Ladies and Gentlemen

What you are about to hear was all except for one song recorded with just two microphones. The exception being the live recording presented which was recorded 1984/13/04 at the Copenhagen rockclub Stengade 30 over the mixing board.

It was Peter and Klaus. Sometimes when we came back up in the classroom after the break one of them would have written in one of the topcorners of the blackboard either "Kiss" or "Sex Pistols" or sometimes "It's A Swindle". The writing would be underlined with an oblique line as used by our Danish teacher who was also our class teacher, the dear old Mrs. Toft indicating that this was a message aimed at the whole class and was not to be erased by that week's monitor.
It was 1978 and we were in the eighth grade. In the newspaper that year I read about a band called Sex Pistols which had dissolved.
Having moved the year before from the small town Birkerød 25 miles north of Copenhagen to the somewhat bigger town Lyngby located closer to Copenhagen, I was the new kid in class. Gradually I was getting friends.
I wasn't into pop or rock music at all at that time as Peter and Klaus were but we did share a mutual interest in comic books, horror films and WW2 model kits. Peter and Klaus would be the "wild" boys in class. Those that you knew sometimes would meet in school bashed out because they had been up all night partying and listening to some new exciting rock music that they had just discovered.
I was the new kid in class and shy so firstly I got friendly with the class other top student and shy boy Boye, and we found that we were both into art - especially surrealism - and that we both shared a mildly mockingly sense of humor toward what we considered the silly social game that went on in class rooms.
Peter would be hanging out with some guys from the grade above ours Michael, Lars and Ken whom would all be his neighbourhood buddies.  At the local small but well-exqusited public libary they would be borrowing LP's with the contemporary more hard rocking bands like Led Zep, Black Sabbath, Queen and Blue Oyster Cult. They would be listening a lot to the Beatles or fifties rock like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis as well. Peter would take up guitar playing.
Peter would also be hanging out with Klaus and his older brother Morten.
Klaus and Morten would be residing in the basement of their parents house in which they had a larger collection of rock LPs of their own and a Hi-Fi with real big loudspeakers. Their father being an officer in the Danish Navy would be away often and would upon returning, bring home stuff from abroad if there were something they had been looking for. It was the perfect place to hang out if you wanted to get away from parents.
One day in 1978 Klaus had on his own initiative made a tape to Peter with a lot of the punk/new wave acts of the time. The tape would include RAMONES, BUZZCOCKS, SEX PISTOLS, THE DAMNED, AC/DC, EDDIE AND THE HOT RODS, TOM ROBINSON BAND, PATTI SMITH., SHAM 69, THE CLASH and Ian Dury and the blockheads.
Peter would play the tape for Michael and Lars and as Lars had an organ and a bass borrowed from his older brother it wouldn't be long till he and Peter would start playing together and till Peter had gotten his first copy of "Leave Home" from the local department store's cheap offers box!
Meanwhile we had reached the ninth grade. I had been making my own comics since I was a kid and now I had gotten friendly with a guy in our parallel class who was doing his own as well. It was the end of school and together we participated as the youngest at the exhibition of Danish comic book artists held in Copenhagen. It was the artist Mårten Smet, with whom I became aquainted during the week the exhibition lasted, that suggested he tapecopied me "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" as well as the soundtrack from The Who's "Tommy". A few months later me and Boye had attended highschool and once again we would be exposed, but this time more cruely, to that social game we knew and loathed so much. While just about every one of us juniors were either quiet well-adaptable types or the more aggresive fit-ins it didn't take me long to spot the more progressive types in the schoolyard. These were a group of seniors that had been going to punk concerts for the last year or so. They had a band and I would join them for a few impromtu jams and they would introduce me to some more of the music like Plastmatics, the first CRASS LP as well as the Danish bands on the scene. I began going to concerts with Mårten Smet or the seniors. I started hanging out with Peter, Lars and Michael and their other buddies as well. It was the winter of 1980. The music they played for me opened up the world to me: The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Damned and on and on. Big in their book would also be David Bowie, Brian Eno, Chuck Berry and Marc Bolan. That winter and into 1981 we went and saw in concert The Clash, Iggy and The Ramones as well as a lot of the Danish bands.
1981 went on and Lars and Peter had now gotten the band going with Michael as drummer. Both Lars and Peter composed.
While Lars had switched to lead guitar and singing they were looking for a bass player and having auditioned some had found none to have what they considered to be the right attitude towards the music in the band.
It was my second year in highschool and I would have begun to hang out more and more at the square in Copenhagen known as a meeting place for the punks and take my schoolwork less and less seriously. It was the spring of 1982.
One evening on the square was Lars and Peter on a trip to the city. We got drunk together and sniffed some lighterfuel and afterwards we went back to the squaded house where I had been staying for some months. I had just ended a brief stint with a hardcore punkband as a singer but had found the hardcore expression boring. I needed something Rock'n'Rolly. Peter and Lars asked me if I wanted to join their band.
I moved back to Lyngby where they were staying and rehearsed. The ball was rolling!
I could borrow the bass Lars had from his brother and any amp would go. We needed better equipment. One evening when we were out walking we passed my highschool. Going round the building we happened to notice that the window to the music locale had been left open. Somehow we managed to climb up there and slide down inside on a wall bar. While we could have taken guitars with us we decided on just to take with us the two Sennheiser microfones, better microphones was our primary need, and a bunch of records from the school discoteque (There wasn't much there of interest).
It was the summer holiday of 1982 and Peter's parents would go away for some weeks leaving the house to him to use as hang-out and rehearsal room. That summer in the house we recorded our first songs together as a band.
We loved punk but to us the essence of rock was what we called "Rock'n'Roll" which somehow vaguely would be rock with what we called "feeling". We felt strongly for artists like Chuck Berry or the Kinks as well as for the 1977 bands and new wave sounds of bands like The Cure, PIL or Siouxie and The Banshees. Most fascinating to us was the Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop records with their mythology around the stars. We felt that we were the only Danish band with that "Rock'n'Roll feeling" at all, the other bands leaning on hardcore or the more arty experimental side of new wave.
In the months to come Peter and Lars would come up with one good song after the other and we would have gotten our own rehearsal room at the a bit distant located school in Virum.
Rehearsing would mostly come about with some beers and hash to go along with it, arrangements for songs only losely scetched out as to be able to jam on them in what we considered a Velvet Undergroundsque manner.
We would have decided on a name for the group by then. "De Rare Anemoner" would come from paraphrasing "The Ramones" into Danish meaning: The Nice Anemones.
Lars who was at graphic school drew a layout and printed us our own stickers. It would be some childishly drawn flowers in white on a screaming orange background with the words: De Rare Anemoner -Denmark's Only ROCK Band.
In the rehearsal room at Virum school more recordings was made during the winter of 1982/83.

