Hurra Torpedo
 

Hey all,

I discovered today mocking around internet a band called Hurra Torpedo. I think they are from Sweden, and they play with kitchen applicances. Very cool! I needed to share this :)

They're not swedish, but norwegian!

It's a group from the Duplex catalogue of bands .. What that means is that Duplex is a record company which is basically run by a bunch of mates who play in various bands under the Duplex banner. So, you have a bunch of bands that are related by a relatively small group of people who play in them. Not every band has the same line-up, but any one artist typically play in a bunch of them. Most of them are small joke-bands, but a few of them have become popular. The most popular that play songs in english are probably Black Debbath, The Cumshots and Thulsa Doom.

Hurra Torpedo is one of the sillier band projects which has actually worked out quite well. Some time ago, they made their own web-tv series while on tour in the US.

I myself have been to a number of concerts. They're always a lot of fun and they always cover something new when they play. Here's a cover of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart from a TV show sometime in the 90s.



The guy who sings here also plays bass in Thulsa Doom and Black Debbath and he's a very successful comedian/artist with his own band called Bare Egil (means Just Egil, Egil being his name). The guy on the "drums" is a singer/frontman f.ex for the band The Cumshots and is also a successful norwegian comedian, both from television and radio. The guy doing backing vocals plays guitar in Black Debbath and is an actor who has appeared in children's television and TV commercials in Norway.

In addition to that, they've all played in various band projects, most of them with songs in norwegian. So, they're pretty famous .. at least over here! :)

Cool stuff! I also moved this thread from the Lounge to the Avant Garde/Experimental section :)

By the way, people may think they're swedish because they tend to talk in swedish when on stage and so on .. this is just another joke, of course :p:

This thread doesn't seem to have generated much interest, but Hurra Torpedo are in the norwegian news today as it seems the band is going to quit (although they're hardly reliable when it comes to that sort of stuff - I'm sure they quit before as well, perhaps more than once). However, while I suspect we'll see them in the future, it seems drummer Kristopher Schau is serious about quitting due to the injuries he gets from playing in the band. Among other things, he's completely crunched his finger once and last year, he broke his arm on the second song during a concert, but kept playing until they were done.

When they were touring the US, they had a photographer along who took pictures. Those pictures haven't been used for anything, but it seems now that the band is quitting, they're putting together a picture book which should contain those and other goodies. I guess I might get it.

Those interested can read the news article here, perhaps with some translation help from google : Hurra Torpedo gir seg - VG Nett

I like the concept of Hurra Torpedo but based on the one video in this thread I'm not a fan of the execution. I have a real soft spot for people making music on found objects but these guys don't seem to do enough with it—the end result still sounds like ordinary music to me.

It's an elaborate joke more than anything. They'd never put their heart and souls into anything musically serious with that band. As such, the music isn't that great actually, but then that's not the point. It's just norwegian humour. Rather than listening to their music at home, it's more interesting going to concerts or to watch the web-series (mockumentary) about their US tour.



Although I have their album, I don't really listen to their music much :p: