archive for the 'john best' Category

iceland tour diary, day thirteen

2 September 2006

tour diary day 13

saturday aug 5th, asbygi / reykjavik

we’ve got 108 hours of footage to look through over the coming weeks – and that’s before we get to the audio recordings. we’re just going to leave it with director denni to wade through once he’s got his editing head back on. he can pull the film into a certain basic structure and then we’ll all look at it and see if we’ve got the sonic performances to match up with his visual fireworks.

it’s way too early to tell, but i truly get the sense we’ve got something special here; a proper old fashioned rock film, pretentious and over-weening, unconventional and ambitious, beautiful and, hopefully, unique.

no-one knows what the future holds, but as it says on the tour pass, “the greatest thing god has created is a new day”. amen to that.

iceland tour diary, day twelve

1 September 2006

tour diary day 12

fri aug 4th, asbyrgi.

the drive to asbyrgi traverses some of my favourite bits of iceland. the land around the abandoned farms of modrudalur is so godforsaken and desolate that it really could be another planet. black volcanic ash stretches in every direction with no blade of grass to give you hope. (un)fortunately we all sleep through this blasted landscape, waking when we hit the dirt roads turning north off the one towards the jokulsa national park.

we stop by dettifoss, a picture of which we chose to illustrate the asbyrgi shirt in our tour range – it being easier to draw a recognisable picture of a waterfall than a gigantic hole in the ground. in fact we did (well, i did) consider a shirt depicting slipneir, odin’s mythical eight-legged horse, who by legend put his hoof to ground at asbyrgi thus creating the huge horseshoe shaped canyon in which we will tonight play. but it’s even harder to draw a feasible eight-legged horse than it is a gaping maw of a canyon and the idea sadly rose and fell quickly.

if you’ve never been to dettifoss, get off your arse and go now. it is europe’s most powerful waterfall and it is impossible to stand by it – or even spot it from a distance – and not feel completely awed. clouds of mist swirl around the base of its crazily compelling drop. the sheer amount of water pouring over its edge every single second is beyond my imagination. more water than i and all my family will use in a lifetime every second, i’m absolutely certain.

unlike england or america where this terrifying spectacle would be roped off and tamed for visitors, here you can walk straight up to edge and, should you be of a mind, throw yourself to instant foamy doom. apparently surprisingly few people do this, although how you would know remains obscure since you surely would never be found. something to do with leaving your car in the car park, probably…

anyway, aside from slipneir, the other theory regarding asbyrgi is that it was formed in a few thousand years ago in a single afternoon (although i guess it could have been morning) by the motherfucker of all jokulhlaups. a jokulhlaup is caused by the volcano under the glacier (jokull) melting and creating huge body of water held back by the weight of the ice. eventually this water finds a way out and bursts forth with an almighty power, washing way whatever’s in its way. if this sounds fanciful be aware there was a comparatively minor one in 1996 that destroyed bridges and closed the main road round iceland and for one afternoon (aha!) had a flow greater than the amazon.

i don’t know if that’s how asbyrgi formed, but i do know it’s a special place. it was kjartan’s idea to do a show here and it is because of that impulse that we are today gathered here under the high cliffs surrounding us on three sides. the weather today is warm and benevolent, so much better than when we did our first field trip here two summers ago to see how dark it got on the longest day and whether we could even consider staging a concert in this unlikely place.

this weekend is the biggest bank holiday of the icelandic year and the campsites all around are fit to bursting with iceland’s intrepid outdoor types. we are once again staying in school classrooms and whatever b&bs we can find.

the field where the band are playing is down the far end of the canyon and is cut from the low trees that pass for forest in the country. usually it’s a 3/4 size football pitch, but today it is host to sigur ros’s last gig. set against the trees in the shadow on a sheer cliff wall perhaps 80m tall, the band’s gear is set up on ground level, the better to integrate with the natural surroundings. initially we had intended to play directly on the grass, but this won’t work for drums and we can’t have the strings or kjarri falling of their chairs as they go about their business, so a low platform is laid out for the band to play on and the audience is going to have to sit down throughout the show is we to be able to film the band over their heads.

not knowing how many people might turn up, we make the mistake of leaving the site to go get dinner back at the school. by the time we turn round to go back the roads are choked with traffic and we have to prioritise getting musicians back to the stage in what little transport we can get through the gridlock (except of course there is no grid, only one nose-to-tail road). i end up walking most of the long way back to site and arriving only moments before showtime.

