The DAT heist

In 1991 we were picked up by a label in Germany. On paper it was a whole family of companies with a manager, a production firm and a larger group above it all, but for this story one word covers them: the German label. The contract was signed on 13 January 1992. I had become much better at keeping every scrap of paper by then, which is why I can tell this story in detail. A famous punk film was once called The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. We should maybe have made volume two.

In November 1991 two of us flew to Hamburg to meet them. We met a team of professional guys who knew their business. Their offices sat wall to wall with a well-known studio, and gold records from famous albums recorded there hung on the wall. There was very little to suggest this would not work as presented.

There was one hook we did not like. We had to put our own money into the production. But the contract explained how we would get it back through sales, we would get part of the pressing to sell at concerts, and it was still cheaper than renting a studio, hiring a producer and pressing records alone in Norway. We were hungry, maybe too hungry, to reach the next level. The contract was not the lucrative kind, but it was a chance to move the whole thing one notch up, so we drove on.

In June 1992 we drove a worn-out old russebil down to Germany and recorded the whole album, The Return Of The Shovel Police, in one week. The process went beautifully and it sounded great. There was nothing wrong with this part of the deal. We drove home very satisfied.

The promise was that the master DAT and the 24-track tape would be sent to us in Norway once everything was processed and copied. The release was planned for the new year. The cover, a very tough piece of artwork made for us, was sent down and later vanished in Germany along with much else.

Then the first signal came that something was off. Neither the master DAT nor the 24-track tape arrived. Every delay had a good, reasonable explanation. Through the autumn of 1992 I ran a one-man campaign and nagged them directly for a copy of the master. It never came. The album never got a concrete release date either, just a new month, again and again. It was starting to smell.

I genuinely feared the whole album could be lost. So I hatched a plan they could not ignore. In December 1992 I sent a formal letter by fax: send us a MASTER DAT immediately, and no later than 15 January 1993. The reason I gave was that we were doing a bigger TV production with NRK in Norway, and NRK had asked for a DAT because the recording had to be done as playback. There was no TV production. There was no request from NRK. There was only a white lie with a deadline on it.

It worked. A DAT went out from Germany by express letter on 8 January 1993 and landed in our postbox a couple of days later. Somewhere in an office down there, somebody had decided that Norwegian state television could not be kept waiting.

Only later did we understand how important that fax was. History showed that most of the bands tied to the label never got copies of their master tapes or anything else. Everything was lost for almost everyone in that soup. That we sat with a master DAT of our own album was partly luck, and partly the result of listening to a gut feeling that said something in fairyland was not right.

The album kept not coming out. It was always about to appear on one of the label’s many imprints, and it never did. We were bound by the contract and could not release it ourselves, so it built up to a fight. We filed a police complaint for fraud from Norway, of the international kind that could be passed to the German police, and a lawyer at the Norwegian rock musicians’ organisation pointed us to his counterparts in Germany, an association for rock musicians there that had been circling the same corner of the industry for a while.

The Germans had suspicions and half-built cases, but they lacked documentation, because that corner of the business ran on the telephone, deliberately. Nothing in writing, nothing to show a court. Here Punishment Park was different. We lived in a country they found hard to call, and none of us had mobile phones, so 90 percent of our communication with the label had gone by fax. We sat on exactly the paper trail the association had been dreaming about.

On 5 November 1993 we wrote a letter, together with a local policeman in Os, demanding that everything from now on happen in writing. We refused, consistently, to discuss anything on the telephone, where everything they said was fog anyway. They probably thought written replies were a cheap way to buy time. It was a mistake they would feel until the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

By the end of 1993 we had made peace with the fact that we had been cheated out of everything we were promised after the recording. We looked forward instead. We had the master, and we put it out ourselves on promo cassettes together with the first album, and gave a damn about the contract. Those cassettes turned up as bootlegs in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and several countries in South America. One of the songs, This Ain’t No New York Rap Shit!, went to number one on a radio station in Croatia in 1995 by way of a compilation cassette. The music got out. Just not the way anyone had planned.

The label grew desperate. In September 1994 they invited me down to Germany at their expense to talk it over. We read it as another attempt to buy time and to stop us from crashing their whole business model, and we never went. Instead the case went to the top of the German music industry. The musicians’ association ran it across the pages of its trade magazine under a headline about sharks in the music business, and Punishment Park stood in the middle of that war and fronted it, hard.

In one last attempt to be rid of us, the people at the label helped find another German company willing to release Punishment Park, and they let us out of our contracts. We said thank you, turned our backs, and let them sink. By spring 1995 the companies were history, frozen out and crucified for how they had treated bands. Why did we push it that far when we already had the master and were already free? Simple. We hated losing, and we hated being played for fools even more. We hit back until there was nothing left of them, and only then were we satisfied.

I got one more thing out of them. I used the label and its supposed big plans for us in Germany as the argument that got me out of my twelve months of military service. They were so tired of me that they played along, thinking it might win me over. They did not understand that now I was using them, exactly the way they had used us. The army had once turned me down when I applied as a young man, so as far as I am concerned we ended even steven.

The Return Of The Shovel Police finally came out in its own right in 2000, on my own label, eight years after we recorded it. One thing still puzzles me. If the label had simply pressed the CD and put it out, they would have sold well and kept their business. People on the scene knew the band and wanted the records. Instead they chose the bluff, and the bluff cost them everything they had. One CD out, and they would have survived us and all the noise. I have never managed to understand it. But idiots are and remain idiots.

People sometimes ask why I dragged my own label into existence and have released my own things on it for years. Well. This story is a large part of the answer.