Tivoli Boy Still Hears the Boy Who Left on A Fairytale, Chapter One

In the early 1990s, in an Oslo rehearsal room, a high school three piece called Mental Illness was trying on the new Norwegian weather. Black metal had made rebellion feel like a local climate, and the band, by its own later account, pushed the attitude until it almost tipped into the satanic. One founding member turned Christian in those first rehearsals and left on the spot. More than thirty years later he is still a Christian. The frontman of that band is Bjørn Sponberg, the musician who now works as Tivoli Boy, and the last of the departed player’s contribution is still on the tape, audible at the very end of “Welcome to Hell.”

Tivoli is a strange name to carry into that room. Copenhagen’s pleasure garden opened in 1843 so the night would have somewhere lit to go, pantomime and fireworks in a park named after an Italian town and an older Parisian garden. A boy from the fair takes the title and promises a tale. A Fairytale, Chapter One, recorded in a professional Norwegian studio in 1995 and back now on Teodor Music, is the chapter before any garden is earned. After Sponberg heard Minas Tirith, the Jessheim band whose early records moved between black metal and a colder progressive severity, the school rebellion gave way to an argument about doomsday. The working assumption was that God had already left, and that life was walking toward hell. He places the story’s start with Mysterious Thoughts in 1994 and this EP, runs it through chapters in 2002 and 2005, and draws the close at Chapter Four, Superstar, the acoustic record of nylon guitar and cello on Teodor Music, set for November. He has since described the universe as a constructed Paradise Machine, a theory he says was tripped by the way David Bowie addressed “them” on “Starman.” The 1995 tape does not need that theory to stand. It only needs to stay the hell gate.

Six songs, twenty six minutes, and a cover that looks like an illuminated manuscript having a bad dream. Gold serpents knot through orange light. Birds cross a beam. Blackletter down both margins spells the title as if a church door and a demo sleeve had agreed to share a panel. The sound underneath is of its year. Saturated electric guitars, drums that prefer a march to a sprint, a voice that changes costume from song to song. Desperate, catacomb growl, nasal chant, high and theatrical. The production leaves the rough edges where they were. That is the right decision for a document.

“Terminal 10” opens the gate without ceremony. A long instrumental weight, then a martial riff and a male voice that sounds already resigned. Father, questions, a ship, the line that no prayer will help you now, and the word terminal repeated until it stops meaning a platform and starts meaning an end. Airports and fairytales both begin with a departure. This one begins at the wrong desk. “Welcome to Hell” answers two minutes later, and it answers in the wrong costume. Acoustic guitars, a light step, a nasal sing song that could be a children’s ballad if the lyric did not walk into a tunnel, fill with joy, and meet a man with a tail and a big pair of horns. The chorus is one dry invitation. He wonders what he missed. He asks to see the torture chamberland. The laugh in the middle is not relief. At the end of the ballad the player who left the circle is still faintly there, which is the most fairytale thing on the record. The one who walks out remains in the story.

“Solution Is Near” drops the joke. A keyboard figure with the manners of a harpsichord lasts only long enough to draw the gothic outline, then the guitars arrive muddy and huge, and the vocal is a growl with no clean melody to hide in. Little child, repeated like a warning and a lure. Depression battles the fear. Solution is near, sung as if nearness were the threat. By the close he stands alone, the child trying to get far from the voice and failing. “The Sorcerer” is the release’s one real lift. Acoustic arpeggio, then distorted guitars and a double kick, a chorus built to be remembered. He met a sorcerer who cast a spell of dreams on his sleep. Why can’t we sleep for a hundred years, in the land devoid of tears. Dawn comes back and lifts the fear, and the singer laughs, the sinister kind. For a few minutes the EP remembers that a tale is allowed to want an exit.

It does not take the exit. “We Are the Youth” is the teenage rock song the rest of the tape keeps circling, alt rock with a punk and grunge scrape, proud of its unfinished edges. When you turn thirteen, your childhood will never be seen. We are the youth, seeking the truth and having fun, then the silence after the laughs. On a 1995 recording it plays as a school band anthem. Heard again in 2026, after the singer has said he stopped playing concerts somewhere in the 1993 to 2005 stretch and now thinks of himself as a scientist, it plays as the chapter where the boys are still inside the story. “Darkbell, The Signal to God” closes the EP the way a stave church portal closes a path, with snakes and a bell. Long doom introduction, a high strident vocal, a nursery rhythm. As the dark bell starts to ring. Grandpa smiles and the children sing. Nobody knows what the future will bring. Nobody knows when the dark bell will ring. A fever deep inside, and the suspicion that it will not end well. The signal goes up. Nothing in the arrangement suggests it is answered.

What gives A Fairytale, Chapter One its weight is that Sponberg has not tidied 1995 into a polite prelude. The riffs stay granitic, the jokes stay grim, the boy who left is still on the last bars of the hell ballad, and the last song is a bell rung at a God the lyric no longer trusts to pick up. A pleasure garden is a promise about where the night ends. This chapter is only the queue at the gate, gold on the sleeve, mud in the guitars, and the dark bell still waiting.

Follow Tivoli Boy

A Fairytale, Chapter One is out now.

Listen: Spotify

Follow: YouTube · Official Site