It is hard to maintain pessimism ... May 2001 - by Klaus K. (Crumbs from musikidol.dk) Is there anything better in the world, than to find ones expectations surpassed by reality? No, I don’t think so - and this is how the situation has been for Danser med Dreng in 2001.  We have been over the moon because of a row of unbelievably successful and well patronised concerts, country wide. An audience who turned up in great numbers and who sang along with us - including the newest songs as well as the old songs from our Tøsedrenge days. It has been an unbelievable experience - thank you for that. We will exert ourselves with great effort to get our arms down... ;-)

We were deep down in the coal cellar during the summer of 2000, when we realised that our latest CD, “Popsamling” would not give us our expected profit - on the contrary it would give us a smack in the eye, as we also were investors in the CD. We did this in the hope of getting a slightly larger slice of the cake, compared with the “normal” record contract (where because of the TV advertisements, not much is left over for the artists). This was not what we had expected - we were right down: Waahhh. .. nobody loved us anymore...  :-(

And as the orchestra by now had reached the more mature years (The old uncles - Kjellerup & Stanley have passed their 20th anniversary of their Tøsedrenge debut, ages ago) - yes, we seriously considered whether we should withdraw from the music industry in a peaceful and disorderly manner, place the walking frames in the garage, rest the rusty voices and enjoy our well earned opium ....?

There we sat - lonely and forsaken, starring at the wall - no one would invest in us. Dismissed by our record company, our manager, our booking bureau, our wives, husband, sweethearts, parents, children and pets - we were down so low that dogs could not be bothered to cock a leg on us and the mosquitoes didn’t bother to bite either - not even the danish taxation department was interested in us anymore - it couldn’t have been worse - as any one would know.

Suddenly, by chance we hear one of our own songs on a minor radio station which they played by mistake - that is to say the song "Rejs dig op og kom videre" [Get yourself up and continue] - and like a flash of lightning from an other world, we realised that we had to continue our mission and march on here in life - that is by going out to play concerts instead of recording CDs in a studio - (CD's which don’t sell much because these days a lot of people don’t see anything wrong with copying them rather than buying them).

And to be standing before an audience again has been a fantastic experience. And who can we thank for this? Our audience - our beautiful mishmash of a mixed collection of boys, girls, men and women, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, pensioners and self-employed, directors secretaries, sports people, rockers, school students, web nerds, music students and sound technicians, university lecturers, parking police, the punished and unpunished, married couples and the divorced, widows and widowers, suicide candidates, happy simpletons, gays and lesbians, doctors and nurses, cancer and aids patients and naturepaths - and not to mention the firefighting crews in the civil defence forces. Our audience is aged between 12 and 55 years - a group, which no advertising agency would ever refer to as: A test group. Such is our audience...

How should we continue from here? That is difficult for us to see - we will now try to release a Live-CD, and then we will cross our fingers, hoping that our audience will buy it. Perhaps it could be that they would like to hear themselves singing along on a CD.

Could we learn something from this? This should be the proverb: “When the need is greatest, help is at hand”. It seems like the defeat - the fiasco - in itself carries the new roads to success. And isn’t that a wonderful thing to know? Just think of all the beautiful defeats and fiascos, that lies ahead in the future ... In such a situation it is quite difficult to maintain pessimism. But we will keep on trying ;-)

By Klaus Kjellerup - Danser med Drenge

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