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BiTS INTERVIEW: Arne Skage

Arne Skage is a Norwegian guitarist who fell in love with the blues and in particular the music
of New Orleans a long time ago. He has played on dozens and dozens of other people’s records
but has shunned and delayed the limelite himself. That is one of the principal reasons why his
stunningly good album is called “Procastination”. Ian Mckenzie spoke to him by telephone.

BiTS: Let’s make a start. I want to talk to you about the new album that you’ve had out recently and
also about your background. Let’s start with the background. How did you get into music in the first

place?

AS: Just general interest, listening to
records and stuff, and I had some older
brothers that had pretty good record
collections and all that, so my taste kind of
developed because of that influence and got

into American music and blues and all that.
That set the path for what was to come.

BiTS: Did you play an instrument in school?

AS: They put me on piano lessons when I
was five or six, and I hated it. I did that for a
while, then when I moved to this town where
I’m currently living, I was 15, 16 and I got to

know these guys and we said, ‘let’s start a
band’. None of us played any instruments, so
we started from scratch. We actually became
a band after two or three years and we’re
having a reunion this summer with that band

and I’m going to play at this festival that we
started 40 years ago.

BiTS: That sounds terrific. Where is that
happening?

AS: We’re playing the 16th July and it’s called
Fjellpark Festival. It’s actually the longest
continuous running rock festival in Norway.

We started that festival because we didn’t get any gigs. We played all this eclectic music, we would
play Van Morrison, Jackson Brown, Little Feat, Muddy Waters, that kind of music, and that was not
what the general population wanted to hear, so we didn’t get any gigs. We had to make our own gig.

BiTS: That’s wonderful. I hear a lot of New Orleans sounds in your music. How did you get
interested in New Orleans music?

AS: It’s always appealed to me. I don’t know whether it’s an influence from my dad’s record
collection, which included people like Louis Armstrong and other jazz artists from that area, but it’s
always resonated with me, so after a while, I found out that everything I liked, or I’m influenced by
comes from Louisiana.