A founding member of pop legends A-ha, today he creates
wild art and performs in a giant cube with Coldplay’s bassist.
So just who is the man in the space suit?
W o r d s
⁄
L u c i l l e H o w e
Will the real
Magne Furuholmen
please standup?
I
f arty waterfront Tjuvholmen is Oslo’s renaissance
district, then Magne Furuholmen is its renaissance
man. Though he’ll always be most famous as A-ha’s
guitarist and keyboard player – the man who played
the famous opening of
Take OnMe
–
he’s done a far
better and more idiosyncratic job of re-inventing himself than most
’80
s pop stars can reasonably hope.
In the last few years alone, in no particular order, he’s opened an
art gallery in Tjuvholmen and persuaded Damien Hirst to cover a
nearby warehouse in butterflies; designed a disco suite at The Thief
hotel; and started a supergroup called Apparatjik with members of
Coldplay and Mew, in which the band members perform in a giant
semi-transparent cube.
A-ha’s Paul Waaktaar-Savoy once wondered of Furuholmen, “Is
he a complete fool or a genius?” – and you can see where he was
coming from. Before we meet at The Thief – the new hotel which
symbolises Tjuvholmen’s arty modern makeover as much as the
next-door Astrup Fearnley Museum – I wake up in the Apparatjik
Suite, the suite he designed, which is decorated with stag horns on
the wall, disco balls, a wearable silver space suit and a projector that
allows you to choose a member of the band to project onto the bed
linen. The one thing the hotel wouldn’t let him do is fill the toiletry
bottles with bodily fluids, but it’s arguably weird enough.
So before I meet the man, I have spooned a naked image of him
while listening to Apparatjik’s songs on the suite’s vinyl record
player. Luckily, I like the music – the quirky electronica sounds a bit
like the lovechild of Daft Punk and Human League, and nothing like
you’d expect from a band featuring Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman.
When Furuholmen does come through The Thief’s silent
revolving doors for lunch, there’s none of the double denim and
hamster-like hair that made girls swoon in the ’80s. He’s wearing a
dapper flat cap, the requisite Nordic neck scarf and a pair of giant
aviator shades that don’t come off until a full 37 minutes into our
interview. He’s suggested sending doppelgängers to replace him at
gigs, so for a while I wonder if it’s really him.
Furuholmen is not easy to read, even once the aviators eventually
come off. He’s said before our interview that he hates journalists
harping on about how he does a lot and has “lots of energy”, and
he’d rather talk about the art collaborations he’s involved with. He’s
also a little uncomfortable having his photo taken.
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HA AKON HARISS, EVY ANDERSEN
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