i’m disappointed about this because i was hoping to do a setlist check to try and see that the band are definitely playing anything they have neglected to play thus far on the tour. there are fears on the fansite that we haven’t yet played ‘milano’ for instance and that if we don’t play it tonight, then that’s that. well i can tell you now, that’s that, we didn’t play it.

in the end the setlist’s good and as they take the stage there must be two-and-a-half thousand people out there to hear it. as i film the crowd, looking back from stage side, i see people i filmed in oxnadalur and seydisfjordur and reykjavik, who i had assumed were locals but had evidently travelled specifically to see the shows. a photographer from i-d magazine snaps the first couple of numbers and then sets off on the long trek to a rope up a lower elevation of cliff in order to climb up and get a picture looking down on this wonderful wilderness gathering. (it’s great, buy the mag when it comes out).

the tiny kids at the front drum along and flinch in pain at the scary pummelling percussion that suddenly interjects itself into lagid-i-gaer (very happy to see this unrecorded gem in the set). gong and andvari are added into the set in an onstage whim and svefn-g-englar and daudalagid drop out the other end (still hopefully we have those from before).

it’s a raw and elemental kind of performance, perhaps informed by the knowledge that there are no more gigs to follow. i know it’s a good thing we’ve done here and that it’s going to look amazing on film, but on the night with the significance weighing heavy all around it is hard not to feel a little less than completely present. maybe i want the sky to crack and lighting to strike and slipneir’s foot to appear fleetingly through the tempestuous clouds. anyway, i challenge anyone to have seen a better or more significant show anywhere in the world tonight.

and that’s that. whisky is drunk (peter tour manager calculates we have consumed 87 bottles of chivas regal on this two-week tour), bananas with chocolate and veggie sausages are barbequed on a little candle-lit square out the back, where in the dim past locals used to host summer concerts before going to midnight horse rides round the canyon lip, but there is no apocalyptic end of tour blow-out. everyone perhaps wants to be alone with their reflections on this ambitious and ridiculous thing we’ve just completed against the odds.

solrun talks to maria about waking up during the performance to the notion that perhaps it is the last time amiina will ever play poppsong – a song they have perhaps performed 600 times in the past six years – and no-one can quite get their head round the thought. so we go to bed and await the long drive back home.

iceland tour diary, day eleven

31 August 2006

tour diary day 11

thurs aug 3rd, karahnjukar / seydisfjordur

we leave in the persistent early morning fog, but in 20 minutes are up above the cloud and into another god-given day. somewhere past egilstadir we depart the blacktop road and hit the dust and dirt on the way to snaefell, in the shadow of vatnajokull and the site of the remaining dam protest camp. we bottom out the suspension in the gravel as we pitch through fast flowing rivers, which are edged by a moss of the most vivid lime green. we have to stop to remove the delicate string instruments from the trailer lest they get crushed by the heavier stuff back there. meanwhile the road surface plays a curious avant-garde tune all by itself on the vibraphone in the boot.

it is a high, empty world with clean, clean air and no sign of humanity. i joke with jonsi that since there isn’t anything here why are they bothering to try and save it. i mean it isn’t like there’s any shops or anything. a bittersweet feeling suffuses the trip.

we stop by a cute alpine-ish mountain refuge. high on the slope above us in a remaining pocket of snow, someone has written “stop karanhjukar’ in large letters, but the edges have melted away and the message like the land over the rise will soon be lost forever.

around the camp on the springy moss under the cloudless sky a few dozen people are scattered. it’s hard to tell whether they are professional protestors, sigur ros fans or just people on holiday who wandered onto set, a mix of all three one suspects. we heard on the way up that there was a story on national radio that yesterday sigur ros had attempted to make their way up to the dam only to be turned back at a roadblock. we also heard that someone had stolen dynamite and that as a result the whole area was sealed with no public access. it is of course all horseshit, designed to derail objections.

the acoustic instruments look so small and vulnerable in this grand environment. the harmonium and stripped down drum-kit have been set up on the bare lava near the hut, but it is decided to go 50m down the slope towards the stream and a team of willing volunteers carry everything down in a jiffy. someone has thoughtfully dug a hole to bury a small generator, which thrums away in its subterranean cell, should we require any power, but in the end the band strike up unamplified to an audience of kids and parents, interspersed with slew of national tv and radio reporters recording proceedings.

