Garden of Delight – Blessed Minutes 7” (Moonlight Productions, 1984)

Wait. I know what you’re thinking - but we’re not talking about the much better known  German Goth band that emerged in  the early 90’s here. 

What we have here is something much earlier, much more obscure, and from, of all places, Norway. Indeed, I must confess to having stumbled across them quite by accident on the net while looking for something entirely different. 

Apparently one of the first Goth bands in Norway but beyond that, not much information is available here, and short of any native Norwegian speakers with an access to fanzines of the time, I doubt there ever will be.

Garden of Delight popped out two singles in 1984 of which “Blessed Minutes” and its B-Side “Glory”, appears to have been the first. It may not be the be all and end all of Goth, but I’ve certainly heard far worse. They clearly had a taste for nice Pornography-era Cure style instrumentation, but whether getting in session musicians to include a horns section on “Blessed Minutes” was a good idea remains debatable. 

Despite its eccentric beginning and unusual lyrics (perhaps “glory to your broken leg” sounds slightly less daft in Norwegian?) “Glory” is a much stronger song, leaving one to speculate on why it was the B-Side? Stranger still, why make a video clip for the B side of a single? Meanwhile, the art work for the B-side certainly suggests the Norwegian music scene may have had a taste for blasphemy long before the Black Metal explosion of the early 90s.

By 1987 Garden of Delight had apparently shed the Goth trappings, releasing their only full length album Big Wheels in Emotion (Pale Records) which I can’t claim to have heard, but the cover art certainly doesn’t inspire confidence. Nor does the fact that no one seems to have uploaded any tracks from it onto Youtube, or that the band seems to have vanished into the void of obscurity shortly thereafter.

Rather more interesting though is Garden of Delight’s second single "22 Faces" (Moonlight Productions, 1984), not so much for its quality, it is in fact a substantially wimpier beast than its predecessor, as for The Strange Tale of The Riff That Wouldn't Die.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, because it’s extremely close to the riff used by Nirvana on their 1991 single “Come as You Are”. Yes! That riff! The one Killing Joke threatened to sue them for ripping off their 1985 song “Eighties”. A threat of legal action that must have taken considerable chutzpah, considering that not only did Garden of Delight beat Killing Joke to it by a year, but also, that the riff seems to have originally come from the 1982 song “Life Goes On” by The Damned, who so far have been very nice indeed in not threatening to sue anyone.


Youtube does also seem to have a couple of tracks from Garden of Delight's 1983 demo which for the sake of completeness we may as well include.

Track Listing:

1. Blessed Minutes

2. Glory

Line Up: Mai-Britt Kristoffersen (vocals), Bitten Forsudd (vocals, guitar), Heidi Hansen (bass), Atle Solberg (keyboards, percussion), Bjorn Pettersen (drums, percussion ).

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Garden-of-Delight/324154985733
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Garden+Of+Delight