This post comes live, direct and on the hoof from the departure lounge of Terminal 2 in Copenhagen Airport.
We’ve been clean(ish) living the past week in Copenhagen, a modern, sleek and stylish European city that puts what we have back home to shame; a cheap, regular/reliable and driverless 24hr tram system, more bike lanes than Ayrshire has potholes, a myriad of safe public areas with no hint of bammery and an attitude towards equity and social inclusiveness that is to be admired.
In four days, we packed in a whole load of touristy stuff; a boat cruise through the city’s interlinking canals, a food market here, a food market there, a craft beer here, a fresh orange beer there, smorrebrods here, there and everywhere, always chased with magnificent pastries and washed down with energy-giving flat whites and the occasional cheap cocktail – just the fuel needed for upwards of 25,000 steps a day.
The olde fairy tale world of Copenhagen – the twisting spires, the marzipan towers, the marching soldiers – sits comfortably beside the glass and steel and ultra-modern architectural wonderplaces which jut and cut the city’s cobbled streets in two. Danish design is a real thing. The Bang And Olufsen shop in the city centre is proof of that alone, but from the buildings and boats to the pedestrian areas and its people, Copenhagen is one stylish place.
The Danes look great. Everyone is younger than us, healthier than us, better looking than us…even in their de-rigeur silver trainers they’re still better dressed than us. We were in Reffen Food Market on Friday night, the sun slowly setting over København Havn, and we realised that we were probably the oldest there, everyone around us cool and relaxed with pals or children, nodding casually to the beat of the conversation or the beat of the music – even if us oldies were the only two in the place who immediately recognised the easy soul of Curtis Mayfield’s Trippin’ Out as it wafted across the imported sand, imported beers and world foods.
Reffen is just one example of how the Danes are getting it right. A once heavily industrial seaport, Copenhagen is very much recast as a must-visit European destination, its many reclaimed dry docks and floating islands repurposed as timber and container-built food markets, clubs, gig venues and artist studios. If you’re reading this, I’d imagine you’d be dead impressed by it all.
Any visit to a new city always gives an excuse to sniff out a record shop or two and Copenhagen was no different. We visited 3 or 4 across the week. One sold exclusively K-Pop, so that was a waste of steps. Another specialised in Death Metal, the guy behind the counter an airport scanner’s nightmare, so that was another waste of steps. An old hippy in Christiania, a commune that sprung up in 1971 after the locals complained about the lack of affordable housing and refused to move, was eagerly trying to sell me his collection of European hard rock – “listened to once, to tape it, then returned to its sleeve,” he said, almost convincingly. He had a lovely, original numbered, mono copy of the Beatles’ white album for sale (the first of two copies I’d turn up) but he wanted £300 for it. Good luck to him.
Saturday (coincidentally Record Store Day) found me in Sound, flicking through boxes and boxes of Bowie and the likes, all of which UK record buyers had been sleeping out to ‘snag’. The fools. I left ’em and their silly inflated prices right where I found them and ended up in Accord, a bit of a jumble sale, but one that nonetheless afforded me two Elvis Costello albums and a Paul Haig 12″ for less than the price of a flat white and a Danish. A result!
Scott Walker – Copenhagen
I’ve always had a thing for Scott Walker’s Copenhagen. Found on Scott 3, it is, like almost all of those Scott releases on Phillips, the sound of drama married to poetry, distilled in a vat of melancholy and served up just on the right side of easy listening.
In Copenhagen, Scott sings metaphorically of snowdrops falling through the night before melting away, two lonely people in love on the streets of the city.
By the end, waltz time fairground rides that echo Tivoli Gardens’ olde-fashioned carousels waft their way earwards, the chimes of the city’s many clocks that tell the time for anyone not glued to their AirPods clanging softly in the background, as Scott and his pal disappear.
Lovely stuff.
Plain Or Pan 