they start with ‘agaetis byrjun’, moving into ‘vaka’ and then ‘samskeyti’, ‘heysatan’ and ‘von’. five songs, no less, all fragile and tremulous and not quite as any of us have heard them before. i immediately realise we should of course have had the entire film crew and recording unit here and hope to god the footage we have will capture some of the magic of this lovely morning.

orri and kjartan do interviews with ruv and all the main news networks that will later been seen and heard around iceland. later in the shop downtown orri’s wife lukka will hear his voice on the radio in the corner and it will be turned up while everyone stops shopping for a moment to hear sigur ros’s drummer state his case – just like churchill in wartime britain. orri jokes that he said to the reporters “what dam? i didn’t know there was a dam” and that he just came to promote the band.

we all conclude that the right decision was made in coming up here, so many years after jonsi was originally arrested for illegally entering parliament to protest and bjork’s mum went on hunger strike over this same issue.

after the brief performance we pile back in the bus and scoot round to the site of the actual dam itself. the scale is suitably awesome and i gaze down into the 400-odd metre valley below me trying to imagine that in a couple of years from now i would be 100 metres south of the surface and drowning where i now stand. maria says, because it is fed by melt water from the glacier, the dam will fill up with alluvial mud and be inoperable within two decades. anyway we didn’t get arrested and no-one tried to blow up the dam and in the end there’s not a lot to do or say, but go back to the fog of seydisfjordur.

back in town preparations are continuing apace. tonight the band are playing in front of the church, with the audience arranged down the closed street opposite its façade. the temperature is chilly and the mist rolling in adds to an atmosphere of damp melancholy that could prove most evocative. the band emerge from the yurt that provides their communal sleeping quarters in this hippyish town of tibetan prayer flags and play the penultimate gig of their world tour.

there is now no touring left anywhere in the sigur ros calendar, save tomorrow in asbyrgi. although it’s exciting to be doing this amazing tour, i get the first glimmer of how much i am going to miss being part of this extraordinary touring circus, and i wonder when we’ll do it again?

commencing with the slow-burn start of vaka, fyrsta, samkeyti, the show is a cracker and despite the cold no-one seems to suffer from the frostbite that threatened in oxnadalur. paul from 18 seconds says it’s the best one he’s seen so far and tomorrow there will be more nice notices and a great photo in morganbladid. the band play ‘daudalagid’ for the first time on the tour, as well as a soaring rendition of the much-loved ‘von’, which maria says is as good as it’s ever been played, so hopefully we now have those in the can for the movie.

after the show we pad round the harbour to an artist-friendly bar where i chat to young man who last saw sigur ros in 1994 (!) when it was just georg, jonsi and original drummer gusti, all with their long hair still flowing. you can’t say we are preaching to the converted on this trip. the atmosphere in the bar is good and communal, with the disparate elements of the crew coming together with some kind of team spirit and common goal.

one more to go.

iceland tour diary, day ten

26 August 2006

wednesday aug 2nd, seydisfjordur

today is mostly spent on the bus since it’s more than 400km to seydisfjordur and the bus is not that nimble. for the first time the sheer size of the touring party has a noticeably divisive effect. jonsi is now travelling in his car with his boyfriend alex and his friends scott and his girlfriend. georg is still behind the wheel of his 4×4 towing the family caravan and now amiinis solrun and edda are also separated in another vehicle with their respective boyfriends.

this is all completely understandable (i too have my own girlfriend helen along to take pictures of the tour), but i can’t help but miss the camaraderie brought on by being alone with the boys and girls on one tour bus, waking up together and going to bed together (although not literally). the layers of separation are multiplied by the addition of a large (if lovely) film crew, as well, of course, as our own extensive road, some of whom don’t appear to have brought enough clothes along for a tour of a place that is after all called “iceland”.

anyway, this observation aside, we meet up along route for sightseeing, rock chucking competitions, listening to tapes of icelandic crank calls à la jerky boys and food of varying quality. first stop today is the incomparable jokulsarlon, a glacial lagoon filled with huge icebergs breaking off from the ice-sheet at its landward edge. this is the natural formation used in some james bond movie or other, though kjartan tells me that they had to fight hard to freeze the water in order to stage the car chase they wanted to film here. the water in the lagoon is seawater and, as every physics student knows, that’s a bitch to freeze.

