"What a Life" from Denmark band Scarlet Pleasure plays over the final dance scene in Thomas Vinterberg's dramedy, which won best international feature at the 2021 Oscars this weekend.
Everyone connected with Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning dramedy Another Round has a drinking story.
For Emil Goll, lead singer of Scarlet Pleasure — the band behind the song “What a Life,” which plays over the film’s final, climactic dancing scene — it was his first time being full-out wasted with fellow band member Joachim Dencker, or as the Danes call it, “druk,” the movie’s original title.
“We shared a bottle of vodka together and we drank it in like 15 minutes. We were maybe 15 years old,” Goll recalls, grinning sheepishly at the memory. “It was like five minutes of just pure heaven, like the greatest joy of my life, almost feeling like being out of our bodies. Then five minutes later we were throwing up all over the place and we blacked out.”
Two girls Goll knew from the neighborhood had an eye out for them, though.
“They followed us, to make sure we were OK. One of them was Mads Mikkelsen’s daughter,” he remembers. “So it was Mads Mikkelsen who came to pick us up at the train station and drive us home. I remember being off my head in the back of his car with a case of beers and feeling like I was in a movie, it was so surreal.”
How much stranger must it have been to be watching the Oscars last weekend when Laura Dern announced Another Round as winner for best international film. As director Thomas Vinterberg ran up to the stage, it was to the accompaniment of Scarlet Pleasure’s song.
“We were watching in Copenhagen, at the offices of [Another Round producers] Zentropa, it was pure druk,” jokes Goll.
“It’s been strange because the song has become something of an anthem in Denmark because of the film,” adds bass player Alexander Malone. “But, because of [COVID-19], we haven’t been able to play it in front of an audience.”
The only live performance of “What a Life” took place at the Danish premiere of Another Round in September. “But that was in a theater for the premiere audience, which is a lot different than playing a real concert,” says Goll.
The song, and the scene it plays over, are an almost-perfect encapsulation of Vinterberg’s dramedy, in which four high-school teachers decide to address their mid-life crises with a dedicated bout of day-drinking.
The film, which shows the glorious highs and the destructive lows of alcohol excess, miraculously avoids lurching into becoming a men-behaving-badly Hangover-style comedy while also steering clear of finger-wagging moral instruction. In the movie’s final scene, a tipsy Mikkelsen, who has just suffered a tragic loss, begins to celebrate with his friends and their pupils. In a single long scene, he whips himself into a dervish dance of joy, joy at life itself. Over it, Scarlet Pleasure’s song plays: “What a life, what a night/What a beautiful, beautiful ride/Don’t know where I’m in five but I’m young and alive/Fuck what they are saying, what a life.”
Says Goll, “It’s almost uncanny, because the theme of the song and the theme of the film are just so similar, about the celebration of life, with the light and the dark. Even though we wrote it back in 2018.”
Scarlet Pleasure was just coming off a tour for their 2017 EP Limbo (their 2016 debut album has the superb title Youth Is Wasted on the Young).
“We’d been touring all summer and it was over and we were somewhere in between, kind of ecstatic still but also hungover,” Goll recalls. “The line came to me: ‘Don’t know where I’m in five but I’m young and alive.’ We wanted to make a song that captured that feeling, that celebrated life but also had some darkness to it.”
The song’s infectious melody, which has elements of European folk music — “a kind of Balkan feel,” notes Dencker — came to Goll fully formed. “It was one of those very rare times where a song came out of nowhere and just felt both familiar and new. It was a pretty easy one to write, though it was difficult to produce.”
Difficult because the tune was a stretch for a pop group like Scarlet Pleasure. While the Danish trio mixes R&B, soul and funk influences — “we started as a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band,” admits Goll — the folk style of “What a Life” was something different.
“It’s slower than we usually play, or at least at first, but then it builds,” says Dencker. “Getting the transitions right, the changes in tempo, were really hard.”
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