CHEAP THRILLS
VOLBEAT
THE £50 RECORD STORE CHALLENGE
Words: Dave Everley
Sex Beat Records Copenhagen
Portraits: Will Ireland
When Volbeat were starting out 20 years ago, frontman Michael Poulsen would go down to Copenhagen’s Sex Beat Records and give its owner, Thomas Andreassen, his band’s merchandise in the hope that the shop would stock it.
“Michael would say: ‘Do you want to have our T-shirts in the shop and hand out some of our promos?’” Andreassen says today. “Demo CDs were not registered for sales, so I would put them in customers’ bags as giveaways.”
Two decades on, very little has changed apart from the premises. Thomas still runs this compact, basement-level institution (named after an old Gun Club song) packed wall-to-wall with brand new shrink-wrapped vinyl and CDs. And today his old friend Michael Poulsen is leaning on the counter, perusing the vinyl LPs he’s already collected from the shelves.
In other respects, an awful lot has changed. These days Volbeat are one of Denmark’s biggest musical exports, give or take Lars Ulrich (not uncoincidentally, Metallica have been Volbeat’s biggest cheerleaders over the years).
Andreassen concedes that he never saw his countrymen’s success happening on this scale. “There were many bands coming down to the shop saying can you do this or that,” he says. “You can’t know a band are going to be successful from the very first time you meet them.”
Today, Poulsen and bandmates Jon Larsen (drums) and Kaspar Boye Larsen (no relation, bass) are just regular record shop customers once more, albeit ones with 400 Danish krone (around £50) of Classic Rock’s money to spend on albums as part of our Record Store Challenge.
“Wait – you’re paying us to go record shopping?” Kaspar Boye Larsen asks disbelievingly.
There’s already a low-level power struggle brewing. Both Michael and Kaspar have their eye on Crawler, the brand new record from Bristol postpunk rabble-rousers Idles. “I loved their other albums,” says Michael. “I don‘t think they’ve made a bad record.”
By contrast, Jon Larsen is gravitating towards something more vintage. “I’ve got some stuff behind the counter already,” says the lugubrious drummer. “The big Beatles Let It Be box set, the new reissue of the Stones’ Tattoo You and the vinyl box of The Kinks In Mono. I don’t listen to music made after 1985,” he adds, looking like he’s not joking.