we tarry not long, since we are on a tight schedule, but skip stones and look at the mesmerising blue green of the recently capsized bergs before they oxidize and go white.

further round, the road passed hofn (pronounced something like h’up) used to be a dirt road climbing a terrifyingly steep incline as short a time ago as three years when i last drove the main road round iceland. today it skips through the mountain in the kind of long tunnel you find in the alps. the road continues around the lower east fjords before tilting through the uplands to egilstadir before pitching down to seydisfjordur at the fjord bottom worthy of norway’s finest.

as we crest the rise and start the dip down sea fog envelopes the bus til little can be seen more than a handful of yards ahead. i note that, driving separately, jonsi is not going to enjoy this. when we finally hit valley bottom and come out the other end of the low cloud base, our ashen faced singer is there proclaiming it to be his worst ever driving experience. i’m just glad to see him here.

it’s evening in seydisfjordur and there is an intention to try and film an acoustic performance of ‘staralfur’ in the quaint pale blue painted church just around the harbour. no-one has really practised ‘staralfur’, however, and although i – and everyone else – loves to hear this song on the rare occasions the band play it, i can see that we are so far away from that happening that it’s not worth arguing about.

the boys and girls go to the church and for the first time in ages we see amiina armed with the acoustic instruments they always used to play with sigur ros. they enter a private debate about whether or not to try and go to the dam tomorrow morning instead of attempting to make the planned acoustic performance in the church, eventually deciding to hold to their convictions and go have their say about the destruction of wild iceland.

there is a feeling that while this dam is undeniably going to begin being filled come september, by perhaps adding their voices to the dissent, maybe sigur ros can fight the high degree of national apathy to the situation and prevent some of the many drawing board stage plans for other similar dams. with sigur ros’s profile at home at an all-time high, you’ve got to say if they are ever going to do it, it has to be now. (there was an editorial in morganbladid on tues apparently saying how welcome this tour was for national morale).

after the debate the band and amiina run through a handful of acoustic numbers to play at the dam in the morning and they sound… just beautiful. the film crew decide they don’t want to come and film the dam, since the rest of the movie is so impressionistic and requires so little back-story explanation that a political act placed at its centre might confuse. dean argues that it should be caught on film and that editorial decision made later. in the end, we agree to take just one cameraman plus myself to get a flavour.

iceland tour diary, day nine

25 August 2006

tour diary day 9

tues aug 1st, kirkjubaejarklaustar

hard to spell and harder to say, kirkjubaejarklaustar, literally means church-farm-cloister and once you realise that and break it down it becomes easier to say. kjartan teaches me and i can now say it with some degree of confidence. we arrive here from reykjavik around lunchtime, joining the band coming in from skogar.

it’s another beautiful day (how blessed are we) and the sun glints off another spectacular waterfall tumbling over the high cliffs forming the backdrop to our scene. we lunch on really good food at the sisters café, which makes a change from the service station crap which is fast becoming the tour norm, and go and claim our mattress at the school that will tonight serve as our communal digs.

tonight isn’t a regular sigur ros gig, as anyone who’s bought the tour t-shirt will notice (not on the list of dates, you see). instead we are staging a “thorablod” meal to accompany a night of icelandic rimur lead by steindor. from mid-afternoon the tiny community centre is thronged by old-timers in traditional dress, bringing in rotten shark, salt fish, sheep’s heads and other food you might think at least twice about.

the whole point of this is that, in iceland’s recent peasant past, this preserved food would be the only stuff available to sustain the population through the long and wearying winter. the shark smells of ammonia since it has been urinated on in order to assist the preservation process (?!) and the whole hall has an eye-watering quality. our edna in fact has to leave in order to vomit so over-powering is the effect.

later, men with bone vertebrae sewn into their woollen hats will sit with ladies in intricate lace along side the band members, hilmar and steindor, while onstage sonorous rhymes are recited in sombre celebration or making it through the darkest days of winter (ok, i know it’s mid-summer, but we had to have a thorablod in there somewhere).

eventually, steindor and the boys take to the stage with the sometime accompaniment of amiina’s maria to play through the three songs from their rare, tour-only rimur ep. not having heard these songs for a bunch of years, i am struck by just how powerful and moving they are and also how reminiscent of the time in which they were written and recorded. the rimur ep was made alongside the ‘( )’ album and its doomy wintery soundscapes definitely recall ‘e-bow’ and ‘deathsong’ in mood and texture, as well as providing a real tangible link between sigur ros and the icelandic tradition into which they knowingly, and unknowingly, tap.