Spring 1983. We had our first job at the progressive highschool "Det Fri Gymnasium" in my old hometown Birkerød. Due to I had just a few days before cut my righthand indexfinger badly (During opening a pack of split peas) it was difficult for me to play. We played just a few songs on some borrowed equipment.
Summer.
Our second job was the large hall of Gladsaxe Beatforum. We were billed with other local (Lyngby being next to Gladsaxe) act "Teenagers" a kid rock band that exceeded us far in technical skills but then they did not have our songs, our sound. We were ROCK'N'ROLL.
We had gone into taking speed at this point. We were all quite romantic about the whole aspect of drugs connected with rock'n'roll. The stories we'd heard. We thought it would help cool our nerves before going on stage and go for a cool appearance!
All of us except Michael was so zonked out that we couldn't play coherently. In the 3000 people hall there was about twenty people out of which about ten would be the local biker prospects (That we knew well from Lyngby) shouting at us: More punk!
It didn't take us many songs to drive out the rest of the audience.
Billed with us was also other punkband Anfall who due to the lack of audience canceled their appearance.
What's more the whole mess was video taped in the dullest of manners by Beatforum just putting up a camera. At least we had hoped for some great shots.
I had just recently bought my first MC5 record, an English 70'ies re-issue of Kick Out The Jams. After the concert I spoke to an older guy in his late thirties mentioning to him this band I had just discovered. "Oh the MC5" he said "I saw them in this hall in 1972".
"You did! What was it like?". "Uhh - I don't remember. I think they had a large American flag hanging as stage decoration."
Not any wiser we approached our next gig a one day punk festival at Club 47 equaly zonked out. While the festival hosted about all of the Copenhagen based hardcore bands, many of whom I knew personally, our disastrous performance was an embarasment.
We had to face it. It didn't work with speed. Back in the rehearsal room at the school in Virum we made new recordings during the rest of the summer and into the fall.
Fall 1983.
Next gig up was the squaded house Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen where we gave an okay performance together with some Danish hardcore bands.
Winter came on and little bettering in our playing showed. Peter and Lars were still making new songs. We still didn't rehearse soberly. Michael had grown weary of the situation and decided it was time to quit. It would take a new drummer for us to clean up our act.
It was Ivan our second drummer that managed to put some discipline into us. While he didn't enjoy jamming he aimed at getting the songs arranged and while this definitely saved our live performances he lacked the machinegun drumming of Michael's so vital for the musical expression in the group.
Spring 1984 came on and now more together in our playing we were booked by the band Rosegarden to play with them at the rockclub Stengade 30 in Copenhagen. We played well and luckily most of our performance was taped over the mixing board. The music was well received that evening but we couldn't help to get the feeling that our music didn't stand a chance due to the lack of a target audience being around for the rock'n'roll music we played. And Ivan's drumming made the songs sound so less exciting. That there was no target audience was certainly felt at our next and last gig in the fall of 1984 at an occupant union party in Farum a town located not so far from Lyngby.
We played well and recorded the concert on a walkman. The music was well received but get any followers? Forget it!
Ivan would loose interest in playing with us and started being absent from our rehearsal hours. A few months later it would all be over.

Anders Röder, Copenhagen 2002/04/07