Gangway’s one of those bands who, as far as people in the States are concerned, can’t really be described as lost…because they were never found in the first place! And I don’t mean that in a “their albums didn’t sell well” kind of way; I mean their albums never got released here at ALL. Hell, I’ve never even heard one of their studio albums; all I have is a best-of disc called Compendium, which plays like all your favorite bits by the Pet Shop Boys, the Lightning Seeds, and…well, basically, any band you can think of that incorporates lush keyboard sounds into their pop songs.
There are a couple of fan sites dedicated to the group (like this one), but they don’t appear to have their own website…possibly because they broke up in 1998. Nor do they have a MySpace page, not even an unofficial one, which is somehow even more odd, given how many folks tend to put up fan-run pages for their favorite artists. They do, at least, have a Wikipedia entry, which indicates that, in 2006, guitarist/songwriter Henrik Balling and lead singer Allan Jensen staged a reunion show at a small bar in Copenhagen for all of 125 people. (Oddly, keyboardist Torben Johansen was present in the audience but, the entry implies, did not participate in the performance.)
None of the band’s albums appear to be in print – or, if they are, they’re only available in Denmark (and since I can neither speak nor read Danish, I may never know) – but, for now, you can at least enjoy this video by the band on YouTube.
Conveniently, it’s for one of my favorite songs on Compendium. It’s called “My Girl and Me,” and it features such brilliant lyrics in its chorus that it’s inexplicable that it didn’t get released in the States:
“My girl and me / We hang around in bars / And we’re usually drunk / But we’re never too drunk to fight / Like cats and dogs all night.”
That’s genius.
