Kings of Convenience
If you can't beat them...

Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience have had a gutful. Sick of fighting critics who charge them as Simon & Garfunkel wannabes, they’ve decided to embrace the tag.

‘Homesick’, the opening track on their delightful new album Riot On An Empty Street, employs a subtle reprise of ‘Homeward Bound’ and the lyric “two soft voices blended in perfection”.

“People think we’re being cocky singing about our own voices, but it’s actually about ‘Homeward Bound’,” Eirik Glambek Boe explains. “We get compared to Simon & Garfunkel so much and we’re pretty fed up with it because we don’t really see the similarity. It’s kind of our way of saying, ‘Okay, we give up’. There’s no way around the comparison so we may as well write a song about Simon & Garfunkel.”

For Boe, Kings of Convenience is more about collaborative songwriting rather than harmony singing. The pair jointly wrote all the songs on Riot…, a formula tried and tested on their 2001 “official debut” Quiet Is The New Loud and its self-titled predecessor.

“Our main focus is on the songwriting, so we like the comparison to Paul McCartney and John Lennon. We’d be very happy if one day people said we were more like Lennon and McCartney. I find that’s the most important thing in our collaboration – the fact that we write songs together makes the songs more interesting.”

Kings of Convenience toured like champions following the success of their debut, something Boe grew to dislike. During the hiatus that followed, he continued his psychology studies at home in Bergen while Erlend Øye took to DJing. But the allure of the studio soon returned.

“I really like being in the studio. I like focussing on things, I like being absorbed in the studio. [Recording and then touring is] a very interesting combination. Being in a studio is like going into a cocoon and working on minute little details for a long time. When you finish making the album you have to travel [and] go out in the world. It’s a huge contrast in my life. I’m beginning to like it, though.”

Boe’s aversion to touring doesn’t extend to travelling. During the recording of Riot…, he took a month off to cycle around Vietnam to clear his head.

“When you’re working in the studio, you tend to lose objectivity. The idea was going far away would give me more objectivity but I don’t think it really worked. I brought all the recordings with me and I was listening to them over and over. I was totally absorbed. Physically taking myself to the other side of the world didn’t really remove me from the project. It was an adventure, though. It’s a beautiful country. It’s so green and yet still so shocking to see all the remains of the war.”

Inspired by his “other side of the world” adventure in Vietnam, Boe says he’s keen to bring Kings of Convenience to Australia once their European touring commitments have been met.

Riot On An Empty Street is out on Source/Virgin.

MATT CONNORS