by john best
monday july 24, olafsvik

late morning. drive from reykjavik in the company of our piano tuner, diddi, to join band in olafsvik out on the far western end of the snaefellsness peninsular about a quarter of the way clockwise round the country. the day is clear and cloudless, exactly as we might have hoped against hope we would have in this especially lousy icelandic summer.

so good, in fact, is the weather that i feel paradoxically gloomy at the notion that it can’t possibly last through the next two weeks of shooting this first ever film of sigur ros live. still, as we leave the city you can clearly see the snaefell glacier glinting on the horizon some hundred and twenty odd miles away.

in my memory i seem to recall the horizon at home in the uk is 14 miles away, which i guess is why you have to be at the top of the white cliffs of dover to see france 21 miles distant. how come then here at 66 degrees north you can see ten times as far? my guess is either, the crystal clear atmosphere acts as some kind of lens bending your vision round the curvature of the earth, or, the earth’s just a little bit flatter at the poles than i’d credited it as being.

the band have been in olafsvik since saturday, setting up and rehearsing in the community hall that will house the first night of their first tour of iceland this century. half a dozen posters were put up round town on yesterday to advertise the band’s arrival, so hopefully the word’s out and some people will turn up. all the gigs are free and open to all and only reykjavik and show in asbyrgi national park have been announced in advance.

the hall here is a decent size for a local hall, but small for the amount of gear we roll into town with these days on tour. it was built as an amenity for the local community, but word is few things actually make the trek out to fill it or, in fact, ever did.

olafsvik is a cutely sited if identikit kind of town, ribboning out from the fishing harbour that gives it its reason. the buildings here abandon architectural flourish in favour of the hard-nosed, harsh-climate pragmatism. the snaefellsness glacier lowers over everything, the dormant crater beneath the ice, according to jules verne, the entrance to the centre of the world.

snow caps the summit and it is this rather picture postcard-y image that we ended up choosing to front the first t-shirt for the tour, rather than alex toothfaerie’s rough rendering of an ugly fish (monkfish, i reckon) being held by a man in oilskins that was the only other image that comes up with regularity when you google “olafsvik”.

we were hoping to have series of classy colour t-shirts for the tour, but in typical sigur ros style, the designs were finished just a week ago and we could only turn round black and white versions printed on whatever shirts were available locally, rather than the favoured thin cotton of american apparel or urban outfitters. today the olafsvik shirt turns up, five minutes after doors open and it looks…. most moderate.

we’ve only printed 50 per show and on the back of each there is a list of the shows, just like a proper rock tour t-shirt. as ever, these dates are handwritten by toothfaerie lukka in ink that refuses to dry for a couple of days. there are always sheets of dog-eared parchment lying round the bus, dressing room, wherever, with pooling black liquid waiting to be smudged once the drinking starts later. writing now i can see an inky approximation of the map of iceland that will forever stain the sleeve of puffa jacket.*

when i get to the venue the band and amiina are lolling round in the lunchtime sun, some indulging in their latest passion for croquet, which they pronounce “crockett”, as in in davy. the lawn is rough and the hoops mere approximations, but the principle holds and boisterous play is intermittently joined.

the band used the weekend to work on songs not played on the year-long tour they finished last week in lisbon, portugal. this means stuff that’s fallen by the wayside, or they never got round to recording or work out how to play in the first place. everyone has their own list of what should be attempted above and beyond the prevailing sigur ros set-list of recent months, but how far and deep we delve into uncharted water depends on how quickly we manage to nail the must-haves from the show.

the idea is to come out the other end of this experience with a film giving a decent account of the power and, some might say, majesty of sigur ros live, as well as a live album hopefully capturing a few rarer moments. the afternoon today is spent running through some of the more essential visual songs in the “programme” (as jonsi still calls it instead of a setlist). there are only a couple of other occasions in the next two weeks to film stuff indoors, so it’s important we take our chances when they present themselves. this means the songs performed behind the gauze curtain that bookend sigur ros’s current set, the opener ‘glosoli’ and set-closer ‘poppsong’.

the sound in the room is surprisingly decent and, perched out the back in their minivan full of mobile recording gear, sigur ros producer ken thomas and engineer biggi, look pleased enough with the results. i am handed a spare hd camera and asked point it at the band, learning as i go what the buttons do and doing my best not to stray into shot of the other three proper camera people. with eight people on stage and only four cameras, it’s all hands on deck to try not to miss any defining moments, plus having seen this set probably more than anyone alive (imagine!), i know better than most when the cues are.