towards the end, they play a forth unrecorded steindor track and, having only ever played it once before, pretty much cock it up, no-one quite knowing when it’s supposed to end. they are preaching to the converted, however, and, having been given a commemorative set of runes in a nice little bag, receive a very warm reception to sustain them through the drinking hours until it is time to go and watch the next installment of rock star: supernova back over at chez sisters.

most of the chat at the bar centres around whether or not the band are going to be able to fly up to the protest camp at karahnjukar tomorrow to join the campaign against a huge dam already built which is about to start being filled in september. this has been a very large rumbling issue in iceland for years now, with much of the artist community horrified at the planned drowning of no less than half-a-percent of iceland’s total area.

built in eastern highlands and fed by the rivers flowing north from the vast vatnajokull glacier, the dam is europe’s tallest and it’s reservoir when filled will swallow 57km sq of pristine valleys and hillsides. this area of iceland is europe’s largest remaining wilderness and so any encroachment is loaded with significance. helena who is one of the main organisers of the protest is in constant contact with our promoter kari to try and arrange sigur ros’s presence at the camp.

the news changes by the minute; there’s going to be a plane to take them up there; the camps have been forcibly cleared by security guards; the roads are closed with roadblocks and anyone remaining is likely to be arrested; all the legitimate icelandic protestors have left and only international anarchists remain. in the end it seems there will be no plane and the band will instead make the long drive round the south-east all the way to a small church in seydisfjordur in the east fjords.

we bed down to the sound of all-night cackling brought on by too much exposure to brennivin and the eating of sheep’s eyeball straight from the socket (bar of course the vegans). the next moring i hear that director denni borrowed a stuffed arctic fox from the school and installed its threatening presence in cameraman magni’s tent.

iceland tour diary, day eight

24 August 2006

tour diary day 8

monday july 31st, reykjavik / husafell

(click for a larger version)

we are on the front pages of both morganbladid and frettabladid as the main pictures, shot from the helicopter. dean, my fellow manager, says this is the first time he is able to register what we’ve just accomplished. there is now a real feeling of goodwill towards sigur ros surrounding the concept of this tour and its notion of somehow being a gift to the people of iceland. i’m just glad that so many people who would never normally go and see sigur ros turned out late on a sunday to check the band out.

later asi, who runs the band’s icelandic label smekkleysa, will tell me that the band sell hundreds of additional copies of their albums over the course of the day, and we have to wonder why we didn’t think of doing free shows before. the best evidence filtering back is that a lot of these people are older folks who previously didn’t feel a “rock band” were in their orbit.

one older person not won over, however, is kjartan’s octogenarian grandmother. she comes to the show and sticks around for the early part of the set until she hears the call of nature. being a bluff old soul, she initial heads for the bushes before kjartan’s mum suggests she instead goes to her house moment’s away and watches the show on tv.

“why didn’t you tell me it was on television before!?” say kjarri’s granny and so off she goes. today, however, we hear that when she turns on her telly and hears the squalling noise and feedback of ‘poppsong’ and sees the flashing lights and strobes of the band’s encore, she fears her television is about to blow up and takes the necessary decisive action of turning it off. later, when she gingerly turns it on again, the tv is miraculously recovered. i know you think i’m making this up, but i swear i’m not.

today the band leave early for husafell, home of our friend palli who built the famed “stone marimba” used by the band on the odin’s raven magic orchestral piece. we are going to improvise a piece on the marimba for the film and want to visit palli where he collects the stones with which he makes the instrument. palli’s a talented fellow who walks the lonely valley near his home in the countryside picking up the flat pieces of brittle, shattered rock, balancing them on his finger tips and striking them with a mallet to hear the note they create.

for sometime now i’ve been telling people palli has perfect pitch and can immediately tell which note he is hearing. director denni tells me, however, that it’s all done with tuning forks. either way as a labour of love is pretty impressive and the 4 metre long marimba he creates is something to behold as well as hear. each stone is carefully balanced on wooden framework overlaid with cut strips of icelandic woollen jumpers to create the necessary resonance. all four members of sigur ros stand around and play the thing together, the sounding it makes somewhat reminiscent of the carl orff music used in that amazing movie badlands.

