Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.09.2011, Blaðsíða 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 14 — 2011
THERE WERE ONCE FOUR
RECORD STORES IN
ÍSAFJöRðUR
Sigurjón made connections and could
keep up with what was going on in the
big city.
"Bjarni Brynjólfsson, who is five
years my senior, just like my brother
Sveinn, was well hip to the world of
punk and new wave. He was an only
child and didn't mind hanging out with
much younger boys, acting as a kind of
wise old man to us imps. He organised
bands like [legendary punkers] Þeyr
to visit Ísafjörður, and sang in a punk
band called Allsherjarfrík (“General
Freaks”). He knew [future Sugarcube]
Einar Örn and brought Crass records
from Grammið in Reykjavík [a his-
torical record store that factors heav-
ily in the making of The Sugarcubes
and Bad Taste Records] to sell from
a little shop he had in his bedroom.
This place was my musical oasis. A bit
later I visited Reykjavík and stopped by
at Grammið, who started using me to
ferry records back to Ísafjörður. When
I met Einar Örn in the shop, his first
question was always: When are you
going back to Ísafjörður? So I brought
parcels from Grammið to the Ísafjörður
record stores. Can you imagine, at the
time there were four record shops in
Ísafjörður! Eplið, Póllinn, the bookstore
and Sería. And Bjarni's bedroom on top
of that.
When punk happened everything
that had come before it was violently
deemed obsolete.
"It was music's last revolution, I
think, negative and angry. For years, I
kept thinking: ‘when is the next revo-
lution coming?’ But it never came. In-
stead, music just became abridged. Par-
ents and kids listen to the same music
today. My sons and me have basically
the same musical tastes, which is really
silly. When I was listening to Purrkur
Pillnikk or Discharged in the old days,
my parents would ask me to turn down
that racket. And today my sons ask me
to turn it up!"
ENTER THE PROMISED LAND
Sigurjón says he is a record mogul in
hiding. In Ísafjörður he released two
cassettes on his ‘Ísafjörður über alles’
imprint; a compilation called ‘Ísfizkar
nýbilgju grúbbur (dauðar og lifandi)’
(“New wave groups from Ísafjörður
(dead and alive)”) and a cassette by his
own Ónýta galleríið (“The Defunkt Gal-
lery”), an experimental "band", strongly
inf luenced by the mighty Fan Houtens
Kókó. In 1985 he finally left the small
town and moved with his parents to
Reykjavík, or Kópavogur to be exact.
"It took me some time to obtain
footing. It was such a promised land
for me. Being from the boonies, I had
enthusiastically followed what was hap-
pening in the city, probably more so
than most people living there. I had
desired to live there for so long. I en-
rolled into MK (“The Kópavogur Col-
lege”) and slowly fell in the circle that
would become HAM. In the summer
of 1985, I was had a job erecting fenc-
es with [HAM bassist] Björn Blöndal,
and through him I got to know [HAM
singer] Óttarr Proppé. They were from
Hafnarfjörður."
Forming a rock group wasn't Sigur-
jón’s first choice of creative outlet.
"Me and people like Óttarr and Jón
Gnarr, whom I had gotten to know
through mutual friends, always had
the dream of making movies. I owned
an 8mm camera with my uncle Þorgeir
Guðmundsson, and we were always
trying to make movies. At the time we
were very much inspired by (art gang/
rock group) Oxsmá, as they had made
such great movies [for instance sci-fi
short ‘The Oxsmá Planet’ and the rare-
ly seen Icelandic hippie dramedy ‘Suck
Me Off Nina’].
In 1987, I decided to go on a short
London trip to visit Bjarni Brynjólfsson,
who was studying there. The Sugar-
cubes were taking their first steps at the
time and Bjarni dragged me to see them
at The Town & Country Club, where
they were supporting Swans, a band I
had never heard before. Seeing Swans
had tremendous inf luence on me. The
concert has been called the loudest gig
to be played in London, ever. I was to-
tally amazed and came back full of in-
spiration. I told Óttarr that this was it.
We should just stop this movie bullshit
and become musicians. That happened
to be right. We were nineteen years old
and spent our days hanging out in cof-
fee shops, always saying and thinking:
‘We should be doing something!’ When
HAM had performed a few times, we
said to ourselves: ‘Ah, now we're finally
doing something!’ Óttarr and I have al-
ways felt like brothers in art. We have
always had an inside pressure to be do-
ing something. HAM is really the re-
sult of the fact that it is much easier to
form a band than to make a movie."
BLOOD AND HORROR
The movie speculations did boil down
to one short film, ‘The Gay Killer.’
