Nils Bech: Norwegian artist on hit TV drama Skam, his album Echo, and writing about love (a lot)

‘Love is this ever-changing thing, sometimes you grow out of it, sometimes into it. It’s the most fascinating thing. And the one thing that everyone keeps looking for, longing for, as one of the key essences in life’

Nils Bech, a former opera singer, has now released four albums (Rex)

The last time I saw Nils Bech he was staring right at me, singing in a beautiful falsetto, in a Sami lavvu (like a teepee) on a mountain in Norway during Oya Festival.

It’s a signature move for the artist’s live performances: he has this unnerving, wide-eyed gaze that, along with elegant, slightly gaunt features that recall an Egon Schiele portrait, make it difficult to look away.

Plenty has gone on since Oya; the former opera singer released his fourth album and found himself with a viral Christmas song that was featured on the hit Norwegian TV series Skam (Shame).

Bech knew the director from its third season, where they used his track “Waiting” off his 2016 record Echo.

“One of the characters sitting in the gym, the boys are playfighting and he gets hit with a milk carton, milk goes everywhere in slow motion, I’m singing ‘Can’t I Be Loved’. It’s very erotic,” he says, laughing.

“And so she [the director] asked me, maybe it’s a crazy idea but have you ever thought about doing a Christmas song? And it was always a dream of mine, actually, to do classic Christmas song.”

Bech actually makes an appearance in a scene at a church, as the character Isak Vulterson comes to terms with his sexuality, and the Swedish cover of “Oh Holy Night” became an overnight sensation, racking up over 1.2 million streams on Spotify.

It was a shock for an artist who had been hoping for some peace and quiet during his holiday.

“I’d released my fourth album and things were quite hectic already – I was cleaning my phone with anti-bac so I didn’t get sick, there was so much going on,” the 35-year-old says.

“And then the moment I was on holiday the episode aired and ‘boom’, everyone was talking about that scene.”

Scandi culture has been the subject of a near-obsessive interest by UK fans for the past five or six years.

TV shows such as Borgen, The Killing and The Bridge have attracted cult following, and pop acts like Zara Larsson and MØ having huge mainstream success in the UK music industry. (Don't even get us started on the UK obsession with Hygge.)

“The Norwegian art scene has been quite out there for the past 10, 15 years, and now with Music Norway as well, that plays a big part in promoting Norwegian culture,” Bech says.

Bech’s upbringing is covered extensively in his music (Rex)

“I had an English boyfriend in 2001 and the whole of London was filled with Swedish people in these rockabilly outfits. I feel like Scandinavians have been in the UK for a long time so I don’t know why suddenly everyone is talking about that music.”

“The idea of hygge [kos in Norway] in the UK is not quite the case of what it actually is,” he says slowly. But he thinks it’s positive that there’s a genuine interest from UK audiences in foreign music exports. “Now if you make something good it will get picked up by someone. It used to be Norwegian artists on the small part of a label, there weren’t that many success stories. But now it gets out there.”

Culture in Norway is viewed more as something that benefits the economy and society than it is by the UK Government – the current ruling party has made it fairly clear that they view the arts as ‘woolly subjects’. It didn’t stop Bech’s friends from wanting to study there, but he realised that he wasn’t missing out as much as he thought by staying in Oslo.

“I thought I had to move somewhere, because Oslo is so small, especially if you’re gay because there are about two gay clubs and you bump into the same people all the time,” he laughs. “But then suddenly everyone moved back, because they realised with these humungous loans they couldn’t just work in a coffee shop in east London.

“And in Oslo it’s not that difficult to get in contact with people, because of this community, everyone in the arts scene knows someone who knows someone...”

Bech was brought up in a Christian home, “only gay in the village sort of thing”, he says, and there were no openly LGBT people for him to compare himself with, which caused him to struggle when it came to relationships later on.

It’s a subject he covers extensively in his music, contrasting natural, earthy noises with more computer-based sounds along with lyrics that make astute and starkly honest observations about love in all its forms.

“Love, love, love – my songs are all about love,” Bech answers, with a self-deprecating eye-roll thrown in for good measure. “And I like that the music shows these emotions, heartache contrasted with beautiful melodies. I think it should resonate in the rest of the music. So we have these extreme beats mixed up with the strings and it almost punches you in the face, which is what I think love can do.”

Bech was seven or eight years old when he realised that singing was the only thing he wanted to do, but gave up on a career as an opera singer and attended university (“so boring”), where he fell into a relationship with a man who was unsure of his own sexuality.

“So he went back to his ex-girlfriend. And it broke my heart, I was devastated. And I decided to try and sing again. But while my career was ongoing, it was always like this side project. My main project was to find love, to find someone to be in love with.

“I started going to therapy and realised that, at least for me, to find love I needed to find some love in me, to start liking myself and not feeling this shame in being gay.

“The funny thing is, for the first time, on my last album I wrote about things I saw happening to my friends. Because I’ve been in this relationship with my boyfriend for six years. So it started off with some stuff to do with jealousy, these mental feelings.”

As Bech grew older, he realised that he had a naive understanding of love; the idea that a couple has to fall in love, get married, have a family and live happily ever after.

“Then I looked around me and realised, this hardly ever happens. Love is this ever-changing thing, sometimes you grow out of it, sometimes into it. It’s the most fascinating thing. And the one thing that everyone keeps looking for, longing for, as one of the key essences in life.”

​Bjork wrote a post on Facebook recently about how women were expected to write music about love and relationships, and I wonder how Bech, as a man who is very much engrossed by that subject, considers the way they are treated by critics.

“I never thought about Bjork in that way,” he says. “I’ve always seen her as this perfect combination of pop music and art that everyone wants to be like. It’s fascinating, for me as a gay male singer I think that there have been some obstacles, people saying ‘he’s so odd, he’s so flamboyant’.

“A lot of the male music critics seem to find it too much. I think if I were a female artist doing that, it would be much easier, as least for critics, to write about how I talk about that subject. But I think things are changing now.”

‘Echo’, the fourth album from Nils Bech, is out now