We toured a country at war

We crossed Europe sideways in our old red russebil. After a concert in Lyon we had a full diesel tank and a full wallet, and the opening in the tour tunnel looked a little wider than it had a few hours earlier. We were on our way to Yugoslavia. It is completely true. We went on tour there in 1992, while the war was on. When you are 22, the fear gene and the consequence gene are more or less absent. That is how things like this become possible.

We were a little dutiful too. Now and then we rang home from a random phone box along the road to say we were alive. On this call we had news: now we are going to Yugoslavia to play. It went completely quiet at the other end. Words were unnecessary. Back home my mother and the others were sitting in front of the news, watching the bombs rain over Sarajevo. It was probably not what our parents had hoped to hear when we finally found a reason to call.

Our man in Serbia had told us to bring all the diesel we would need, and possibly a little more. Because of the war there was a fuel shortage in the whole country. The fuel gauge in the bus did not work, so we had worked out our range the empirical way: set the trip counter to zero, drive from a full tank until the engine died, and read the number. From that we calculated the diesel budget for the entire round trip.

On the way toward the Hungarian border we spotted a farmer cutting grass with formic-acid canisters lying all over his field. Perfect diesel containers. He was a friendly man. When we explained what we needed them for, he gave us two for free. He probably thought it was the least he could do for these idiots heading into a country at war.

What we did not know was that it was illegal to stop that close to the border without a special permit. The Cold War dust had not settled in 1992. Two soldiers on bicycles stopped us on the pavement, listened to our explanation in a mix of German and English, and then walked us back to the bus with our two canisters in hand and a rifle pointed at each of us. Not the best fun I have had. They turned out to be decent people. They laughed, told us to mind the east-west border zones in future, and wished us luck.

In Budapest we filled the canisters, the plastic bottles and everything else we had with diesel. The bus was now a rolling diesel bomb, to put it nicely. Nothing was stored in any responsible way. It was the only way to solve it, so that was the solution.

The queues at the Serbian border ran for miles. It did not help that there were three Americans in the bus. The political leadership was deeply sceptical of the USA, and we learned along the way that a rumour had gone around, printed in newspapers, that the American band we toured with were really CIA spies. Having met them, I will just say it was for the best, for the USA and for the world, that they were only a punk band.

Pez had a passport photo of himself at sixteen. He now stood with a beard and rasta braids in the middle of a ring of border soldiers carrying machine guns and everything else a war machine can bear, while they studied the picture and discussed among themselves. The mood was lightly pressing, to put it mildly.

While that went on, another soldier came over to the bus, took the camera lying on the dashboard and ripped the film out of it. He probably felt he had to contribute something. The strange part is that he took the film from the wrong camera. The one we had actually photographed the border with lay in plain sight, and survived the control.

Our man Dragan was supposed to meet us at the border, and without him we were not allowed to drive on. The hours went by and nobody came. We were seriously discussing a retreat to Hungary when a figure came walking up the road, waving. He had gone to the other border crossing by mistake and hitchhiked over when he understood. No mobile phones, no way to send word. He sorted everything out with the heavily armed guards and got us out of no-man’s-land.

Driving in, we passed petrol stations with queues of parked cars stretching for kilometres, no people in them, just holding a place in case fuel ever came. All of it went to the front. We had the motorway more or less to ourselves. The first concert was Novi Sad on 16 September 1992, and it was amazing. Far more people came than we had dreamt of. The war had not managed to kill the scene at all.

The next night we played Belgrade, in the courtyard of one of the big universities. Around a thousand tickets, completely sold out. I was interviewed on national television together with the bass player from the American band. Nobody wanted to talk about the war. Our concert was their break from the misery, and neither side wanted to ruin that. The concert was filmed, and I have still never got hold of that film. Rumour says a live recording was later pressed as a bootleg LP in Serbia, 100 to 150 copies. I want one on my wall at home.

In Belgrade we stayed with a young couple in a high-rise. In two days we had earned close to a Serbian yearly wage, cash in, no tax. Broke punks from Norway and the USA, suddenly kings. We had a few copies left of the first Punishment Park CD and gave them to the people who helped us along the way. Our hosts had a harder story. He was Serbian, she was Croatian. Her family stood on the other side of the front. She could not work in Serbia, could not travel home, could not get a visa anywhere because she was now stateless. Only months earlier everyone had lived in one country. Years later I watched on television as the bridges we drove over in Belgrade were bombed to rubble by NATO planes.

