Music

Extracting great, personality revealing quotes from a new indie band – beyond the usual ‘actually, we’d never heard of Wire’ – is like slowly tearing off a toenail. They also have about as much charisma, charm and commitment to entertaining us live (yes, you are supposed to entertain us) as watching said toenail being pulled. Norway’s Ida Maria, praise Valhalla, is the antithesis of this. She believes – very important this – in the righteous power of rock ’n’ roll: ‘I saw a rock concert when I was 16 and realised that this must be the best way you can spend your life,’ she said recently. She also understands what makes pop so great, which is why she’s headlining our next On The Up gig on November 29. Feature continues

Ida’s youth – she grew up in the tiny university town of Nesna, dad’s a jazz and ska musician, mum sings at weddings, the family GP introduced her to Hendrix – is an epic in itself. But, as hep cats say, it’s where she’s at that’s most exciting. She’s gobby, side-splittingly funny, boundless of energy and when she steps onto the creaking boards of any venue she and her band plays – be it in front of three elderly locals or 5,000 rabid converts – she packs an iron punch. Blowing indie goons The Wombats offstage recently, Ida was a bass-wielding Janis Joplin figure one minute; a water throwing, knicker-flashing, swearing dervish the next, whipping up a scuzz-pop frenzy. We’ve even seen her cry at the end of songs.

‘I go into another state of being,’ says Ida, catching her breath after a gig in Leeds. ‘If it’s a good night, the crowd send you energy and good vibrations. You’re standing there in the centre and you’re getting hit by it all. I don’t cry at my own songs. It’s just a special feeling when you’re communicating songs to people, songs that have been written in a bedroom. If I talk to people, it’s impossible for me to explain philosophies about life, but if you change them into lyrics and add music, people tend to get me.’

What about the broken ribs and spilt blood caused by Ida running about and stagediving like a lunatic? ‘Gigs are electrifying,’ she gabbles. ‘Sparks are shooting out from everywhere, but that’s probably got something to do with my synaesthesia. I have this LSD thing. My mum has the same thing. I see colours every time I hear music and it kind of fucks you up… in a good way.’

Synaesthesia is a condition in which sensations usually experienced separately join together. For Ida this means seeing colours whenever she hears music. As a child, Ida would stare at trees for hours, wanting to eat the deep greens. Now she uses her synaesthesia in her music. She runs about the stage following the patterns, which accounts for her jittery, end-to-end live performances; when writing, she sees songs assemble and shape into blocks and shades of colour.

‘“Louie” is bright, bright yellow,’ she explains. ‘And a bit black and spiky, too. The chorus is very light and sunny and floaty. It’s just the two notes, “Lou-ieee”, and they’re pink and yellow. Every single note has got a different colour so some songs just explode.’

If the mix looks ugly, something we’ve yet to hear in Ida Maria’s sugar-coated mod-pop, the song will be ditched. If only she was able to loan her condition to The Pigeon Detectives. Their frontman, who, incidentally, looks like he’s auditioning for the part of an ultra-permed barmaid in ‘Coronation Street’, would take one look at their grey (that’s what Ida says rubbish music looks like) tunes and know how the rest of us feel.

Ida’s synaesthesia also explains why she’s a ‘sucker for big organs’ – of the church type – studied jazz singing and classical history at college, and joined the award-winning Norwegian Youth Choir. Imagine if you could see music as well as hear it. Chances are you’d be hungry for the most vivid, intense musical experiences, just like Ida, whose palette is as broad and colourful as they come. She’s also the only person Time Out has met who has described Shaun Ryder, one of her heroes, in colour.

‘Oh, he’s mad,’ says Ida. ‘Don’t you love him? He’s anarchy with nice colours around him. Funny colours. He’s just saying, “Fuck you, go and have a party.” I like that. You’ve got Nick Cave and he’s wonderful but you’ve got to have Shaun Ryder. You’ve got to have the contrast.’

This shade and light thing – again informed by Ida’s synaesthesia, and the long days and nights in Scandinavia – reveals itself in every Ida Maria song we’ve heard. There’s ‘Stella’, which is about a prostitute who inherits the world after having it off with God; the bouncy, goofball ‘Naked’, which objectifies the male form, something Ida finds ‘very, very beautiful’; and ‘Oh My God’, a fizzing shout for help that’s better than anything The Libertines ever wrote.

‘I describe my music as melancholy gone partying,’ she says. ‘My biggest hero is Håkan Hellström. He’s like The Smiths, you know, writing introspective, dark lyrics, but dropping in major chords and speeding them up and having fun with them. It’s like dancing on a grave. That’s how life is. You never know when you’re going to die, so it’s like a shield for me to say that I know that life consists of the absolute contrasts.’

Gobby, confident and full of throwaway remarks (‘Sex is better than whale meat’) yet deeply thoughtful, Ida’s pop songs are the only way that she has found to connect with the wider world. A self-styled nihilist who loves a drink (‘I haven’t lost all the hope, but I guess I’m trying to distract myself from thinking’), she’s throwing everything at the wall while she still can. And she expects every single band on the planet to do exactly the same. If they don’t they might meet the same fate as that dished out to unfortunate Swedish electro-popsters Ziegeist.

‘I beat their singer’s ass,’ says Ida. ‘They were onstage trying to look cool, doing it for the fame and to say they’re in a band. I saw them and felt this instant, physical reaction – not emotional, just physical. I jumped over a fence, ran past the guards and suddenly I was in this big light show with all these Ku Klux Klan-looking electronica people from Sweden. I ran to the front and beat the singer’s ass hard. They had choirgirls at the side and they looked terrified. I was really happy for the rest of the night.’

If any of the bands supporting Ida Maria at our On The Up gig are reading this, you have been warned.

Get your free tickets tickets to Ida’s On The Up show on November 29.