The Minds of 99 achieved a record for them as the first ever to perform to three sold out concerts in Parken in the summer of 2024.
As befits the country’s best live band, it is impossible to not be swept away once you hear every single note and the massive crowd in what is probably the best Danish concert movie ever made.
Yes, I know the competition Dinamarca is not exactly tough, but I am frankly happy to announce that The Minds of 99 Three Days in the Park is undoubtedly the best concert movie from Danish soil.
Even if like the undersigned you only have a vague idea about the band, there is no denying the visual power that the musicians along with cinematographer and father of the director Martin Werner work in the heart of Jant Law’s land.
The Copenhagen rock group has been Denmark’s most popular live orchestra for nearly a decade and last year proved it with three sold out concerts in Parken.
No one has done it before them, as lead singer Niels Brandt happily declares from the stage, before lamenting that the band hasn’t been invited to Rådhuspandekager after all. Handball players are permitted, as long as they win silver, as he says.
You have just enough time to snort at the arrogance before Brandt and the rest of the team launch into the song Big as a Sun. Eyewitnesses have described the performance as a stunning monument seance, capturing in full glory through the camera and microphone the stage show’s use of massive flamethrowers that were, best put, inexplicably appropriate.
This movie proves that The Minds of 99 is the first real stadium band in Denmark. Their sound is bigger than TV-2, folkier than DAD or Dizzy Mizz Lizzy, and full of more sincere pathos than Nephew.
Some of these can even be dubbed inventions of the Super Bowl. In the middle of the audience are three giant elevators. Niels Brandt sways nonchalantly on one, while in the others a string of stars are hoisted up to sing a duet with him.
Before Tim Kristensen, performing the heroic guitar solo from Dizzy Mizz Lizzy’s Silverflame, takes over, Sivas and Ukendt Kunstner, alongside their crew, are lifted up and down.
The documentary crew does an excellent job of capturing the widespread and ever-growing fan community, as this is a well-known celebration.
This goes full-on cheeseball with the sideshow featuring a couple celebrating their wedding at the concert. They even bring a choir along to sing After School to the bongo drums! This did no harm to the band’s expression which was anything but hippie.
Niels Brandt’s voice punctuates with a glaring, precise incision in a nasal tone seamlessly blending with the bombastic post-punk tunes played flawlessly by the band. Yet, juxtaposed with this wide reach, there exists a nerve within the recordings.
Unlike most concert recordings, the sound isn’t cluttered or sterile. Every single note can be appreciated alongside the audience’s palpable presence. This achieves the same balance offered by Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, the best concert film in the world, which is considered by many.
The documentary crew of Martin Werner is notably skilled in capturing concert footage, which is praiseworthy until they lose my attention by spending too much time on the ‘behind-the-scenes’ aspect of the movie.
Interviews with Louis Clausen, who suffers from tinnitus, Niels Brandt’s depression, and other hidden, personal issues dominate much of the space and many of the band member interviews tend to be overly casual and irrelevant.
But little by little, the pronounced transitions between the actual concert and its preparation, blaring sound, and deafening silence become tolerable.
The film evolves into an examination of artistic passion. Not the usual madcap artistic self-indulgence, which Brandt performs bravely and unflatteringly, but the everyday artistry that goes into a show of that scale.
An impressive amount of work has to be completed before a concert. The picking up of thousands of plastic cups after the party and the screaming match the band has with their manager because he lets Culture Minister Jakob Engel. Schimdt backstage without telling them first.
The film benefits in a big way from Niels Brandt’s encounter with Mø, who sings Under Din and performs the song’s chorus with Mø.
When Niels Brandt begs for her voice two days in advance, Mø gleefully rescues him with a licorice trick she learned from Annisette. Something special is created in the intercutting between the softly flowing, well-rehearsed duet ‘The Zipper’ and the performance later that night.
This section is perhaps the best illustration of how the film sustains the finished performance in all its immediacy and spontaneity, while at the same time capturing the comical element of all the effort that goes into a show which is, in essence, a grand illusion.
As one of the band members reminds us further down the line, it’s all just jokes. But for them, it’s quite serious.
The Minds of 99 Three Days in the Park doesn’t deify the artists but rather does turn them into a mundane, yet hard working, people who for a few minutes in their lifetime, becomes the center of hundreds of thousands of Danes.
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