Scan Magazine | Cover Feature | Thomas Buttenschøn
Thomas Buttenschøn: Doin’ My Drugs “There isn’t a single day when I don’t think about death.” It’s a startling comment from a man who oozes positivity from every fibre of his being. But then, Thomas Buttenschøn and death are old friends… By Paula Hammond | Photos: Adam Battaglia
Scan Magazine chats to Buttenschøn at home in Copenhagen. When asked what he’s working on, he responds with a poignant pause. He’s composing a song for his brother who’s just died.
a bad thing. It was a good thing – and now I want to tell my story, because I don’t believe that a single feeling I have is unique, and that’s what music is about. Uniting people; stopping us from feeling alone.”
Buttenschøn was born with HIV and lost both his parents to the disease before he was nine. In Zambia, where he was born, over a million people are HIV positive – that’s 13 per cent of the population. You can go to a funeral every day, and still lose loved ones to an illness that’s cut a weeping wound through the heart of the nation.
– there were five of us – suddenly found ourselves in the rehearsal room and it saved us, really. Of course, everyone, at first, wanted to play the drums, because it meant we could hit something! It was later that I picked up the guitar… Today, I still sit at the guitar or piano rather than see a shrink. That’s how I get my thoughts out. In many ways, it’s a lot easier for me to write a song than to sit down and have a conversation.” Today, Buttenschøn is not only an award-winning musician but, thanks to a stint as a judge on Denmark’s Got Talent, he’s a household name.
Reconnecting with that family back in Zambia was something that he hadn’t planned. “When you’re a teenager,” he says, “Zambia feels like such a different world. I wasn’t expecting to reconnect and, to be honest, I was a bit scared to. But then my oldest son was born in 2011 and along came this TV programme called Back to the Roots, and everything grew out of that. Now I visit two or three times a year.” It was from those visits, and his own experiences of living with HIV, that the film Doin’ My Drugs was born.
For Buttenschøn, music has always been his way of dealing with the pain and problems that life has thrown at him. Things could have been a lot different. “My music teacher could tell that I was troubled. I was starting to get into fights. I had anger problems and a lot of energy that I needed to burn off. The guys in my crew
Growing up as a child of two continents – with a Zambian mother and a Danish father – has meant that Buttenschøn often gets labelled. “In Denmark, I’m black. In Zambia, I’m white. I remember at one point, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I wanted to fit in. Then, all of a sudden, I realised that being different wasn’t
The documentary deals with the HIV crisis in Zambia, where the same antiretroviral drugs that allow Buttenschøn to live a normal life are freely available. Despite that, a positive diagnosis is often seen as a death sentence. Few people are even aware that you can have relationships, children, and keep your loved-ones
Staying positive
Issue 126 | July 2019 | 39