Ungdomshuset - A kick in the butt to counter culture!
We haven't added any photos of Ungdomshuset because there is so many great, sad, interesting etc. photos around the internet. So, please google for yourself and get involved- Ed.).

By Jon A

It's not as if LowCut hasn't been writing about Ungdomshuset lately, but one we haven't done is let them -speak up for themselves - at least not in English, for the benefit of our international readers. These past weeks, since the eviction, the demolition, and the riots in the beginning of March, various actions have taken place all over CPH and DK, probably the best of them the covering up of street signs in central CPH, changing the streets to "Jagtvej", the street where Ungdomshuset lay from 1982 - 2007. In the end of March, 3 weeks to the day after the eviction March 1st, I met with two of the music bookers from Ungdomshuset, Andreas and Martin, at Stalingrad, the bar on top of another famous Nørrebronx venue, Stengade 30. Which inevitably led to the question: What is it that separates Stengade from Ungdomshuset, why is it that CPH needs a place like Ungdomshuset, when we have Stengade that hosts plenty of punk rock bands as well?

Andreas: The main difference is that Stengade is a business - Ungdomshuset wasn't there to generate money. Ungdomshuset worked in a different way from Stengade, it was more free, and of course, it was run by its users, not by some direction. The culture at Ungdomshuset was different, it was DIY to the bone! Plus, it was a political place, including the bands that played there.

Martin: You have to buy your way into Stengade if you want to set up shows here, and it's way too expensive for most of the kind of bands we've worked with. In Ungdomshuset, you took responsibility yourself, set it all up by yourself, got people to man the bar, man the door, do sound, everything. It was a learning process. Also, because everyone worked voluntarily, we were able to keep the prices at a minimum. And it was a place for all those that couldn't go anywhere else, because it was all ages, whereas most other places in CPH have a curfew at midnight for people under 18.

LowCut: To outsiders, it looked like a very heterogeneous culture?

Andreas: Musically, it varied a lot, even if there were a lot of crust bands. But we also had indie bands playing there, emo, screamo.

Martin: A lot of myths were created about Ungdomshuset, and the crust thing was one of them. The last few months before we were evicted, many people came there to see the giraffe, see if it was really true what they'd heard.

LowCut: A year from now, is there a new Ungdomshuset?

Andreas: Yes.

Martin: You have to believe in it.

Andreas: But I'm not sure which form it will take, if all four of our demands will necessarily be met. But I'm an optimist. We want a place that's owned by the city council, we just don't want any interference from them, we don't want it to be run by bureaucracy. Play/Rec ran their club in a different way, with the city council guaranteeing them they wouldn't have to pay, if they didn't make enough money from their club, but that involves so much bureaucracy, which is also why they're not doing it any longer. We don't want to have to work like that.

Martin: And at the moment, it looks like that's where the problem lies, that's what the power struggle is about. They say they want a cultural environment, that they want a city that's alive, but they want it bubble wrapped, they want a culture that's not dangerous, a culture that's empty.

Andreas: The thing is, both Ritt Bjerregaard and Klaus Bondam, our mayors, have read this book by Richard Florida, "The Rise of the Creative Class", but none of them have understood what it's about. Florida preaches tolerance against cultural minorities as a way of creating an inspiring, creative environment in a city. A sociologist from the Roskilde University Centre put the whole thing into a capitalist perspective: How subcultures are absorbed into the cultural industry and turned into commodities. We've seen it in punk with Green Day, who had their roots in a subculture which they then mass-marketed. Even if you don't like Green Day for what they represent now, the fact is they wouldn't exist without the subculture that spawned them, and that's why it's so important to have a diverse cultural life in the city.

LowCut: Can a place like Ungdomshuset be replanted in a new building?

Andreas: It will be different, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Martin: Jagtvej 69 had a history, and the people that came there were aware of that history, of taking part in it, and a new building isn't gonna have that history.

Andreas: But we're gonna keep on setting up shows, keeping the DIY culture alive. We're not sentimental about Jagtvej 69, we just have to keep going.

Martin: The struggle continues, and it's an open field now: We have to set up shows in all sorts of places, make sure it's still there.