after husafell the boys travel to meet another icelandic maverick, this time specialising in church organs, down by the elemental beauty of the skogar waterfall. they perform a special version of ‘agaetis byrjun’, which i’m not sure i’ve ever seen them play live. we will catch up with them tomorrow in kirkjubaejarklaustar, somewhere near the southern tip of iceland halfway along the bottom.

iceland tour diary, day seven

23 August 2006

sunday july 30, reykjavik

well, there’s cloud certainly. sadly there’s also a lot of hard rain this morning, which we have to hope will clear later on. there was an article in yesterday’s national press about the building of the stage, so we know the show is news, but we still have very little idea of how many people are going to come along tonight.

when i get to the site in the early afternoon, the rain has petered out and the band tell me they have asked hilmar orn hilmarsson (with whom they made the soundtrack to the movie angels of the universe) to command the weather to be cloudy but rainy, in his capacity as head of the pagan church. and, i can tell you now, he pulls it off.

klambratun looks very impressive. a large, sloping, grassy site, a few hundred metres away from the centre of town, it has never staged a large-scale music event before and the hope is sigur ros could set some sort of precedent. finni, our film producer from the immaculate true north production company, tells me he has managed to blag a helicopter to take some aerial shots of the event. also in the air is the pa, which is hanging from two enormous cranes on either side of a stage specially imported from the roskilde festival in denmark.

jonsi turns up on his shopper bike from his apartment downtown, while georg parks his caravan round the back of the art museum that will today serve as our dressing room and place where we will later shake hands with the great and the good of reykjavik who have contributed funding to make this unique event financially feasible. i meet the folks from reykjavik city council who put their money where their mouths were, while craig, the word journalist, tells me he’s been introduced to no fewer than half the current cabinet. later, the president himself will turn up, but, despite urging from the band, his first lady will refuse to parade across the stage with the brass band at the climax of ‘se lest’.

the sound-check is conducted in front of kids playing footie further up the park and sounds impressively powerful. there is a pervasive sense of trepidation among the band, this being a hugely significant event both for them personally and, without wanting to over-dramatise, for reykjavik itself. no-one has attempted anything like this before and we don’t really know what to expect. added to this is fact that the show will be broadcast live on both icelandic national television and radio, as well as being beamed by satellite to the national film theatre in london, where a sell-out audience of sigur ros fans will be patiently sitting until the early hours of monday morning to see the band go through their paces.

everyone’s families are out in force, including jonsi’s 12 year old sister sigurros, after whom the band are named. i wander round the burgeoning crowd taking stills of kids on their dad’s shoulders, only to find that the first person i accost is in fact kjartan’s brother-in-law and the cute baby his niece. we hear from the police that around 30,000 people have turned up, which if true means that one-tenth of the iceland population is standing in this field by the time the band take the stage on the dot of 10pm. i wonder if this is some sort of world record, having such a high percentage of your people at a single show? put it this way, if it was england, you need to play to a crowd of 6 million to equal the achievement.

the very un-sigur ros gesture of going on sharp at 10.03 precisely is accounted for by the live television broadcast and the need for no dead air. everyone hugs and psyches themselves up for the big occasion and then the gig is on. the site looks amazing and the wind, which half an hour ago threatened to prevent us being able to use our visual backdrop, drops to nothing (thanks, hilmar!). behind the stage the familiar basalt column shape of the highest building in iceland, the hallgrims church, is set in black against the evening sky and i allow myself a moment’s satisfaction.

the show is good and the achievement substantial, but it does, one supposes feel more like a “normal” sigur ros show than the off-menu stuff of the previous few days. in a way, i will be glad to leave reykjavik again for the countryside and its adventures.

iceland tour diary, day six

22 August 2006

saturday july 29, reykjavik

up by ten with everyone in such a great hello-trees-hello-flowers! early morning mood, not at all gruff and hung-over, in order to get back to reykjavik in time for orri to go to a friend’s wedding this afternoon. this friend, who was a junior school with iceland’s premier drummeister (that’s orri), is now a fast-rising government minister. how far our lives diverge.

first though, we have to go through the pain of a photo shoot to go with a feature about the tour in the uk magazine the word. inevitably the enthusiasm for this venture is low-to-non-existent. the alternative, however, is to get up and go and do a session on sunday, the day of the reykjavik show and i know them well enough to see that this will be even less popular. the only problem is georg made it clear last night, as he was cracking open another crate of ale, that he had no intention of getting up until late in the afternoon, if then.

