Wandering Stars of Whom it Is Reserved, the Blackness of Darkness Forever

One of the cave stages at Traena festival (photo from Starmobil).

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 41-year-old who really wants to go to bed.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

MENK 54: WANDERING STARS OF WHOM IT IS RESERVED, THE BLACKNESS OF DARKNESS FOREVER

Dear Geoff Barrow,

I am writing to you to ask if you and your excellent band Portishead will consider playing a stripped down gig in a small field on a Volcanic island off the north west shoulder of Norway this summer. This is because I love your band Portishead and I love going to the Norwegian archipelago Traena, so I feel the combination of the two things might possibly be the best thing that will ever happen. I know this is highly unlikely, but I can promise you that if you attend, you will have a fantastic time.

The Traena Festival is held every July on Husøya, the most densely populated of the 1,000 islands, mountains, skerries and rocks that make up the archipelago that juts out of the teal blue sea where the Arctic Ocean begins. This main island houses most of the 490 inhabitants, although there are also villages on Selvær and Sanna and there is even one man who lives on his own in a shed on an island called Sandøy. (Apparently he is not very popular and very rude.) The people share this space with a bunch of majestic sea eagles, sea lions and some walrus. (One year when I was there, I played the song "My Father My King" by Mogwai to a very large sea otter. He seemed to really enjoy the experience and listened to all 20 minutes.)

The other big mammal that lives there is the whale. There are 130,000 of them to be exact. The Norwegian whalers hunt about 1,000 of them a year. These numbers are tightly controlled and despite popular opinion, the long-term prognosis for their survival in that neck of the woods seems to be a lot healthier than that of the cod they share the waters with.

I’m a vegetarian when I’m in the UK, but I’ve developed quite a taste for whale meat. The stuff’s delicious when it's cooked right. When I first tried it I hadn’t eaten any kind of flesh in 25 years, but I always said if I was abroad and in danger of offending a host and there was nothing else on offer, I’d get stuck in. I was a bit dainty at first and only had a tiny fried cube of the dark, ruby meat with some wasabi. It was delicious. Shamefully, the same day I ate some miso soup with wild cod in it. I really shouldn’t have done. When I got home everyone bollocked me for eating whale but no one seemed bothered that I’d eaten an actually endangered fish.

I guess all British people are sentimental about animals, and the bigger they are, the more sentimental they make us. I’m no different: I feel sorry for whales. They’re like giant tasty lumps of meat the size of George Michael’s house that swim round slowly in the sea almost asking to have a harpoon the size of a municipal Christmas tree packed full of explosives fired straight into their oil filled noggins. But people like them because they sing and they’ve evolved to look like they’re smiling wryly at something heart-warming they’ve just remembered, so we can’t help but invest them anthropomorphically with plenty of human characteristics – wisdom, a dry sense of humour, sensitivity, good manners, to the extent that it’s not hard to imagine one as a guest presenter on QI.

The author, letting the wind run through his hair at Traena festival. Photo by Wyndham Wallace.

As much as I kind of like them, I’m not that sentimental. However, I’m not vegetarian because I subscribe to an animal rights-based philosophy; it's mainly for humanist reasons. I don’t eat meat because I can’t afford to eat flesh that has been raised and slaughtered humanely outside of the factory farming system. I don’t care about the life of one whale that much more than I care about the life of one mouse. It is the factory farming system that is wrong; that is inhumane, that causes sickness and obesity in the working classes and the poor the world over.

And say what you want about whale meat, at least it’s free range.

Though, the night after I had the first cube of the tasty, gamey meat, I must have felt guilty, as I dreamt of the whale.

“Why did you eat me?” asked the unhappy looking mammal.

“Er, it was only about 2cm cubed,” I said.

“Don’t be facetious,” it said, and swam off in a bad mood.

Whatever guilt I felt had completely vanished by the time I arrived back at the islands a year later, because this time I ate a lot more than a small fried cube. Vegetarianism will not be tolerated at the top of the Earth. This is a working fishing community in the middle of the sea and to visit it you can draw a parenthesis in your dietary requirements that starts and ends somewhere around Oslo. Whales tend to have the run of the place until their number is up and then – well, it isn’t, admittedly, an aesthetically pleasing way to die and not one I’d choose, but then again (luckily for me) I’m not a slab of tasty meat the size of the 100 Club swimming slowly round the sea, looking like I would make thousands of nice burgers.

If only we could learn from the Norwegians. No deforestation for breeding whales, no keeping them tightly packed in battery sheds, no injecting them full of water and hormones to make them weigh more. No working class communities crippled by illness, fatigue, malnutrition, academic under-achievement and obesity because of whale meat. While I’m visiting Traena I only eat whale meat and other sustainable sea food. Eating whale meat is a pretty good substitute for vegetarianism in a lot of ways.

The whale’s lot has improved considerably in western Europe over the years. I was given a timely reminder of this when I last went to the festival with British Sea Power so they could perform their beautiful and oceanic live soundtrack to Robert J Flaherty’s 1934 documentary Man Of Aran in the community’s wooden stave church. The film showed the struggle for survival of a small Irish community of shark hunters. To a much more incidental degree, it also showed the struggle for survival of a fucking giant basking shark that took the brawny Irishmen over two days to kill before they could render its liver to oil for their lamps.

The author in a cave at Traena festival, photo by Maria Jefferis. 

After three days of eating nothing but whale meat you do start fraying round the edges a little bit. It interacts with your brain in a strange way and it doesn’t matter how much you brush your teeth, all you can taste is whale after a while. The toothpaste itself becomes whale-flavoured. It interfered with my sense of direction. I crashed British Sea Power’s motorboat into a ferry three times in two days. It was the same ferry, it was 200ft long and it was moored.

The thing is Geoff, if you don’t fancy playing on the main stage – it’s like a cross between one of the more "compact" stages at Glastonbury and where they stage the spider baby show at the Craggy Island fete – and you don’t fancy playing in the beautiful wooden church, there’s always the cave.

Until recent years, the remote location of the Sanna Mountains was used by the Norwegians as an outpost to "keep an eye" on the Russians and on one of the peaks there is an incongruous-looking building shaped like a large golf ball. To get to it you have to walk up a man-made, steep tunnel in near pitch blackness straight through the heart of the mountain, all as someone sings Norwegian opera. Once at the top and out into the daylight, there is a scramble down the other side, which is just as fraught. Drunk Norwegians slip off the path and roll down the side, laughing as they go. It’s like the opening scene from Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath Of God, but with drunk Norwegian sailors instead of conquistadors.

Eventually you come round the side of the mountain to see Kirkhelleren, a huge, striated limestone cavern where the original Traena settlers lived in the Stone Age 10,000 years ago. You should see it, Geoff. The beauty of it: it’d burst your eyes. Everyone sits in the cave in complete silence and watches… Portishead… by the light of the midnight sun.

Traena is the greatest festival in the world, Geoff. I think if you agree to come to it you’ll find out for yourself. I have to go there myself – I don’t have an option any more. Like a busy crackhead on giro day must get to his dealer’s and Malcolm McDowell must find the giant blue ribbon in outer space in Star Trek Generations – even if it means killing Jim Kirk – I must get back to Traena, such is its magnetic pull. The normal population swells from 400 to 2,000 as people gather to frolic in the 24-hour sunshine under mountainous outcrops that look, from a distance, like the top of the Wu Tang Clan symbol sticking out of the ocean.

Let’s make the numbers swell by a few more. Me, you and the rest of Portishead.

Best wishes, John Doran

Previously - Menk, by John Doran: You Can Do It, Put Your Back Into It. I Can Do It, Put Your Ass Into It

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.