Northern Disco Lights

PAPER VISION/DIR BEN DAVIS. DVD/DL

How a twisted disco revival was born in the fjords.

In the ’80s, Swedes used to joke that Norway should add “nul points” to their name for Eurovision and be done. Yet by the decade’s end, a global dance music movement was forming in the unlikely setting of the Arctic Circle coastal town of Tromsø. Using interviews with its main protagonists – Bjørn Torske, Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, all now clubland mainstays – embellished by archive shots and arresting drone footage of the icy landscape, Northern Disco Lights tells how Norway brought disco in from the cold by dousing it in psychedelia, synth-pop and twisted noise to produce a warped variant that went under names including cosmic disco, Scandolearic or, as stalwart producer Rune Lindbaek dubbed it, “heroin disco”. The documentary shows how via a mixture of homespun experimentalism, a healthy dollop of eccentricity and, most of all, damn fine basslines, Norway got its groove on.