Even after Lillebjørn Nilsen grew old and grey, it was easy to see the boy in him. It wasn’t just because he was constantly associated with who he once was, the quietest boy in a dormitory, who was out of place and lonely in the country and who wrote an immortal poem about just that. It wasn’t just because he so often seemed to look back, towards a more innocent time, a time that was now irretrievably gone: “Father has told”. It was a little because he was so young when he became known as an artist, only fifteen years old. It was probably a little because of the big, bright, serious look. The feeling that we were watching an eternal art student or student. Nilsen was fascinated by learning, and by teaching. He taught generations of Norwegians to play the guitar, through “Lillebjørn’s guitar school”. It had an incredible 18 editions, and sold 200,000 copies. He was born Bjørn Falk Nilsen and he was a city boy, through and through. He grew up in a large, noisy block of flats near Alexander Kielland’s place. The mother painted and made screen prints, the father was an amateur violinist. Notation entered his life before the alphabet. The artistic parents were not so concerned about other things. The only time Bjørn saw his father skiing, he was wearing a tie and a Borsalino hat. At home there was music all day, proper drawing materials, thick, proper paper. The boy found a broken guitar and spent his hours repairing it. But it wasn’t just through craftsmanship that Bjørn had inherited the artistry. He would remember it as a significant moment in his life the day he confided in his mother that he felt so down. “It’s no wonder,” said the mother, “you’re an artist.” Melancholy was to run through the entire artistry. It shines in the song he already wrote as a precocious seventeen-year-old, “Dance, don’t cry now”, which he sang many decades later at his mother’s funeral. It is there when Bjørn becomes Lillebjørn, and is in “The Young Norwegians” together with the other Bjørn, Bjørn Morrisse. It follows through the great success, through the sensational debut album “Tilbake” from 1971 and the breakthrough with “Portrett” in 1973. It is there when he becomes the bright voice and fiddler in the star quartet Gitarkameratene, who were in such demand that they almost lived as an endless tour. Lillebjørn Nilsen was subtle, subdued. But also quality-conscious, concerned that things should be right. There is a reason why he became famous for his lyrics. That’s how you noticed how carefully they were written, put together and polished, as he once polished the broken guitar on the track. It was perhaps not so surprising that he was enraged when four other artists called themselves “The new guitar friends”. He experienced it as a robbery. In this sense, it is perhaps not so surprising that he hesitated when he was asked to perform “Children of the rainbow” on Youngstorget, together with the demonstrators present, during the trial against Anders Behring Breivik in 2012. The song, which was written by Nilsen’s great role model Pete Seeger and translated by himself, according to the terrorist, was everything he himself hated. Lillebjørn wondered if it was really his role and place to stand in the foreground like that. But after a conversation with Seeger, he said yes, and the result caused a stir outside the country’s borders. In the rainy weather in Oslo, the city that Lillebjørn Nilsen loved and which had been subjected to an incomprehensible attack, 40,000 people stood and sang “a sky full of stars, blue sea as far as you can see.” That was the city life Lillebjørn Nilsen wanted to convey. He singled out the urban poet Rudolf Nilsen, wanted the urban experience included in the textbooks. No ode to Oslo swings quite like the irresistible “Tanta til Beate”. It was in the city that he stayed all his life. He loved it and it loved him back. He gave it much, much that is reason to celebrate on a day like this. Dance, don’t cry now.
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Dance, don’t cry now – Speech
