On the other side of the world, in the picturesque city of Bergen in Norway, Eirik Bøe sits quietly after his morning coffee and contemplates the weather in Australia.
“It’s hot there right now? I’m looking forward to it. I’m freezing here so it will be good for my health.” Bøe is one half of Kings Of Convenience; his partner is Erland Øye, frontman of electropop band Whitest Boy Alive.
Together they make simple music that couples acoustic melodies with enchanting harmonies, not unlike Simon and Garfunkel. They will tour Australia this February with performances at Laneway Festival and special sideshows at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall.
It’s been a long, patient wait but Kings of Convenience fans will finally be lucky enough to see them play live. They have recorded and toured together for over a decade, but making it to Australian shores has been a long time coming.
“Australia is so far away unfortunately”, Bøe explains. “We have been talking about going [there] for several years, but every time the issue came up and we started making plans we realised that it would make the tour so long.”
“Prolonging the tour to include Australia would always mean that we would be away for at least a month and for me, as a family man with kids, a month is a little too long,” Bøe pleads.
“We don’t like to tour for a long time,” he declares. “We like to keep it fresh and for us every show we play is special. I can remember every single show we have played,” he adds proudly. “They mean that much to me.”
“We feel that if we toured for longer than a month we could not play as well. I am a music fan and when I watch shows I can tell when a band is not as interested and going through the motions,” an “effect” Bøe says they never want to fall under the yoke of. “I can remember every single show we have played. They mean that much to me.”
“ This time we decided to just do Australia and the Laneway festivals so it was possible to make it happen,” he concludes.
With such delicate music, the duo are very specific about the location and timing of their performances and this year’s Laneway shows will see Kings Of Convenience perform the opening set of the day in each city.
“It was our idea”, Bøe explains. “We’re kind of picky with which festivals we play,” he admits. “We have a few demands that we always propose and one of them is that we have to play when there’s no one else playing on the other stages.”
“For us the most important ingredient is silence. The most important part of our music is the silence and it is very easy to spoil that,” he details.
One European summer, Kings of Convenience played a festival in Portugal, recalls Bøe; “We played the main stage on Saturday night and at the same time someone thought it a great idea to put a house music dance show 200 meters from our stage and it was kind of a disaster.”
Seeing it as a unique opportunity to do something special at the beginning of the day, Laneway organisers have granted the duo their request and Kings Of Convenience will open the festival in solitude. “There will be silence. We’re hoping it’s going to work and we’re excited.”
The opportunity to play a show at the Sydney Opera House is a goal that will finally be realised for Bøe.
As he explains, “It’s the only venue in the world that is more famous than the bands that have played there.”
“We are really happy,” he continues. “We have been offered to play there a few times in the past but have never managed to make it happen”
“From an architectural point of view I really enjoy seeing all these amazing buildings when we play. The Sydney Opera House sets the standard. Every major city in the world has tried to copy what Sydney did,” Bøe enthuses, “this iconic symphony hall that became the symbol of Sydney.”
Kings of Convenience have played at many of these ‘copies’, but the Opera House remains “the original,” says Bøe, “the one building that sparked this idea.”“For us the most important ingredient is silence… and it is very easy to spoil that.”
Bøe’s keen interest in architecture spawns from his studies in architectural psychology. He has a masters degree in the field and passionately practices his interest when he is away from Kings Of Convenience.
“There are few architectural psychologists and it is not a very well known profession but it’s really important,” he says, “trying to understand how the physical surrounding affects the people and trying to understand what kind of surroundings we should be building to create good spaces for people.”
Bøe says of his “rare knowledge” that he works “part time and am involved in city projects in my home town and I often give lectures to architecture students.”
With Bøe based in Bergen and Oye in Berlin, they spend most of the year apart. It’s a dynamic that works well for them. After three albums and three years since their last, they are in no rush to return to the studio.
“We don’t want to make too many albums”, says Bøe. “We want to make sure we can do each song justice and if we keep releasing albums we will never have time to play the songs in our live shows.”
Bøe assures us however that there may be new Kings Of Convenience material on the horizon. “We are thinking about new songs. There is no studio time yet, but we are thinking about it.”
“I’m picturing later this year we will be in the studio, I’m hoping.” Kings Of Convenience fans will be hoping too.
Kings of Convenience will be the opening act at Laneway Festival as it tours around the country this February, details and set times here and tickets are available from lanewayfestival.com.au, they also play two sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne, see below for dates.
Kings Of Convenience Laneway 2013 Sideshows
Tuesday, 5th February – Hamer Hall, Melbourne
Tickets available here.
Thursday, 7th Feburary – Sydney Opera House, Sydney