i have this idea that because when you go and see sigur ros you kind of watch from row h seat 19 (or wherever) and only ever really look at the rectangle of the backdrop and the smattering of players arranged variously across the stage. that is, you see it as a – hopefully impressive – whole rather than the constituent parts that make it up. without wanting to demystify the experience we wanted to reveal a little more of who was actually doing what on stage, be it georg hammering a drumstick against his bass in ‘hafsol’, the caul of sweat cloaking orri at the close of ‘poppsong’, jonsi sitting on the floor with an e-bow in ‘samskeyti’ (if we get as far as playing that gem this time out), or kjartan deep in concentration in his “office”, as his huge keyboard riser and bank of analogue gear is known.

the inspiration from this concept comes from bert stern’s 1958 film of newport jazz festival ‘jazz on a summer’s day’. what an amazing piece of work is that film! stern, a stills photographer who famously was the last person to shoot marilyn monroe alive, arranged his film almost like a series of photographs; the framing tight and immaculate, the shots held long and unwaveringly, way beyond the editing comfort zone.

this combination of seeing up close what a musician is doing to create the sound, coupled with the risk of the viewer’s boredom, struck me as the perfect way to shoot a band who take as long to advance songs as do sigur ros. set this idea in the harsh and annihilating beauty of iceland (here the reference point is nicholas roeg’s startling portrait of australia in his debut walkabout) and maybe we could be onto something. that at least is the idea. i wonder how it’ll look in reality?

we are using an all-icelandic film crew, precisely because we want to steer clear of clichéd, outsider views of this stunning and mystical place. (it seems it is psychologically impossible for a british or american photographer/cameraman not to ask the band to go to the blue lagoon). with denni, who edited the oscar-nominated fridrik thor fridriksson movie ‘children of nature’, as well as ‘cold fever’, and magni, who shot the also-oscar-nominated short ‘the last farm’ (for which kjartan from sigur ros provided the score), as our director and principle camera operator, we should escape eye-candy visions of iceland with ease.

gig time rolls around with surprising speed, a trick of the imperceptibly slow fade to dusk that occurs this far north on the planet. it still feels like afternoon when 8 o’clock comes and it is time for the band take to the stage. the local audience is out in force, ranged across the generations and with a distinct air of curiosity rather than ardent fandom. here and there they interspersed with a smattering of die-hard fans who’ve trekked from overseas to be here tonight.

small, over-tired children demand to be taken home by their mum’s once the full-on racket of ‘glosoli’ starts to shake the rafters, maybe to return nightmarishly in their troubled sleep later on. some little girls aged maybe seven or eight ponder why the funny man is screaming some “bullshit” they don’t understand. an old woman heads out into the gloaming to escape the mounting heat, only to turn on her heels upon hearing traditional rhyme superstar steindor andersen is about to perform a “rimur” about local fjord, a blush overtaking her cheeks at the very glamour of the idea.

other people respond more positively and, as the band mill around out back afterwards there are plenty of well-wishers stopping by to say “blessur” and share a can of viking lager in the bright horizontal sunlight on the rocky shore.
we go to our home for the night, the bare rooms at an out of season mountain rescue centre in the middle of a coastal lava field and pile as one into the twin hot tubs standing out the backdoor beneath the already lightening sky. a party spirit takes holds and amiina’s edda leads our tub in the spontaneous composition in honour of the virtues of olafsvik as measured against the big city horrors of reykjavik. i wonder whether the tour might reveal similar songs about all the places we are due to visit, so that we might end up with a sufjan stevens-style place-centric album based on iceland.

a familiar and infectious hysteria grips proceedings as the clocks ticks ever closer to the seven am of our departure to meet the twice-a-day ferry to the west fjords. first, however, it is decreed that lukka’s i-tunes must boom kriss kross’s ‘jump jump’, mc hammer’s ‘you can’t touch this’, ‘pussy control’ by prince and other timeless classics, ‘til we can take no more and go and close our eyes for the remaining minutes of the long gone night.
john x

* we will shortly have some of these tour t-shirts and postcards on the band site for sale to those unlucky enough not to be able to see the band in iceland.