‘You make more noise when you buy curtains!” California blues singer England Brooks, a Bodø resident for 20 years, gently berates her audience for their typically Norwegian diffidence when asked to join in on a song. They laugh, and at the next attempt sing a tiny louder.
This is the latest in a series of “Live Fridays” held at the PåPir library bar in this small coastal town. One of three capitals of culture this year (the other two are Bad Ischl in Austria and Tartu in Estonia), Bodø (pronounced BOO-duh) is also the first ever inside the Arctic Circle.