the word photographer has moved his flight from akureyri back to reykjavik in order to make this session happen and so a solution needs to be sought quickly. in the end we wander up the hill behind hals with kjartan, orri and jonsi accompanied by our guitar tech ryan, who in a poor light looks a bit like a 4/5ths scale version of georg, and whose surname is actually george, so it’s almost legitimate. i toy with the idea of not telling the snapper that it isn’t in fact georg, but in the end don’t have the front and we call on him to collude with us in the subterfuge.

amiina are also featured in some of the pictures and they too have a member absent, edda having gone home with the equipment truck last night to meet up with her boyfriend, mads from the band efterklang, early this morning. we suggest that the similarly firey redheaded tour manager peter van der velde stand in for edda, but quite frankly he looks not even remotely like her and we abandon this stupid concept after a few sad frames.

everyone pretty much slumbers all the way back to reykjavik and the only eventful thing i can remember is when we brake sharply to avoid a collision and lukka goes flying from her lying position across the backseat to land the floor without actually waking up.

we poke through some disappointing service station food at the borgarnes junction and make it back to the capital by the middle of the afternoon, where upon everyone goes to ground for the night, happy at last to have a familiar bed under them.

late at night i wander down to klambratun, site of tomorrow’s gig to look at the light levels around stage time to make some decisions about whether or not we can use our projected visuals from the start of the show at 10pm. the sun will set at 10.39pm tomorrow night, so we are talking quite a lot of daylight left. however, since the sun hits the horizon at an oblique angle at this latitude, that might not mean it is that light. of course it also depend on how sunny or otherwise it is tomorrow. tonight the sun is shining and it’s a fine evening. better hope for cloud tomorrow.

iceland tour diary, day five

17 August 2006

friday july 28, hals in oxnadalur

up early to leave for the 400+km drive to the oxnadalur valley half an hour shy of second city akureyri in the middle of the north of iceland. everyone sleeps for the first half of the trip to make up for the short night we’ve had. we wake up for lunch in kjartan’s hometown of blonduos and eat at his recommended café just beyond the fence of his old high school. he is welcomed as a friend by the owner, who it turns out used to be his headmaster.

once again the sky is azure and the sheer exhilaration of being outside and doing this amazing thing – a free tour of iceland! – makes everyone (well, me at least) feel somewhat elated. we pick through the flatter marshland and straighter roads of the region around varmalid much quicker than on previous days and arrive at the breathtaking site of hals in oxnadalur in good time. thanks to the fine weather the stage is open to the air with no super-structure to interrupt the dramatic mountain backdrop.

crazy needle peaks silhouette behind the stage against the sinking sun, their distinctive shape the well-known logo for an icelandic book publisher. down in the valley at the old farmhouse in whose fields we are playing, an impromptu flea market is taking place and jonsi plays the same 78rpm record several times over, letting its speed slur as it spins. he eventually splashes out on some antique embroidered napkins.

onstage things are taking shape in front of a sprinkling of early-comers, who have to move from time to time to allow the tractor to shift the enormous white plastic-coated hay bails that still litter the field. a large fire is built to one-side of the stage and as the sun begins to drop the trickle of people turns to a tide, until there is a backed-up queue of traffic stretching back down the valley road.

the band go on a little late to allow for traffic to clear, playing in hats and fingerless gloves (where they have them), far from the now impressive fire stage left. the failing light is stunning and the gig seems to embody everything i thought of when contemplating just what this tour of iceland might be like. the band play with fire in their bellies, which i later discover is largely to stave of the bitter cold which is gripping their extremities.

amiina says they performed looking at their tuners all the time since so numb were their fingers that they had no idea which strings they were pressing. we make a vow to buy some fisherman’s hand-warmers for next week’s final gig at asbyrgi, which if anything is more likely to end up somewhere south of chilly.

after the show, amiina cellist solrun and jonsi wait around to visit the local seer who is sat in a shack up the hill telling diddi’s* fortune in exchange for 3,000 kroner. since she takes about an hour per reading this goes on sometime and after sitting round the fire and kicking a ball around in the gloom, we decide to repair to the nearby guesthouse to try and crash their hot-tub. the owner however is having none of it, so we kick around bored ‘til the early hours waiting for our singer to discover his fate (or be told the vacuous claptrap that is the stock in trade of such charlatans, if, like me you’re cynical) before heading off for another too short night in a nylon sleeping bag on a narrow uncomfortable bed, this time in a local school. ah, the glamour of the road!

