EVEN JOHANSEN, better known to his fans as Magnet, is keen to offer words of reassurance. “I know it seems scary at first, but the Nordic people get drunk in a different way from you guys.” But at the accurately named Lost Weekend festival on the coastal outskirts of Bergen the Nordic people’s drunkenness doesn’t seem very different from the kind we have over here.

If you have seen those cautionary TV shows which use CCTV footage from Cardiff city centre to tell us that drinking is best done in moderation, you will know the kind of thing. Revellers traverse the mostly flat route from the main stage to the second stage do so in the manner of descending Weebles. A small gang have taken exception to a wire fence near the entrance. With a triumphant roar they manage to pull it down before the police amble over for a gentle word.

Johansen continues: “What you need to bear in mind is that it never turns into violence. We just fall about and get unconscious. Norwegians are very friendly people.”

And no more so, it seems, than when Johansen is in their midst. Though other Bergen bands — most notably Kings of Convenience and Röyksopp — have established a measure of celebrity beyond their homeland, the reverence accorded to Magnet supersedes them both. A grizzled fiftysomething with more than a passing resemblance to Max Von Sidow bounds up to Johansen. He is one of many to stop and give him a manly hug.

“Meet the guy from The Times,” says the singer. “The Times? Hey, listen here! I got something to tell you about Even,” declares the stranger, in the manner of someone who has the most hilarious revelation to impart. “When he was younger he used to be into . . . Thin Lizzy! He’ll hate me for telling you that!” As Von Sidow bounds merrily along his way, Johansen greets the revelation with an equanimity bordering on apathy. “He’s the Norwegian John Peel,” explains Johansen, helpfully.

Mercifully, there’s very little trace of Thin Lizzy in Magnet’s recorded oeuvre. As with their debut in 2003, On Your Own, this month’s follow-up, The Tourniquet, mines a rich seam of melancholy from influences as disparate as Gram Parsons, Air and latter-period R.E.M. Indeed, the keening reassurances of the new single, Hold On, sound, to these ears, like a millennial Everybody Hurts in the making. If rootlessness and displacement are big themes in Johansen’s lyrical world, it doesn't take too much digging to get to the reason why. Most of the past decade has been spent not in Norway, but in the undulating countryside just north of the Scottish border, where his wife Becky grew up.

They met in 1992 when she was visiting a friend in Bergen and Johansen was funnelling his dreams of rock stardom into a local indie band. “Was she impressed that I was in a band? I think she was until she discovered that we were called the Chocolate Overdose.”

Like countless emotionally inarticulate men have done over the decadesJohansen attempted to kickstart the relationship through the medium of the compilation tape. Whatever his charms, subtlety doesn’t appear to be among them. “The first track,” he recalls, “was the Beatles’ Got To Get You Into My Life. I don’t even like that song, but it conveyed something of what I was feeling.”

Clearly something worked. Within months she allowed him to visit her in Dumfries. Shortly afterwards, a baby, Francesca, appeared. Johansen had found his muse but lost his band. So he formed another one, albeit one in which he was the only member. Why Magnet? It’s a tall story, but he has the scars to prove it. Seeking to cure his son’s anaemia, Johansen’s father — a jazz trumpeter obsessed with John Coltrane — took him to a complementary therapist in LA, who recommended a tattoo of a magnet to draw all the iron out. “Over ten years later, in the middle of the Scottish countryside, it seemed like a good time to remind myself of who I was.”

He was forced to make ends meet and in the mid-1990s he even got casual work as a shepherd. An anxious time? “Yes and no,” he says, deploying that impeccably precise English in which Scandinavians seem to specialise. “It’s not like I had ever earned a living out of music in the first place. So I didn’t know what I was missing. Besides, have you ever spent time near sheep? You don’t get many sheep around Bergen, so it was good to witness them at close quarters. The farm had cows, too, but not just any cows. Have you heard of Galloway Belties? They get their name from a big white belt that runs across their back. You’ll never find a more beautiful cow anywhere in the world.”

Thrilling cattle notwithstanding, relocation wasn’t a hard choice for the Johansen clan — at least not once lovelorn Caledonian memoirs such as Smile to the World and Homesong found a major label deal. By the time he moved back to his home town in 2003, Bergen had already acquired its reputation as the pop capital of Scandinavia.

As with the ubiquitous instrumental electronica of Royksopp, there’s every chance that you have heard Johansen’s music without necessarily realising it. Last Day of Summer and Everything’s Perfect have had frequent airings on US dramas such as The OC and Six Feet Under. And if his decision to reconstruct Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay as a baroque duet (with Gemma Hayes) seems audacious, his explanation is rather charming: “I thought that after 35 years it would be nice to sing a version where he finally got the girl.”

Clearly his countrymen agreed. In Norway it was Lay Lady Lay that turned the laconic Johansen into a bona fide popstar. When did he finally register the change? “I think it took me about a year,” he says. “It actually hit home with me last summer, when Morten Harket agreed to get up on stage and sing a duet with me.”

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