We go all the way back to 1980 when Michael wrote the score as part of his forthcoming music exams at the College of Education. Originally, “Flying” was written as an act of desperation minutes before the deadline. The task was to write/arrange music that would be suitable for instructions in front of a panel of students and teachers. The original title of the song was “Mickey Mouse”, and the lyrics were about what might be Mickey’s alter ego, a fucked up mouse on drugs, tired of always being this nice and harmless cartoon hero. Mickey wanted to be in the air, so to speak, flying high and freely. And so he did, at least until Michael’s exams were passed.

The ukulele that Michael wrote the song on became the joke of Christmas 1980 in the Kolster family. Michael had wished himself a new guitar for Christmas, but the financial situation that year only allowed his wife to buy him a low-price Bruko uke, almost unable to stay in tune. Despite his deep disappointment, Michael learned a few chords on the instrument, and thus the outline of the song was a fact. Together with the ukulele, however, the song was soon forgotten after the exams and it was not until a couple of years later that Michael dared play the song for Bo after a beer or two. Bo certainly did not like the lyrics but he was thrilled by the melody. Bo came up with a Danish lyric suggestion, but it did not really work. At last Michael killed his darling and wrote Mickey out of the original words, kept the chorus and renamed the song after the repetitive hookline “Flying”.

Bo and Michael used to play the song every now and then in Mænd Såmænd when they were gigging the small cafés and clubs. People hardly noticed the song, and although they were responding politely, they did not know that they were actually witnessing the premiere of a Danish pop classic. Not even when Bo and Michael played the song live at a local radio station was there much of a reaction to be noticed. Somehow, the song would survive in the back of their minds and it would take a couple of years before things started happening.

When the band was collecting and rehearsing new material for the second album, Bo and Michael played the song for Carsten who immediately captured the atmosphere of the melody and completed the arrangement with a drum track that would be a mixture of traditional skiffle and music hall. Already after the first take, the trio had created the arrangement that would eventually become the final take on the “Flying” album. The penguins were convinced they had something going on because the song almost played by itself. Nevertheless, “Flying” was far away from the penguins’ musical expression and the demo of the song was made more like a joke and placed as the last title in the line of demos for the album.

The demo of “Flying” was recorded in the autumn of 1993 one late, yet merry, evening in The Albert Hall Studios in Fredericia. It became a very shady version with a ukulele completely out of tune as the pivotal point of the song. The recording also featured a solo on ordinary wine glasses, and to finish the song, Michael (who was a heavy smoker at that time), did a pretty scary laughter. This is the exact version you can download for free on this page. Hans Henrik Præstbro, the keyboard player and new valid member of Nice Little Penguins was recording the take on a 16- track recording machine but he did not play one note on the song – neither did he play on the album track. Hans, of course, had been quite annoyed that he did not contribute with even the slightest note on the track. That would have given him a share of the income the song had already given – and is continuously giving the participating musicians in the future.