* tomorrow edna, who works with me on the management will turn up and inform me that where she’s from – the philippines – diddi means “nipples”. nice.

iceland tour diary, day four

16 August 2006

thursday july 27, djupavik

the road from isafjordur to djupavik on the eastern side of the west fjords is even more challenging, lonely and circuitous than before. we leave later than intended after the frivolity of the night before and dawdle perhaps too much on the way. somewhere along the way, we stop for a piss and someone starts throwing stones at yea distant rock. jonsi suggests we spice it up by trying with our left hands. this simple idea turns out to be killingly funny in actuality, as all ideas of macho competition evaporate in display of flimsy-armed uselessness. despite a long run up my own effort clunks to the ground no more than a dozen feet away, while orri can only manage a steep arc terminating about one step in front of his boots. amiini hildur is once again the best and one suspects she might be secretly ambidextrous. anyway, as free entertainment it’s hard to beat.

the shoreline on the eastern facing beaches along which we are now winding is confusingly littered with huge logjams of tree trunks, while the landscape all around contains none. maria explains that these bleached and dessicated behemoths have made the long waterborne journey from norway and northern russia beyond to lay here unloved and unused.

a result of all this rubbernecking and time wasting, including stops to pick berries and the bitter leaves of dog sour and watch the sheep eat seaweed, we are more than a couple of hours late for our scheduled arrival at the far-flung djupavik and all the filming we have to do. the site, however, is stunning with a huge rusting hulk of an 1890’s boat resting on the beach in front of the crumbling remains of the once vibrant fish factory that dominates the cove.

immediately, the amiina girls and jonsi are crawling through a short length of pipe maybe 80cm across into a large circular tank some 15 metres in diameter by 8 metres high (i’m guessing these dimensions). one of several silos standing out the back of the processing plant, this used to contain fish oil and has in its base a kind of oversized kettle element for maintaining the fishy by-product at the right temperature. it looks like something from tarkovsky’s movie stalker where they enter the forbidden zone (great movie, by the way).

today we are recording a version of a song named ‘guitardjamm’, which is just strings, vocals and some filigree touches of guitar, quite at odds with the wig-out implied by the title. the sound in the tank is unbelievably atmospheric and the reverb-laden results to me are redolent of the miasmic soundscapes the early sigur ros created for their debut, ‘von’.

the pipe is too small for the guitar amp to fit through into the tank and it stands outside in the grass pointing towards jonsi some metres distant. occasionally the gulls and arctic terns wheeling overhead outside are audible through an open square in the roof and these will probably be evident on the finished recording being captured by ken and biggi on the other end of the pipe.

once this is over, the band move to the factory for the first time, where they discover their gear is too tightly arranged between decaying and anomalous american automobiles in the dark concrete skeleton of dead building.

while it certainly looks great, the situation is far from ideal for creating music you intend to present to the world at large. the players’ sightlines by which they stay in touch with each other on stage are either interrupted by pillars or non-existent and the monitor desk from where they get the sound they hear on stage (rather than what the audience hear) stands on the other side of a high wall. sadly there is also no time left to sound-check to iron out potential problems and we go into the show blindfold, a situation not perhaps helped by the fact that tonight we have decided to try and play our most experimental set for years, including lagid-i-gaer, daudalagid, e-bow, vaka, fyrsta and samskeyti and von

nevertheless, the atmosphere as the band start up is pretty electric. in this bay where only two people live year round, around 200 folks have travelled in to see an unadvertised show in a woe-begotten industrial relic. as before, children and old-timers intermingle with the hipsters and tobacco chewers. i have never seen so many traditional icelandic jumpers in one place at one time.

the show is tough on the band and we all vow to get up earlier than planned so that we don’t have these problems again tomorrow after another long day driving. after the show in the dim light of the early hours our sound guy goth catches the third and biggest of his three cod today, while inside the cosy confines of the djupavik hotel (http://www.djupavik.com) the band drink chivas regal and ponder what it must be like here in the winter, when only a once-a-week delivery van supplies asbjorn and his wife, who have lived here for some twenty years without going all shining on one another.