Anders belonged to the third group. He had gained a kind of respect at the school, where he came to be seen as a troublemaking tagger, a bit of a bully. If you said anything wrong you were in for it.
Anders now carried himself with confidence and was not afraid to speak up and say what he thought. He had acquired the right look at the hip-hop store Jean TV in Arkaden, Oslo’s first indoor shopping centre. He had Nike on his feet, outsize trousers and a Champion hoodie. Every morning he styled his hair in front of the mirror, parting his fringe in the middle and making several applications of hair gel so it would stay in place. The tough image was supposed to look accidental, but the troublemaking tagger was very vain and fretted about his big nose.
The gang of four started on a small scale, spending hours sketching on paper before they graduated to neighbourhood walls and fences, or crept into the school grounds in the evening. Later on they took to sneaking into the local bus station after the buses had stopped running for the night. They carried rucksacks full of spray cans and wrote their names in hard, angular letters.
Once they had conquered the locality, Morg wanted to go further afield. He bought a map of Oslo and one day Spok came into his room, which was always in immaculate order, to find him sitting like a general about to go into battle. He pointed and outlined, indicating districts of the city, streets and buildings. He knew who the leading taggers were in the areas he wanted to dominate; he knew where they lived and relished the thought of his own signature adorning a wall in their territory. He had reconnoitred to identify the best times for a quick escape. It was as if he were planning a raid or robbery, with detailed routes that included exit strategies if the police turned up. Spok sat there with his innocent baby face, so often his passport out of trouble, quietly taking it all in. When Anders had presented the whole plan, Spok said he thought it was a great idea.
The boys were still ‘toys’, novices. Though it seemed free and anarchic from the outside, the graffiti community was strictly hierarchical. You had to find which rung of the ladder you were on. Being a toy was fine, most of them were, but it was seen as uncool to be a wannabe, somebody trying to be more than he was.
For the ambitious, the goal was to be a king. That was the title bestowed on the top writers, the ones who were both good and daring. To become a king you had to pull off a memorable stunt, like bombing a whole wall, writing over a whole underground train or tagging somewhere that was under strict surveillance. Your name should be visible in the city centre, the most closely watched place, in the main thoroughfare of Karl Johans gate or along the underground line that runs from the central station via the Parliament to the Royal Palace. There was no point being King of Skøyen.
‘How can I get to the top?’ Anders asked a classmate, one of the straights, when they were hanging about on the steps by Majorstua metro station after school one day. ‘What are they doing that I’m not?’
‘Well, I suppose you just need to tag in all sorts of places where people can see,’ said his classmate. ‘Like on that wall there.’ He pointed over to the jeweller’s shop on the other side of the road.
Anders said nothing, simply crossed straight over to the exclusive jeweller’s with its white marble walls, whipped out a felt pen and wrote ‘MORG’ right across the wall. Then he turned on his heel and walked calmly away with his head held high, across the busy shopping street and out of sight. His classmate was dead impressed. There were heavy fines for tagging. Anders isn’t scared of anything, thought his classmate, who had been poised to run.
To climb the ladder you also needed to keep in with the right people. One afternoon the four Year 8 students went over to the taggers’ hangout at Egertorget in the middle of Karl Johans gate. The steps down to the Parliament underground station served as their ‘Writers’ Bench’. They sat round in groups, almost all boys and anything from a handful of kids to around fifty, showing each other sketches, sharing ideas and talking about bombing raids. Here you could find everyone from ultra-reds of the Blitz community to young guys from broken homes, the odd petty criminal and plenty of wild cards. There was a larger proportion of immigrants than in most other gatherings of young Norwegians in the 1990s.
All newcomers were treated with scepticism. You couldn’t just turn up at the Writers’ Bench. Someone had to vouch for you, someone had to know you. Otherwise you were told to get lost, and if you didn’t take the hint you would be forcibly ejected.
If you wanted to stay, you had to prove yourself. You had to bomb your way up. To really earn some cred you had to pass the ultimate test: get arrested and show you wouldn’t squeal.
It all started so well. In the mid-1980s, when the graffiti trend crossed the Atlantic, it was seen as a new and interesting youth phenomenon. Norway’s first newspaper article on the subject, in the tabloid Verdens Gang, used words like ‘tremendous professionalism’ to describe a ‘work’ in the underground. The public transport company Oslo Sporveier referred to the writers as ‘graffiti artists’. The boys, their names given in full, proudly acknowledged their deed. The only thing the company asked of the youths was that they get permission before letting loose with their aerosol cans along the line.
Over the years that followed, the language changed. It was no longer art but vandalism. Oslo Sporveier claimed the graffiti made its passengers feel less safe. Millions of kroner were spent on cleaning.
‘Increasing numbers find their property defaced by this scrawl. We need a swift and forceful response,’ said a Progress Party spokesman in Parliament, demanding action from Labour’s Minister of Transport.
By the time Anders came on the street scene, words like ‘war’ and ‘hooligans’ kept recurring. ‘We’re fighting a mafia,’ a section leader from Oslo Sporveier told the media in the summer of 1993. ‘This mafia is well organised, with communication equipment, its own radio station and a magazine. I would call it a war, what’s going on between Oslo Sporveier and the graffiti mafia.’
The Oslo Sporveier security guards went out of their way to make life difficult for the repeat offenders. The security guards employed by the Consept company were the ones the taggers found roughest. A few of them were former hired thugs, and occasionally meted out their own kind of justice.
As the 1990s wore on, more and more young people were arrested by the police, and some of them were given prison sentences and astronomical fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of kroner, a debt to the state that would hang over the teenagers into adult life. Those with convictions could no longer go on tagging because the police knew their tags. The prison sentence was often suspended but would be reimposed if there were any further breaches of the law.
When questioning their teen suspects, the police tried to get them to inform on each other. The interviewers tricked many into giving away their mates by saying they had already confessed. It wasn’t easy for a fourteen-year-old to stand up to experienced detectives.
The police hunt changed the character of the graffiti scene. Guts started to matter more than talent. There was more daubing, less art. To produce what was called a ‘piece’, a picture of reasonable size with a number of different motifs and colours, took time, concentration and no disturbance. A successful piece was not something you could just spray up while looking over your shoulder. It became a case of ‘hit and run’. ‘A society gets the graffiti it deserves,’ commented one criminologist on the street galleries that grew ever scruffier.