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by Ally Winford

Hang on to the things that you’re supposed to say,
Millions of stars.

Norway is a country that has, at various stages of my life, and in various ways – some bigger, some smaller – meant something or other to me.

The films of Joachim Trier, once being reduced to tears watching Martin Ødegaard play football, Serena-Maneesh, The Megaphonic Thrift (and subsequently Misty Coast – Bergen represent), becoming obsessed with making a cocktail called the Trident and discovering the best results were from using Linie aquavit, a mutual internet infatuation in my late teens where we never did actually meet. What’s the Bokmål for “adolescent sliding doors moment”?

So why have I, a 39 year old man, found myself on a flight to Norge for the very first time, basing the terribly compressed itinerary wholly on my 53rd Mew show, carrying some cheese sandwiches, a bottle of wine, an empty can of Coke, and a plastic funnel?

The answer is partly that, after an unforeseen, unwanted and astronomical bill for a boiler replacement in late November, I am not quite in a position to go full carpe diem and take out a second mortgage against one of my kidneys for a quick night’s worth of drinking at Oslo prices. So today, we are doing this DIY-style.

The second part of the answer is that I wish to at least try to experience tonight as I might have done 20 years ago, without the baggage of half a lifetime’s worth of additional living. I would like this to be redolent of before we knew how much time remained of our joy.

It is not going to be quite the format of 2005 or 2006, spending very literally any money I had in the world on tickets, planes, trains, merch and beer. Let’s not pretend it is actually that way again. It is not. I have long since grown not young with this band. I have long since not had to sleep on airport floors because paying for anywhere with a bed was impossible.

But either way, I have decided that I would like to try to relive those days, even if artificially. A facsimile of a formative experience might sometimes be better than something which has evolved to the point that it no longer has any real connection to the formative experience at all.

I know that I cannot go back, I cannot extend life expectancies, I cannot do anything to make our joy extant for any longer than it has been (although it would turn out that Jonas’s throat infection could!), and I cannot re-make myself youthful.

So, this is an illusion – but if I am to succumb to the illusory, something feels right about doing so in Oslo, for my second last Mew show and one final continental adventure. There will be no more chances to do this. We will not be coming full circle any more.

3 December 2025

05:14

I wake up abruptly and unprompted, still loaded with a filthy streaming cold from the weekend, with Blood by Editors in my head. I do not like Editors. I don’t know what it is doing there. I cannot properly fall back asleep.

09:00

I’m having a fitful half-dream where I’m slowly walking towards an abstract sound coming from somewhere over the horizon. The abstract sound turns out to be my phone alarm. I manage to jab it off after a couple of attempts.

09:10

Second alarm goes off. I get up feeling like absolute shit, fighting a wall of fuzz from my brain, and chuck myself in the shower.

09:25

Dig out OG Zookeeper’s Boy t-shirt for the occasion, purchased c. 2006. It looks like it belongs in a museum. But then I look (and sound) like I belong on Victor Frankenstein’s operating table today, so all’s fair in love and war. 

09:30

Make coffee and a bacon sandwich; shaking slightly, shove a fistful of assorted pills down my throat (vitamin supplements, max strength paracetamol with added caffeine, anything else I can get my hands on).

10:30

Launch a change of clothes, a bottle of wine, and some transportable food into a piece of hand luggage, and leave the flat to waddle to the Edinburgh airport tram.

11:10

Discover that, at some point since embarking, I had briefly fallen asleep on the tram. This is not a fantastic sign.

11:30

… or maybe it is. This momentary nap appears to have generated a second wind of sorts. I bound off the tram and into the airport blasting Field Harmonics’s Happenstance. Thank me later.

13:10

Thankfully there is zero to report at the airport, and the flight – with Norwegian – takes off with none of the quirks or charm of Easyjet (i.e. on time!).

13:11

Put on William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration. It is 1. Excellent and 2. Not remotely the right kind of vibe for the occasion. I last 25 minutes and decide to save the rest for another day.

13:35

I swallow another fistful of medicine (at 30,000 feet this time) as am feeling increasingly grim again. I am confronted with the stark reality that nothing about approaching middle age is particularly sexy. Is this it? Each day identifiable only by a varying allocation of pills?

15:40 (Local time)

Flight lands in Oslo. There is thick, billowing, dark grey mist, verging on black fog, swirling around. I can’t see the ground until a few seconds before the aircraft hits it. It is all deeply atmospheric. It is perfect. My first thought is nothing other than a rhetorical “How have I never been here before?”

16:13

Board a Vy train to Oslo Central Station, and via some googling the day before, have immediately saved £20 on the round trip vs the express train. Feel a little bit smug.

