The first Norwegian punk CD?

In the autumn of 1990 Punishment Park had exactly one member. Me. I had a list. Play a lot, play loud, and get out of Norway. An album was near the top of that list before I had enough songs, before I had a band, and before I had asked anyone to produce it. I was not going to waste time on demos. Demos led nowhere. I wanted the best studio in Bergen and a proper record, first try.

On 23 December 1990 the four of us met for our first rehearsal in the cellar of Os Rock Klubb. Kjell, Claes, Anja and Pez. It clicked from the first cup of coffee and the first riff. I walked home that night before Christmas Eve and had a beer and thought: this is going to be a firework.

Very few people who knew about the plan believed in it. A punk band from Os and Askøy that was going to conquer the world? We did not care. We rehearsed hard every week, and I sat at home every night writing letters to fanzines, bands and people on the underground scene in Europe. No internet, no mobile phones. Telephone, letters, fax, stamps and paper. That was how you built a network then, letter by letter.

For the sound I wanted one man: Yngve L. Sætre, then the singer in Barbie Bones. Other producers in Bergen were ranked higher and considered more professional. I did not want professional in that sense. We had just left the eighties behind, with all the overproduced rubbish that came out of that decade. I wanted rough edges and no polish, and I knew he could deliver that better than anyone. The studio was Sigma Lydstudio in Sandviksboder 69, the best in town.

We recorded at night because night was cheaper, and went to work and school in the daytime. Sleep is not rock and roll, so we skipped it. Yngve understood the madness. He was not chasing perfection, he was chasing a sound that hit hard, which was exactly the starting point I had when I started the band. Those weeks in Sigma taught us more than the whole previous decade had.

Our first concert was at Hulen in Bergen on 19 April 1991, while the album was still in progress. A pedal failed on stage and gave us five to seven minutes of dead air. Yngve had taped the show and made us listen to it afterwards. Lesson learned. From then on we plugged straight into the amplifiers and played loud.

Summer 1991. The album had to be finished and pressed, and there was a debate: vinyl or CD? CD was the new format, and on our scene it was regarded as selling out. People talked it down hard. But a CD was easier to mail, easier to sell out of Norway, easier to handle in every practical way. So Punishment Park chose CD over vinyl for exactly that reason. We took a lot of heat from local heroes for it. What they thought meant honestly very little. The band had a plan and followed it.

The album came out on our own pressing, catalogue number PPRCD 2551, in 1,200 copies. In 1991 everyone still swore by vinyl. We were the ones standing there with a compact disc.

The release concert was at Hulen on 31 August 1991. The room was far from full. In fact no Punishment Park concert in Bergen was ever full through the whole nineties. Few of the people who did show up that night could have guessed that thirty years later the album would be a sought-after collector piece among record people around the world. We in the band probably understood it least of all.

One detail belongs to the album story. The first person who physically bought the CD had given clear notice that he wanted it the moment it existed, and me and Pez delivered it to his door in Fana straight after we picked the boxes up at the train station in Bergen. Back then he was a metal musician and a friend with a clean record, a guy we shared rehearsal space and rock visions with across the genres. Later he would shock the world and become known for murder, church fires and much more. The book leaves the ball there, and so do I.

The cover did its own bit of history. Willy B ran an informal poll on NRK for the best Norwegian record cover, and the cover of the first Punishment Park album placed among the top three. The idea came from Claes, and he got the artwork through his artist friend Jan Henning Larsen. It was simply a bit brilliant.

Here is the claim, as carefully as the book itself puts it. According to rumour and talk in later years, Punishment Park is said to be the first independent band in Norway to release its music on a CD. That has never been confirmed by reliable sources. But it has been said more than once.

The band archive puts it its own way: as far as the band knows, this was the first punk or indie release done on CD in Norway at the time. That is the whole claim. No certificate, no registry, just a 1,200-copy pressing from August 1991, a format everyone told us was a sell-out, and a rumour that has refused to die for over thirty years. If somebody out there has an earlier one, I would honestly love to see it.