In what is a bit of an atypical move, The Old Firm Casuals made their album, Holger Danske, available for streaming on February 18th, close to a month before said album’s official physical release date of March 15th. The album marks a few firsts for the band, most notably the fact that it’s their first full-length as a four-piece and simultaneously their first full-length on Pirates Press Records. But more importantly, Holger Danske finds The Old Firm Casuals officially unleashing what can fairly and accurately be called a whole new sonic experience to the masses; a dozen songs that merge balls-out 70’s AC/DC-style rock, blistering early-80’s Metallica style thrash and their trademark Oi!/street punk sound and bellow it through a centuries-old Viking Gjallarhorn.
We called the band’s well-known frontman, Lars Frederiksen, at his home last week, to discuss Holger Danske and all that went in to the making of this unique and widely well-received album. To say that we found Frederiksen’s personality and storytelling to be any less unique, compelling, and wide-ranging than the album we set out to discuss would be to wildly inaccurate. And while Holger Dankse may not be comprised of autobiographical material referencing his friends or his family or his upbringing, it may well be the most personal album from start-to-finish in Frederiksen’s three decades in the music business. But fear not, punk fans. Lest you were afraid that approaching the age of fifty, being a husband for more than a decade and a father to eleven-year-old and seven-year-old sons, Wolfgang and Soren, would have softened some of Lars Frederiksen’s trademark rougher edges, you clearly don’t know Lars Frederiksen. “Since I’ve become a father,” he points out, “I’ve gotten a lot more pissed off. There’s a lot more responsibility and there’s a lot more being accountable and taking responsibility for my actions or seeing the world as it is.” Still, fatherhood has allowed Frederiksen some rather important insight into his own history and behavior. “When I was eleven years old,” he explains, “I went to juvie for possession of PCP, breaking and entering and mayhem, because the guy who I broke into the house with, I took his eyeball out of his skull (when I hit him) with a piece of racing track because he was giving me a bad trip. That’s what I got busted for. And to juxtapose that, my eleven year old loves Magic: The Gathering, right? Plays soccer. Can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under ten seconds. Does Rubik’s Cube tournaments, okay? He reads himself to sleep every night.”
The fact that Frederiksen reports that both of his boys are musical may not necessarily be much of a surprise to most readers. What may be a surprise, however, is the role that his youngest son had in shaping some of the album’s sound. “My seven year old is a drummer,” he explains with a palpable level of pride oozing from his voice. “(Soren) thinks punk is cool, but (he) wants to listen to Slayer and Lamb Of God and Testament and Kreator and Manowar. KISS is too puss for (him) right now. So, when I have a new riff, most of the time, he’ll go down and jam them with me. He’s a really good drummer, he can keep a beat. That’s how “Thunderbolt” came about. We were sitting down there, and he’s like “Dad, you gotta play some hardcore. I’ve got this beat and I want to play it but it’s got to be to hardcore!” So I went downstairs and we started playing around and that’s when I came up with that riff. So there’s really a few songs on that record that he sort of helped come into fruition!” But the familial input didn’t stop there. Far from it, in fact.
To have been aware of Lars Frederiksen in any number of his projects, from Rancid to Lars Frederiksen And The Bastards to Oxley’s Midnight Runners to Stomper 98 to The Old Firm Casuals to others that I’m probably forgetting to mention now is to have been aware of how outwardly proud he is of his Danish heritage; Lars’ mom moved to the States from Denmark with little in the way of money, contacts, or knowledge of the English language and eventually brought Frederiksen and his older brother back to her homeland for a time after divorcing the boys’ father. While Holger Danske owes a great deal of its inspiration and imagery to the Frederiksen family’s *ahem* “motherland,” that wasn’t initially the case. “The whole thing about this record is that, and I hate to use this word, but it’s a little be auspicious in a sense,” he explains. You see, during the writing process, the band had initially planned on calling the album Zombies, a title derived from the song of the same name that closes Holger Danske but that was really a hold-over from the sessions that went into A Butcher’s Banquet a few years back. The album’s artwork, while not completed, would have essentially consisted of zombie-fied, cartoon-like depictions of the band’s four members. As the writing process continued, however, a change of direction began to take shape, simultaneously inspired by Frederiksen’s connection to his mother’s native Denmark, and his own growing anger at the current sociopolitical climate at home.
“My mom was raised in Nazi-occupied Denmark in World War II, and she saw a lot of things that no kid between the ages of four and eight should ever see,” says Frederiksen. “Growing up in that environment as a kid, she comes from a Socialist country that’s very accepting and very tolerant, whether it be sex, race, religion, whatever it is. From her own experiences in dealing with fascism, she’s obviously got a very strong hatred toward that kind of thinking. I think that was installed in me and my brother.” Enter: Holger Danske, the legendary Danish folk hero who fought as one of the Knights Of Charlemagne. According to legend, Holger Danske is still alive centuries later, albeit in a deep sleep in an off-limits corner of a castle basement in Denmark. As Frederiksen describes it, “the story is that every Christmas an angel comes and whispers in his ear, and either he can stay asleep or he has to rise up and defend Denmark against his enemies.“
It was during a visit from his Danish cousin to the States last year that Frederiksen began to take notice of the Holger Danske iconography that was depicted on the front of the Danish Men’s National Team’s jerseys during the World Cup. From there, the wheels started in motion, but in a stroke of serendipity, the decision to change the album’s name and direction came from a perhaps unlikely source. “What really sealed the fucking deal on that,” he explains, “is that me and my mom were talking, and she’s like “oh, you’re making a new record!…what are you going to call it?” And I said, “actually, I was thinking about calling it Holger Danske.” And she goes “Oh, that’s a great idea!! Did you know that your uncle Viggo, in World War II was part of the Danish resistance against the Nazis, and his unit was called ‘Holger Danske’?” And I was like “no, I was never told that, mother, because you don’t want to talk about the war and what happened and how you saw body parts and your family getting killed for their farm and shit like that.” So, I was like “this is it!”
As you might imagine, Frederiksen took a look at the current sociopolitical climate in the world – not just in the States – and thought that now might be as good a time as any for Holger Danske to awaken and get shit back on track. “Holger Danske was kind of a metaphor in a way where I’m talking about fighting fascism…That’s what this record is kind of about; it’s about fighting fascism from both the left and the right.” One need not look very far for examples of the types of fascism Frederiksen is referring to. Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Lack of clearly defined boundaries between church and state. Political correctness. All of the above and on both sides of the political spectrum draw the ire of Frederiksen and crew on Holger Danske. “I don’t care who the current administration is — well, I DO — but you’re going to get fucking shots fired at you either way. You’re going to take more shots than Karl Malone, to borrow a phrase from my buddies over in The Transplants. To me, politics is bullshit…Once you start telling people how they can act, what they can say, what they can not say, how they can dress, how they can not dress, what they can call themselves or what they can’t call themselves, that’s fascism…And that’s one of the things with Holger Danske. Now’s the time for this motherfucker to rise up and defend us again. Obviously I’m from a long line of fighting fascism, so I have to continue the family tradition!”
Assuming you haven’t done so, give Holger Danske a listen right here. You’ve still got time to pre-order before the March 15th street date here through Pirates Press as well. But most importantly today, you can check out our exclusive chat with the inimitable Frederiksen. We covered an awful lot of ground; being working class poor, the origin of “casual rock and roll,” Metallica’s Kirk Hammett’s opinion of The Old Firm Casuals’ new lead guitar player (Gabe Gavriloff), parenthood, the Kardashians, gerrymandering, the separation of church and state, and watermelon farmers in Alabama are but a few of the many topics touched on. Check out the full exchange below!