16:40

Check in to a really pretty nice hotel, obtained perfectly affordably at off-season prices. You have to pick your Oslo battles.

16:42

Crack open bottle of wine, inhale a cheese sandwich.

16:50

I have heard Norwegian society is a little funny about drinking in public. I have come here prepared, and decant some of the wine into the empty Coke can via the plastic funnel to consume on the way over to the venue later without alerting the attention of the authorities. The ingenuity is strong in this one.

17:25

Head up to Clara and Martin’s room to drink more wine, listen to a 2010s pop playlist, and read out some shocking Nik & Jay lyrics in English in the style of a theatrical recital.

19:10

Depart hotel in the pissing rain. Drink “Coke” on the walk to Sentrum Scene, and therefore commit my first public order offence in a new country, three and a half hours after touching down.

19:20

Arrive at the venue, which is externally unremarkable but internally stunning. Discover I am apparently slightly in love with Norwegian functionalist architecture. Illness? What illness. The adrenaline has taken care of that for now.

19:23

Fully laugh out loud at Clara’s lack of self-control when buying some of the archival t-shirts the band are selling at the merch desk.

19:25

Find Leila, Stephanie and others waiting down at the front. Talk shit about Swedish bands. Remember that I miss Jeniferever very much.

20:05

Oddvar turns up. I provide further encouragement, as if any were needed, regarding his bucket list item to experience a full Easter Road singing Sunshine On Leith after Hibs have beaten Hearts.

20:30

Showtime. Man, this is loud. It is dialled right up, aggressive, abrasive. I saw mb valentine twice last week – they are unique, but this is no joke either. 

20:55

It’s during a deafening Then I Run that I think of Simon for the first time today.

22:10

I’m glad this largely wasn’t an emotional wringer, unlike Aarhus and Copenhagen back in May. The volume, the exultant lighting, the beautiful venue – this is celebratory, not funereal. It passes far too quickly. Everyone is grinning at each other afterwards, even as Jonas wipes away tears on stage.

It feels like a loving look back at time well spent – at love well spent.

22:25

Backstage. Talk These New Puritans, Samme Stof Som Stof, general nonsense. I’m drinking it all in. I have been inconceivably lucky. The guys don’t have to be this warm, graceful, funny, hospitable. But they are. 

I wonder if it’s too tacky to say that words can sometimes unlock things you never dreamed about. So I won’t say that.

00:10

Stagger out of backstage, directly into Oslo’s 24/7 supply of fresh rainwater.

00:30

Slump into my hotel bed. Head is buzzing and I just cannot sleep.

04:10

Jolt awake for no reason.

There is nothing playing in my head for now.

Today – and, after this, never again in quite the same way – we have come full circle.

3rd December 2025 – Post-script.

I remember Simon turning up to Truck Festival 2010 for a full weekend of camping, with a rucksack containing only a sleeping bag and a multipack of crisps. Naturally we sort him out to crash in the porch of one of our tents. 

This was a goodun. The last remnants of the No More Stories tour, with a more atmospheric Mew headline show than usual due to the backdrops not working and the light show in full disco mode instead to compensate. But there is also 65daysofstatic, Thomas Truax, Future of the Left, Nedry, Mercury Rev, Esben And The Witch, together with plenty else that hit true at the right time.

I remember how I felt 12 years later when Tom texts me to say that Simon has died suddenly.

I miss you, pal. I wish that things would have been different. 

As well as for all of the more functional reasons listed above, the real reason I arrived in Oslo today lacking any sensible level of money or essentials, and with a bag full of food, is because it is my own small tribute to Simon, and to that vivid weekend a decade and a half ago.

4 December 2025.

I am hungover, cold, tired, residually ill, and solitary in the airport waiting to fly home. The flight times meant I have seen basically zero of this city. But this was a ramshackle idea, and it all makes sense in its own way. I’ll be back someday, with more time and greater opportunity.

Whatever; this will always have been my first time here, and everything about it was perfect. I might not even trade away the illness. It set the state of my brain in a particularly foggy way that somehow felt right in the circumstances, right in the climate, right in the atmosphere.

It’s often the case that Joe Meek is somewhere in and around my scattered thoughts – he is one of my heroes. But he is there unusually prominently today. It’s now The Cryin’ Shames that I can hear in my head, for lots of reasons.

I like sad songs. I like sad stories. Very often, the sad songs and the sad stories that I like will be about sad endings. But being a live participant in sad endings – and despite the celebratory nature of the show last night, it is still part of such an ending – I never quite like that so much.

“If I call out your name like a song
Which was written for you and you alone
This time
Be different
Please stay.
Don’t go.
Please stay.”

I guess I’m home again now. I am home to a dry, soundless winter and one day closer to the loss of our joy.

I’m home now. 

I am home.