Ida Maria

Appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival in 2008

“I met this producer in Norway and he said to me, well Ida, you’re a kind of arty punk singer, you can’t really write pop, can you?’ And that drove me mad. I was like, fuck you, I can write pop music.

So I started writing these pop songs, and thought, this is fucking fun. I love how pop songs connect with people, I love that instant reaction. I love to be on stage and to smash things up, with words and with music. That’s how pop should be…”

She’s as gobby as the Gallaghers, as wayward as Winehouse, and she makes three-minute punk-pop songs that are so perfect, they will take residence in your neural paths by the time it gets to the first chorus. Her name is Ida Maria and she's a 23-year-old from Norway whose music sounds like Bjork backed by Blondie, or Janis Joplin joining The Jam, or Billie Holiday sitting in with The Strokes. Live, she's a manic, crazed, whirling dervish, slam-dancing around the stage, screaming at the top of her register and all but trashing her guitar against the speaker stack.

Ida admits to going "absolutely fucking mad" when she plays gigs. Once she cracked her ribs so badly she couldn't walk for a month; another time she head-butted a bass guitar with such force that blood gushed down her head for the rest of the gig. She thought it was red wine chucked from the moshpit.

"Being on stage feels natural to me in the way nothing else does," she says. "It's physical. Every time I play live I want to challenge myself. I go into a trance. I want to live the music with my whole body. Playing live should be hard, physical work, like being a fisherman or a carpenter. You should put everything you've got into it."

Ida grew up Nesna, a tiny university town in the north of Norway, population 1,776, with one gas station, one pub, one closed-down shoe factory, (Nesna Lobben), and lots of mountains. It's near the Arctic Circle, which means that it's in perpetual darkness for half of the year. "As soon as autumn comes everyone curls up and goes into a seasonal depression without noticing it," she says. "It's like the body saving energy and hibernating. I think that explains the whole Scandinavian melancholy thing. If there's a dark edge to my music I think it comes from that."

Her mother is a college teacher who sings with choirs, her dad has worked variously as a fisherman, a carpenter and a computer engineer and now teaches in an education college. He also played bass in various jazz and ska bands, and Ida soon absorbed his record collection (“every Steely Dan song is now tattooed into my mind,” says Ida).

When she was a small child her parents bought her a piano and put it in her bedroom. "It was black and I hated it, so I *** on the keyboard, and made them paint it blue," she laughs. "I had piano lessons for years, but they didn't really work out. It was only much later, when I was baking a pizza in the oven, that I picked up my dad's guitar and started picking out chords. I wrote a song and burnt the pizza. But playing the guitar was instinctive."

Aged 16 she moved to Bergen, on the southwest coast of Norway, to study music. The college was run by Norway's Missionary Communion and ran a strict, fundamentalist regime, which has fed Ida's enduring scepticism about religion. But Bergen is also host to a thriving music scene, home to the likes of Kings Of Convenience, Sondre Lerche, Annie, Erlend Øye, Röyksopp and Datarock, along with a host of black metal bands.

"It was a fantastic place to be a musician," says Ida. "You've got the death metal scene, you've got people playing country, bluegrass, electronica, jazz, folk, all working in the same bands, sharing ideas." By the time she had finished her three-year music course, she was a regular on Bergen’s open mic nights, where she’d accompany herself on guitar or bass. She also rehearsed with bluegrass bands and even recorded with an electronica and brass act called Elektro Ompaniet.

After two more years in Bergen, sharing a tiny, rotten, condemned apartment with seven other people, she decided that she “wanted to stay in a place with proper windows, and floors that were somehow hanging together". Ida soon got sick of the rain in Bergen so ended up moving to Uppsala in Sweden, where she enrolled to study at the city's prestigious university.

"I studied classical music history, pop music history, rock mythologies, ethnological music, all really cool subjects. And I loved it. But I soon realised that I'd become a full-time a musician and, instead of being in lectures every Monday, I'd be doing gigs around Norway and Sweden.

Having booked a last-minute slot at a big Norwegian festival, she rushed around music venues in Stockholm to find musicians to join her band. "I got in the best guys I could find, we rehearsed for two days, and we then played the festival," she says. "We sounded like crap, but the guys were great and they were all fantastic players and it all kinda worked out."

The musicians (Stefan Törnby on lead guitar, Johannes Lindberg on bass, and Olle Lundin on drums) remain the core of Ida's touring band, with all of them playing and singing backing vocals on the debut album. The LP comprises 10 short, sharp tracks - songs about God, depression, sexual politics, partying, drinking and love - all of them potential hit singles. "I had a few dogmatic requirements about the album," she says. "It had to be 10 tracks, with each track not much more than three minutes long. I wanted it to be short and sharp and perfect. I wanted pop music that hits you hard RIGHT THERE," she says, hitting her stomach. "Music you can dance to, drink to, go crazy to, and cry to. Melancholic gone partying."

"I've studied music, I've sung jazz standards, I know how things are structured. But the pop music I make is something different. It's physical, it's visceral, it's concentrated. I can't sing other people's songs - it's got to come from my heart."

Like most of her compatriots, she sings in English ("Norwegian has too many consonants, too many Ks and Rs and Ts and Gs - the poetry is wonderful but it's not sexy enough to sing!"). She says her songwriting is informed by a benign variant of "synaesthesia", a condition where your senses are jumbled up to the point where you see sounds and hear colours. She sees songwriting as "assembling shapes and patterns", and her songs are "yellow" or "black" or "spiky". "The stage is my canvas, it's where I put all those colours and shapes and patterns that are bursting out of my head all the time."

And the personal stuff? She lives with her boyfriend Sebastian near Stockholm ("although it seems like I've been touring constantly for more than a year") where they run an independent label, Nesna Records. Her list of favourite music includes Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, Häkan Hellström, Arvo Part, Black Grape, Interpol, Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday. If you want to impress her, you'd take her to see an organ recital ("something like Bach") in a really old church. If you want to get her drunk, give her an Italian herbal liquor called Fernet-Branca ("we all drink it in Sweden, it's thick and black and strong and absolutely disgusting, but we love it"). And, if you want to make her happy, take her fishing ("nothing makes me happier than catching a great big f****** fish").

"I'm a bit eerie, like a cloud, floating in space. I am a weirdo, but I've got better at communicating with the outside world."

Her name is Ida Maria and you should listen to her music right now.

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Ida Maria 2008