Vampire State Building

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Vampire State Building was an industrial band from Norway with an experimental flair, that in their three years of existence made quite an impact in their home country, Norway. Their eccentric live show, consisting of rubber fetish outfits, video graphics, avant-garde antics and ballet dancers, attracted the tabloids attention from day one, resulting in enormous amounts of press, to the extent of creating a skepticism about their musical abilities.

They played the Roskilde festival and PopCom in 1994, and toured Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany with huge success. In their home country, Vampire State Building always attracted big crowds, but the popularity did not produce the record sales one might have expected. This had a lot to do with the small and rather inept Progress label the band was signed to.^[clarify]

The hard industrial sound of their first EP ("Frankie Say: No More") and debut album ("50 Hz Broken") did not help. But with the "nXt" EP, they finally got the radio hit they needed, through a more mellow remake of Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy". But just as the band was about to make it to the big stage, they pushed the self-destruct button, and sacked front-man and main songwriter Stig Jakobsen.

Although Vampire later released a track for a Knutsen & Ludvigsen tribute album, they never played live again nor finished the second album. They disbanded in the autumn of 1995.

Vampire State Building consisted of Stig Jakobsen, Erik Ljunggren, Kai Nicolai Priddy, Jim Ivan Bergsten, Aksel Hagen Tjora, Stine Varvin, and Carl Braathen.

Stig Jakobsen went on to form Lonely Crowd, Erik Ljunggren went on to form Zeromancer with Seigmen members, and Jim Ivan Bergsten and Lars Sørensen went on to join Red Harvest.