. who always had a more showbizz approach to the whole thing.To this day Sandmen, Sort Sol and D.A.D. (random order folks!) are mentioned in the same breath for the same reason. Mainly because we where the alternative to the established Danish music scene of the mid 80's. Don't forget that people like me and Michael and most of the Sort Sol guys are the same generation as the established mid-80's Danish artists, we just didn't want to be a part of it. We sang in English which seemed to be quite a sensation in the press at that time but as Allan once said: I don't think any of us ever played in a band that didn't sing in English". And yes, whether it be post-punk or acid-rock or whatever we used to do before The Sandmen we always stuck to English. Don't get me wrong we don't mind band's singing in Danish as long as it works.

I believe that the English singing in those days where looked upon by certain critics in the press as us being very ambitious, looking for a way to get our music abroad, but this is not the case, it just seemed more natural and if you think about it: Sandmen's music would sound pretty strange in Danish. It has something to do with the rhythm of the language it works better with English and nobody remarked on it in the 60's and 70's so why in the 80's? Was it lonely being a Sandmen? No we had our audience and we where proud of our band and our music and we had Floss (still there in Lars Bjørn str).

Lowcut: My favorite Sandmen album was always Western Blood. Could you tell a bit about what The Sandmen went through around that record, how it was recorded and what kind of album The Sandmen had in mind when it was recorded? Western Blood was also released in the US?

Ole: Just as we where about to release our debut album "The Sandmen" (vinyl only folks !) our label Irmgratz went bankrupt. Enter a creative Swedish label owner Peter Yngen of Mistlur Records in Stockholm. He bought Irmgartz and in the process changed the name to Garden Records. Our first album consisted of 3 songs from Stefan and Allan's former band Girls Girls and the old Buddy Holly standard "Not Fade Away" (also in a strange remix) and a song called "Love is just a feeling" which in reality is the first actual Sandmen composition. All our music is based on guitarriffs/melodies and bassriffs/melodies. It starts from the guitar or the bass and gradually we work out B and C parts which could be other riffs we have been working on getting nowhere and suddenly find a use for. We discuss the tempo and the arrangement and Allan improvises his way to a song melody. Allan, Michael and later Sam help out finishing the lyrics.

I can always hear if a song started of with a guitar or a bass idea depending on if the instrument plays a perticular tight outstanding structure.

Anyhow this is how we work and this is how the first version of Western Blood came about and to me it is all there: the garage sound (Western blood), the freeform psychedelic approach (500 %) and a touch of garage/jazz (Angry man). We had made all the basic tracks in Mistlur Studios in Stockholm when we realized that we needed some good guitar solo's. Richard Lloyd of Television was living in Sweden at the time and we talked about having him over. However I had at one time seen a gig with Sam Mitchell + band in Musikcafe'n in Huset and was very impressed with this little leather dressed
Link Wray looking slideguitarist who sounded like speedway champ Ole Olsen in his prime every time a solo would set off. Back in Copenhagen I looked up Sammi and played him the basic tracks of "Western Blood" and asked him if he'd like to come up to Stockholm and do some guitarwork on the record, he said: "Are you kidding!?" We all came by to see Sam do a solo gig and everybody agreed that this was our man and we all went to Sweden and finished the record known as the original "Western Blood" with the painted girl face on the cover.

Everybody seemed to like the record and we played a lot of gigs in Denmark at that time and Sam became a fulltime member in 1988. By 1989 Peter Yngen had succeeded in making A&M Records in Hollywood interested in "Western Blood" and they wanted to release it in the U.S.A. However they needed to change the cover as the rule in the U.S. was that the band should be visible on the front cover of the album and they wanted to take 3 or 4 songs out and change them with something they would find more suitable. So we retreated to a house in the country in Sweden where we would be creative and compose some new songs together, this time with Sam as part of the writing team for the first time. Thus the changed version of "Western Blood".

We went to U.S.A. to promote the record and it was great fun. The Danish press was at that time very provinsional and thought that if a Danish band went abroad surely something would happen instantly!
We took it as an experience but was fully aware of the fact that it would take months even years to built a career in the U.S. This was never anything we aimed at and we were always very aware of our audience in Denmark so you couldn't push us around. I don't think that we really had enough ambitions to overlook all the phonyness that we met in the States it seemed far removed from our Danish nature.

In any case had it been Italy or Iceland who had invited us we would have gone there we never even dreamed that we one day would be standing on stage at The Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles but we did and it still feels like quite a thing. The U.S. experience made A&M Records convinced enough to go on with the planning of a new album which we started working on in London in 1990. It was here the contract with A&M ended as we could not work with the producer they provided us with, so we all agreed to call it a day, no hard feelings.

Lowcut: On the second CD of your new " Beauties & Beasts - Best of The Sandmen" album there is quite a few songs that are more spaced out than I remember Sandmen. Were The Sandmen influenced by psych or what moved the band to go into the more spacy part of Sandmen.

Ole: Well the spacy part was always there somewhere in my mind as something we should get more into and with Sam entering on guitar having the capacity to improvise together with the bass and drum we did indeed get more spacy although "500 %" has always had quite long parts open for loose improvised playing.
Sam is quite a Hendrix fan and has all these spacy echo effects etc and I have always wanted to make each concert different from the last one which again means taking chances, sometimes it's works better than other times and sometimes it just clicks and takes off in fantastic colours like on the "Slavesong" live version on our new album "Beauties and Beasts". On the original version of "Slavesong" on the "House Of Secrets" album we had long jazzy soprano saxophone improvisation going against our loose playing.

Lowcut: Having been a musician and a part of Danish radio for many years I am sure you have a few views on how it is to be a rock musician in the kingdom of Denmark and what the conditions are?

Ole: I don't know who is to blame but somebody is to blame that's for sure whether it be the media, the clubowners, the record companies or the audience. I'd like to make a stream of concioness here :

Jam Bands: make your own Goddamn music or fuck off!
Club owner : don't book jam bands!
Audience: go see some original bands!
Media (all of it): look at Sweden and learn!
Multinational Record companies: Don't worry about profit so much and don't underestimate the record
buyers!
And to some of you critics out there (you know who you are): do your job properly, grow up or piss off!

Lowcut: Why did The Sandmen break up?

Ole: I guess we ran out of energy and inspiration...

Lowcut: How come the Best Of album is released exactly now in 2003?

Ole: Our 3 first records ended up being owned by MNW while the rest is EMI. It apparently took some time to get it together and make a deal concerning the whole cataloug and maybe it has something to do with the fact that garage or non-artificial rock as you might call it are very much in at the moment. Mind you they did talk about a "Best of Sandmen" some years ago already.

Lowcut: Were you surprised about the huge interest in the tickets for your re-union concerts ?

Ole: It's fantastic! We agreed that it would be fun to do 2 or 3 gigs in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense or Aalborg. If we announced it a few month beforehand chances where that we would have a nice big crowd when the time came. Little did we know! By now we have sold over 5000 tickets to 9 shows it is completely wild. It is a strange world and I will say thanks very much to all the people who have bought a ticket and don't forget to go and see On Trial and Baby Woodrose as well!!