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Black metal star’s family says no to Norwegian tailfin honour

In line with the wishes of his family, murdered black metal musician Øystein Aarseth will not have his picture painted on the tailfin of a Norwegian airline plane despite topping an online poll.

Black metal star's family says no to Norwegian tailfin honour
Photo: Hans Olav Nyborg/Mayhem

The airline was faced with a potential selection headache after legions of international fans propelled the controversial Mayhem guitarist to the summit of a list of candidates for the Oslo region.

Seeking a tailfin hero of whom Norwegians could be proud, the airline had allowed voters to nominate their own favourite personalities. Norwegian launched the campaign to celebrate its first ten years in the air.

A jury appointed by the airline has now presented its Oslo shortlist after sifting through the nominees with the highest number of votes. But Aarseth never made it to the final list of candidates after his family spared Norwegian’s blushes by requesting that he be taken out of the reckoning. The family declined to give a reason, newspaper Dagbladet reports.

“Naturally we respect their wishes,” Norwegian spokesman Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen told the newspaper. 

A leading figure in a black metal scene notorious in the 1990s for church burnings and vicious in-fighting, Aarseth died in 1993 at the age of 25 after being stabbed 23 times by his erstwhile understudy and bandmate Varg Vikernes.

Known also as Euronymous, Aarseth had previously earned notoriety for allegedly taking photos of Mayhem member Per “Dead” Ohlin immediately after his gory suicide in 1991, before making necklaces from pieces of the ex-vocalist’s skull.

Aarseth wasn’t the only nominee to pose a problem for Norwegian. The airline announced on Monday that it had taken the deceased military commander Trond Bolle out of contention for security reasons.

Rewarded posthumously with the prestigious War Cross, Bolle was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2010.

Norwegian’s commercial director Daniel Skjeldam explained the decision in a statement.

“Norwegian currently has flights to a number of areas where the war in Afghanistan is considered controversial.

“This makes it a risk, since it could be considered provocative if were to have the war hero Trond Bolle on the tailfin.

“This is a risk we just can’t take. We know that many people will be disappointed but we hope people will understand that we always put flight security first,” said Skjeldam.

The Oslo jury has whittled its selection down to five final candidates: influential 19th century revivalist minister Hans Nielsen Hauge, marathon runner Grete Waitz, actress Wenche Foss, impressionist painter Johan Fredrik «Frits» Thaulow, and popular Romany preacher Ludvig Walentin Karlsen.

The finalists for the Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger regions will be presented on Tuesday.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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