Datarock’s Ketil Mosnes is on his hands and knees grasping at a pair of indigo jeans. Their owner, and the Norwegian duo’s other half, Fredrik Saroea is crawling under a backstage trailer at Norway’s Øya Festival. Watching the sun set on Oslo, it’s turning into that kind of night.

(Datarock at Oya Festival, Norway, 2005)

Earlier they played to 5,000 Norwegian music fans - their biggest audience ever – a crowd who arrived early to hear Datarock’s crayon-scrawled funky grooves. They didn’t disappoint. Along with eight musicians from Oslo hardcore and punk bands, apparently a few on stage just to get free tickets to the festival, as well as their own choir the New Traditionalists, Datarock prowled the stage.

“I have problems expressing myself because I’m drunk and I’m not that good in English, but this festival is quite special,” says Mosnes. Shy and self-effacing, he is the antithesis of hipster party boy Saroea. “You know it’s a festival for people who are into underground stuff, but I was shocked that so many people turned up to see us play.”

Saroea is back on his feet and racing across the road to a grassy embankment. Kristin Winsents, a DJ from P3 (Norway’s equivalent to Triple J), is urging the twosome to dive head first, like a human ten pin bowling ball, into a beer bottle-laden table. It’s not a new stunt either; Mosnes broke bones doing it at last year’s festival.

It’s been a great year for Datarock, whose debut album was memorably described by Nick Sylvester at Pitchforkmedia.com as a shot for instant pleasure that accidentally ended up being much more than that, ‘sorta how mom and dad ended up with five kids’. Norwegian pop princess Annie included them on her new DJ Kicks CD describing them as her favourite band from hometown Bergen.

Dressed in red and white striped tracksuits, their smart casual imagery brings to mind Manchester’s Happy Mondays, a band regularly invoked in Datarock reviews. The comparison had seemed generous for the record, which is closer in spirit to contemporaries LCD Soundsystem or !!!. But live it makes perfect, gloriously messy sense.

“I played in some really stupid punk rock bands here and Fredrik played in this trash metal band,” says Mosnes, who grew up on a soundtrack of Dinosaur Jr, Built to Spill and Pavement. He says it was a natural reaction to the jazz his music journalist father played around the house, but his musical palette broadened on moving to west coast university town Bergen. “It’s a small city and you can’t choose between that many clubs when you go out, so sometimes we just ended up in disco clubs.”

The tension between punk and funk that fires the duo has sent a factory load of other groups up the indie charts. But instead of reducing that potential to a pop formula, Datarock embrace the messy fun of disco punk. It’s philandery that winks at indie kids, electronic geeks and the Bee Gees. Wedged into a patch behind the public toilets, Mosnes and I suddenly realise that Norwegian psych group Madrugada are about to finish and the bustling queue for the toilets has gone quiet. We both have another drink ticket to cash in. Racing for the bar seems like the right way to end the interview.

(originally published in Nylon magazine, Australia)

Datarock - The New Song

Datarock tour Australia this month, gig details at their site.

Just announced, Datarock play the Mandarin club this Sunday (Feb 19).