Andreas: In a way, the eviction has worked as a kick in our collective butt, we have to get together now, try to make it work in a different way, whereas in the past, some may have taken Ungdomshuset for granted.

Martin: We've always had shows in different places, but people weren't always willing to move their ass out to shows that took place in other parts of town, because they were used to going down to Ungdomshuset. So the way I see it, this situation has a potential for starting something interesting. In a way, it's been a healthy experience, a wake up call.

LowCut: When users from Ungdomshuset wrote a supplement to the leftwing intellectual newspaper Information, one person wrote that now, you have something to fight for?

Andreas: It's the difference between fighting for something we want and fighting for something we already had and wanted to maintain. There's a nerve to it now. A colonization of our world is taking place, of civil society. And a lot people that weren't users of the house are aware of that, for them it's important that a place like Ungdomshuset exists, even if they're not gonna use it themselves.

LowCut: How long can you keep up the fight?

Andreas: Forever!

Martin: The struggle is gonna change character, but it can continue for a long time. New people join all the time, just last weekend we had the biggest demo for ages! It's a big, fat gob in the face of the city council.

Andreas: Some of the people in there, they have no idea about what Ungdomshuet symbolized, about the culture it stood for - take someone like Martin Geertsen. We need to fight for the right to have this culture represented in CPH. And what they don't understand is Ungdomshuset was a cheap investment for CPH, it cost something like DKR 200.000 (app. € 25.000) a year, which was for renovation, electricity, water, gas, heat. It was self-sufficient, because everyone made it work.

LowCut: Ungdomshuset was run on a voluntary basis: For how long can people keep working like that, where do you get the energy from?

Andreas: The work we've invested in Ungdomshuset has paid off when seeing the results from it. DIY changed my life: When I moved to CPH in '98, I was listening to more commercial hardcore like Sick Of It All, Snapcase, Earth Crisis, and then I started coming in Ungdomshuset, saw a totally different scene there. Then I started doing shows myself in 2002. Ungdomshuset had a social significance, it's where you met your friends.

Martin: Me, I started coming there in '96-97, but that was mainly to smoke hash and drink beer. That was when you could still smoke hash in there, and I was like 16-17 years old, and that was all I cared for, most of the time I didn't even go see the shows in the next room. Then I moved to Edinburgh, studied there, started getting into the culture there, and one summer, I returned for the holidays and attended the K-Town festival, and that's when I came back and started doing shows at Ungdomshuset. I learned to work with myself that way, create contacts in the scene.

Andreas: We've built up this whole network to bands and bookers, that call us up when they're going on tour to see if they can come and play, which is so frustrating right now, because a lot of these shows, you can't do them in some cultural centre or at a regular venue, because they're not gonna draw enough people to pay the high price of renting the place.

Martin: Plus, again there's so much bureaucracy involved with those places, like the limit on how high the bands can play, or how late. Actually, that's what's most important to me: That Ungdomshuset was run by its users.

LowCut: One of your demands is that a new Ungdomshuset has to be situated on Nørrebro?

Andreas: The culture that Ungdomshuset represents, that the building on Jagtvej 69 has represented through time, that's a part of Nørrebro. Ungdomshuset plays a big part in the identity of Nørrebro and the other way around.

Martin: It's a part of the history of Den Sorte Firkant, the beginning of the squatter movement in CPH, that environment has always been there on Nørrebro, and Nørrebro has always been culturally diverse.

LowCut: Why do you think Ungdomshuset was evicted?

Andreas: The standard response has been that it was a breeding nest for crime, but that's laughable - even the police went out and stated that it wasn't, because if it had been, they'd have long since evicted the place! There haven't been any riots on Nørrebro since we were forced into the European Union in '93, not until now, where they've fucked us over again. It has been proven that we're not gonna get anywhere through parliamentary means. That's what democracy is in DK: You can say what you want to, but you have to do what you're told. Democracy is God.

Martin: Democracy and the right of property.

The struggle for Ungdomshuset continues. Several acts of sympathy have taken place all over the world, with Danish embassies and consulates occupied in protest for short intervals of time in Bergen, Milan, Prague, Berlin. As long as there is no Ungdomshuset, the struggle for an Ungdomshuset continues. Follow it here: http://www.ungeren.dk