Remembering Petter Naess

If you've heard the Ministry of Culture play in Oslo over the past few years, you've quite likely heard Petter Naess's voice, guitar, and jaw harp.

First of all, apparently Petter Naess is a fairly common Norwegian name, so the one you know might still be alive. But the one I knew was evidently born in 1951, and died on March 29th, 2025.

Petter was quite a preeminent scholar of urban planning, from what I gather. This certainly seemed evident in conversation, not that he ever bragged about his achievements, but it was clear that he was deeply knowledgeable in his field.

As one might expect of a Norwegian professor of urban planning, Petter lived in a beautiful housing cooperative and rode a bicycle everywhere. As with his fellow Norwegians, he never let the weather get in the way, since he had the right clothing to stay dry while bicycling through whatever the sky had to offer.

I became familiar with such details of Petter's life over recent years because every time I was planning to come back to Norway, Petter was intent on organizing another concert for me and his band in Oslo, most recently a few months ago at Cafe Mir.

When I first met Petter he was teaching in Aalborg, Denmark. Every year I was coming to Aalborg to play at the punk rock social center, 1000Fryd, and every year there would be a tall, thin, dark-haired Norwegian man among the mostly Danish audience.

He got a job teaching in Oslo and eventually I'd see him at shows there instead, and eventually he became that tall, thin, white-haired Norwegian professor instead.

It was around four years ago, as memory and my record of emails we've exchanged seems to indicate, which coincided with his semi-retirement from the university, that Petter got into playing music and writing songs again.

He contacted old friends that he had formed a band with in 1975, called Folk Flest. Norway is long, and the other band members lived in parts of the country nowhere near the capital, but they started up a new tradition of doing annual shows in Oslo with me and Kamala anyway.

Petter was one of the most athletic guys in their seventies that I knew, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who is shocked he died so young. I was truly expecting to be seeing him around for at least another twenty years. I gather he died while literally running through the forest as part of an orienteering event, which sounds a bit like a fast-paced Easter Egg hunt for adults, as far as I can tell.

Petter lived in an eastern neighborhood of Oslo that was once downwind from industry, as the east sides of so many cities generally used to be. It's a high-altitude neighborhood with a big vista of the city, just on the edge of a forest. From Petter's home, the forest is very close. He knew it well, and took Kamala and I hiking in it on one memorable occasion.

The second-to-last show Petter organized for us at Cafe Mir was especially memorable because the night of the gig happened to coincide with the day Stella Assange was receiving an award on behalf of her then-still-imprisoned husband, and Stella and crew came to the show, where filmmaker Niels Ladefoged managed to make a viral video of Julian phoning Stella while Kamala and I were singing a song about them.

I believe many of the songs Folk Flest were doing at our shows together in recent years were songs they had first written in the 1970's. Here's one from the last show we did together in Oslo, a song just as relevant as it ever was, unfortunately, on a subject that very few artists in much of the west dare to speak out on -- "Free Palestine."

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