Then the road police found us. Two of them pulled us over and wanted to go through the bus, though customs had cleared everything at the border. They were after cash. The American drummer had to empty his baggage and strip down at the roadside. What the two officers had not counted on was that we had our own Serbian gunpowder in the bus. Our two Serbian friends stepped up, and they knew how the dice were rolled. No money changed hands, and the officers left with their tails down.

On 18 September we reached Smederevo early and sat down for pizza and beer in the sun. A man appeared with a military-green wooden crate. Our friends translated: hand grenades and machine-gun magazines, cheap. I asked what on earth we would do with magazines when we had no machine guns. No problem at all. He could get us matching machine guns in fifteen to twenty minutes, before the pizza arrived. The prices were entirely affordable. We thanked him politely and explained that a crate of grenades would cause us trouble at the Hungarian border. He understood completely, took no offence, and said to come back if we needed anything.

During load-in two of ours were nearly run over. In the chaos they swore and gave the driver the finger. The car braked, reversed and clipped them, then drove off. Cables and microphones lay scattered across the street. We thought: there went an idiot, that is that. It was not. Suddenly the building was surrounded by police with bulletproof vests, helmets and shotguns. The men in the car were two leaders of the local weapons mafia, suspected earlier that week in the shooting of a policeman. We asked what we should do now. The answer: play the concert, this is currently the safest building in the region. We could not argue with that. We went on and gave it everything.

We were told to wait for dark before leaving town, with a police escort, and to keep our heads low in case the two idiots were waiting on the road. Nobody volunteered to drive. We drew lots. I won, of course, and sat with my whole body in the windscreen while the rest lay more or less on the floor. At the town line the police peeled off. I asked if we were being abandoned. No, we had simply left that mafia’s territory. A different gang ran the next district, and we were not in conflict with them. Yet. Strangely, that did not ease the pressure much.

That night we slept at Dragan’s family home in Smederevska Palanka. His grandmother sat in front of the war news and cried. She said this had never happened under Tito, that people who had been good neighbours were now killing each other because some madmen had secured power. Nobody we met on that whole tour had one good word to say about the war. The next evening we played an open-air venue in the same town. Right before showtime we spotted a man in the crowd, dead drunk, with a bottle of spirits in one hand and a loaded pistol in his belt. We drew the line there. The local boss snapped his fingers, and the pistol was laid on the boss’s table. The man had just come back from the front, where a friend had been shot at his side. After the concert he stood and apologised to us for the scare, and we were invited to the boss’s table as a plaster on the wound. We did not dare say no. The concert itself went off without a single weapon.

The last concert was Nis, on 20 September, in the far south. A military checkpoint on the motorway wanted 50 German marks to let us pass, roughly fifty times the normal toll. Our friends argued it down to twenty or thirty while we tried not to look at the guns. In Nis we were billed as Permanent Park, and the cellar club was packed from the first touch of a guitar string. At the club we met a young woman named Ivana, gave her a copy of the first CD, and years later she named her daughter Anja, after Punishment Park’s first singer, because she thought the name was beautiful.

Then home. Driving through the dark, no street lights because of the war, we suddenly saw barbed-wire crosses in the road and a sign that read Zagreb, not Budapest. We had taken the one wrong fork we had been warned never to take, the road to the Croatian front. We turned in the middle of the motorway and drove back as hard as the old bus could take, and made the border crossing before it shut at eleven.

Germany finished us off. The engine blew on the Autobahn, a workshop gave the bus a death sentence, and the money ran out. We cancelled a month and a half of concerts in Italy, Slovenia and the Netherlands, dropped the Americans at the airport in Düsseldorf, and got ourselves arrested by two plain-clothes policemen who found our endless relay between phone boxes highly suspicious. Our story was too wild not to believe. Their drug dog jumped into the bus and immediately stuck its nose out the window, which we took as a verdict on the smell as much as on our innocence. We rolled onto the ferry with one loaf of bread to share, filled the tank in Kristiansand by overdrawing a bank card at the pump, and coughed the whole way home to Os. The old bus that had been declared dead in Germany carried us through the entire Norwegian tour that November too.