Kat Boelskov

I stumbled across this intimidatingly cool Danish girl on the internet only a few months ago. Even before I heard her music, I was sure I was gonna love it. And that assumption was made from just looking at one single photo, which I later on found out was to became the cover of her first album. Kat puts despair and loneliness into her music that just breaks your heart, and she is very brave both musically and visually.
























I kinda wish I’d had heard this already when I was 13 and sat up in the middle of the night in my room in the basement drawing and crying to music that got to me. It would have fit so well into the feelings I was going through at that point. Kat’s music brings out so much nostalgia in me. The song called ‘Everything’ is my absolute favourite track from her album ‘Amateur’ and is about the feeling of being in such a perfect relationship that is so wonderful and fantastic that it feels you’re gonna explode. So you need to get out of it. Don’t ask me why that brings out nostalgia in me, it’s a mystery. Being in any kind of relationship back then seemed at the time like a paradise I had no access to.

Kat wanted to make a record a year ago with a friend, but got tired of waiting for everyone around to get their thumbs out their arses, so she started writing an album by herself in the Autumn. Within a few weeks after she started posting her music on the internet at the turn of the year, she had quite a following of over 4000 people on FB from all over the world. I asked her if she wanted to do some kind of a collaboration. I mean, she is ravishing and she is mad, so I knew for sure I wanted her to come play with me.


I suggested we did the collaboration within my paraphrase project and that we did a photo of Carl Barât and Pete Doherty of the Libertines. I wanted Kat to play the part of Pete in our photo and she was both thrilled and surprised over what I wanted to do. The original was shot the same day as Pete got out of prison for trashing Carl’s apartment when looking for things to steal to support his cocaine addiction. After serving three months in prison, Pete met up with Carl at the music venue Tap ‘n’ tin in Chatham just outside London. Carl was very nervous about meeting Pete, unsure of how upset Pete might be from being sent to prison by his best friend. As it turned out there were no hard feelings and they played a gig later on the same night.
(To the right is the original Libertines photo, which was later cut and used as one of their album covers.)

When Kat and I met up with Mårten and André to make this video, which happened already within two weeks after we started talking about it, I'd barely met nor spoken to her before. Kat came over to Malmö in the afternoon of a weekday and we tried to find a nice bar where we could film it all. First we all changed into Ravishing Mad clothes and then I think we walked around for an hour or so because everything was closed, before we finally found a place that would let us in before opening hours. We spotted a red velvet couch through the window of the restaurant called Metro in Malmö, and the chef let us in.

(above: photo by André de Loisted)

There was quite some tension in the air all along. We didn't plan anything, just went along with the making of the photo in a somewhat stumbling way. I like to do it like that. In some ways I think we kinda captured the same nervous feeling that was behind the original photo. This was the second out of ten paraphrases that I've made together with photographer André de Loisted and friends and artists that I adore. We call it "to libertines".