"It was shown once at some short
film festival at Hótel Borg. I haven't
seen it since, and it is probably forever
lost by now. Jón Gnarr played an in-
sane homosexual who lured men to his
apartment to kill them. I might have
played a pizza delivery boy or his boy-
friend, I can't remember. In the end I
was naked; he had tied me up and was
busy murdering me with an electric
drill. Björn Blöndal was the camera
man. This was a big splatter film, with
gore and all. We were much into the
world of sickness. Mass murderers and
serial killers were all the rage. Every-
thing sick was in. It was very important
to be sick. It was almost like a contest
of 'who could be the sickest and view
the sickest things'. It was the zeitgeist.
It's no coincidence we've been called
the ironic generation. All this got trans-
mitted into HAM. We decided to make
noise, and all the lyrics had to be about
blood and horror."
MAKING FUN OF HEAVY METAL
HAM started rehearsing as a band at
the end of 1987, and played their first
concert at Tunglið (a club that has since
burnt down) on March 10, 1988. Ice-
landic pop icons Sálin hans Jóns míns
were playing their first gig ever at a club
in the basement. A big day for Icelandic
music, indeed. The different periods
of HAM can be split between the three
drummers that have played with the
band.
“We were just four in the begin-
ning; me, Óttarr, Björn and the first
drummer Ævar Ísberg. We made our
first EP, ‘Hold’ with that line-up. There
was a valuable unity in the band at
this time, and we lost that unity for a
while after. Ævar was a softer character
than the rest of the band. He listened
to Sting and liked Laurie Anderson
way too much. He wore glasses and we
didn't like that either, even though Ót-
tarr also wore glasses too. In the end
we got hot headed and thought we were
too much of a rock band for Ævar's soft
drumming. We let him go and he has
been thankful to us ever since.”
“We were making the album ‘Buf-
falo Virgin’ at the time and got Hallur
Ingólfsson to drum for us. You can
hear in ‘Buffalo Virgin’ that we weren't
a functioning band at the time. Hallur
came from a heavy metal background,
which we thought was funny, as we had
started to make fun of heavy metal. We
had started to listen to The Cult and
rock music like that, and wanted more
‘rock’ elements in our sound. No one
else in our circle, the Bad Taste circle,
was thinking about metal or anything
of the kind. Hallur played with us for
a year, and we developed in a certain
direction with him aboard. Songs like
‘Animalia’ were born at the time.”
“However, Hallur had ambitions
to write songs and of course I had no
interest in that. I have always written
the HAM songs. I am not a dictator
in the band though. Most of the time,
the other members know better than
I what is a good HAM song. For every
song we make, there are maybe ten that
get tossed away. Often I have difficul-
ties when presenting new songs to the
band, because I am so afraid of their
opinion. They have controlled me just
as much as I have controlled them—
and maybe that's the foundation of our
quality. We have a very strict quality
control."
THE FINAL NAIL IN THE HAM
COFFIN
After Hallur quit in 1990, HAM found
their third (and current) drummer in
Kópavogur. A boy several years younger
than the rest of the band, Addi.
"He was the final nail in the, ehrm,
HAM coffin. A great, powerful drum-
mer, but with a simple style. He never
shows off. Nobody in HAM ever shows
off. At this time we were 100% in HAM.
In 1991 we started planning a move to
New York City, as there was nothing
to be done in Iceland. In the spring of
1993, we finally went there and it was
a kind of make or break situation for
the band. It was a hustle. We played
lots of small clubs, CBGB's twice, and
got good feedback but we just couldn't
stay in the city longer than six months,
money wise. The Icelandic króna col-
lapsed while we were abroad, so that
shortened our stay, too."
"It was in the wake of this trip that
I started wondering why everything
worked much easier in the film indus-
try than in the music business. At the
time I was working with [fabled Ice-
landic director] Óskar Jónasson. It ap-
peared to me that rock music was not
a foundation that I could live off in the
future, but that my chances could lie in
films and the comedy business. I had
watched a lot of TV in New York, and
was inf luenced by things like Saturday
Night Live and David Letterman. I got
interested in exploring more fields. In
1994 me and Magga Stína [who was
singer in the Bad Taste band Reptile]
and Jón Gnarr started our first radio
show, ‘Heimsendir’ [“The End Of The
World”]. It had been apparent since we
met that Jón and I would eventually do
something together."
HAM IS DEAD, LONG LIVE HAM
HAM played what was supposed to be
their last ever concert in June of 1994,
with recordings from the show being
released in CD form as ‘HAM lengi lifi’
(“Long Live HAM”).
"I still wanted to make music, and to
that end I operated my solo outfit Olym-
pia for one year [an Olympia album and
EP were released in 1994 og 1995].
Olympia was more pop than HAM, and
OK as such. But in the autumn of 1995,
I really couldn't be bothered with music
anymore and dived headfirst into work-
ing on stage, in radio and television
[his then projects included a staged
production of Lazytown, the long-lived
‘Tvíhöfði’ radio show (with Reykjavík
“I am not a dictator in the band though. Most
of the time, the other members know better than
I what is a good HAM song.”
HAM's first line up + Dr. Gunni play Tunglið on
October 10, 1988.
Classic HAM in 1993.