Eivind Kløverød plays with Jackie Leven (subheading “KLØVERØD MED LEVEN”; main headline not reliably legible in the OCR)

Under the heading “Vestfossens uslepne diamant” (“Vestfossen’s uncut diamond”), Johnny Andreassen profiles the drummer Eivind Kløverød in Drammens Tidende (30 August 2005). The occasion: on Saturday 24 September the new Union Scene in Drammen is officially opened with a concert by the Scot Jackie Leven. According to the paper, Leven has put together a band “for the first time since he led the legendary Doll By Doll in the early eighties”, with Kløverød on percussion. That claim is the newspaper’s own.

Andreassen calls the background a “tall tale”: at the Working Class Hero festival on 1 May, which the critic Øyvind Gundersen had rated a six, Leven played solo. Kløverød, who had played as support with the Bent Bredesen Trio, walked on “completely impulsively” with his kit. The roughly 150 present still talk about the magic between the two. Kløverød says he had listened to Leven – “This is good. I could have played here” – and asked the sound man to set up his drums; “after a couple of beers” he was probably a bit cocky, and it was “cheeky”, since you never know what reaction you will trigger. Bredesen was horrified and shouted “no, no”.

For the collaboration he is building a “very special instrument”. After the Drammen concert he is to tour Germany and Switzerland with Leven and the new group, Leven’s “Small World Orchestra”. Kløverød, drummer in Jonas Fjeld’s band and lately in the Jensengruppen, is called a “find” and perhaps Norway’s most exciting drummer by Dagbladet. Of playing together he says, “We talk to each other without talking”; he dislikes the word jam because it is far more constructive and structured. He never went to music school – “The school I attended is called Jonny Aasgaard”.