Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.08.2014, Síða 29

29The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 11 — 2014
Born in 1970, Páll Óskar Hjalmtýsson
was the youngest of seven children
raised in a small f lat in Reykjavík’s
Vesturbær neighbourhood. Both
his parents were classically trained
singers which led to a very musical
household. “We were nine people
living in about 90 square metres so
it was kind of crowded,” Páll says.
“Most of my brothers and sisters
were searching for their identity
through music, and none of us were
necessarily listening to the same
thing, but being the youngest, I got a
taste of everything.”
He recalls the various cata-
logues of artists each of his siblings
curated for themselves. His sister
Diddú, who is now a classical singer
in Iceland, listened to great female
singer-songwriters like Joan Baez,
Joni Mitchell, and Cleo Laine, while
the youngest of his brothers butched
it up by playing Thin Lizzy, Mötör-
head and KISS on his lunch breaks
at home. His eldest sister worked in
one of Iceland’s oldest discoteques in
the seventies, Klúburinn, and would
bring home all the latest disco sin-
gles. His youngest sister, who dated
local punk musician Mike Pollock in
the eighties during the peak of his
band Utangarðsmenn’s success, got
him into Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich
and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Páll hit high school during the
eighties and began to experience a
personal awakening as the world
was in the peak of the AIDS crisis.
“It was 1987 and we were just as pet-
rified as the rest of the world. People
were dying,” he says. “There I was,
16 or 17, still taking my sexuality as
a joke. When I was growing up I was
not the hottest guy at school. I was
not the hunk. I never considered my-
self a sexual being
or worthy of lov-
ing or being loved.
I knew deep down
in my heart that I
was gay, but I had
no place to go and
no place to express
these emotions.”
While people
were terrified of
the virus that no one yet understood,
the gay community centred around
Samtökin ’78 (Iceland’s National
Queer Organization) began demand-
ing responsible information. In the
midst of this, the media started pub-
lishing stories about gay men and the
gay community was becoming more
visible. This led Páll to begin looking
for information in books, and while
the books he found at his school li-
brary proved to be useless to him, he
met his first love.
“The emotion of falling in love
was so strong and so real, it was the
first time I felt something that I was
willing to do anything within my
power for,” he says. “Finally I felt vi-
brant and alive and everything came
alive to me—the clouds, the sky, the
sea, nature, weather. I woke up.”
This time he turned to Samtökin ’78
to help him find the information he
wanted to have when he came out to
his parents. “I didn’t
want to come out to
my parents and not
be able to answer
the questions that
would rain on me.
And rain down they
did.” he says.
After coming
out, Páll headed to
college at Reykja-
vík’s Menntaskólinn við Hamrahlið,
where he joined the theatre com-
mittee that put on Iceland’s first
production of the Rocky Horror Pic-
ture Show. He starred as the show’s
gender-bending anti-hero, Frank-
N-Furter, and the show was a great
success. After college he moved to
New York City where he recorded his
first album, ‘Stuð.’ Once back in Ice-
land, he had a stint as the country’s
Eurovision entry in 1997 with his
song “Minn Hinsti Dans” (“My Final
Dance”), which placed 20th of 25 en-
tries but stood out for its provocative
choreography at the live final. Páll
continues to host famous Eurovision
parties in Iceland every year.
Nowadays, he has spent the vast
majority of his time performing live,
as he has for the past 22 years. His
performing calendar is full year-
round, with events drawing him
to every part of Iceland for rag-
ing dance parties, annual company
gatherings, sit-down concerts, small
town festivals and the occasional fu-
neral. “I’m so grateful to be able to
host huge parties for a standing or
dancing audience, but then again I
can also do concerts for sitting audi-
ences,” he says. “I’m equally grateful
for the funerals, because those are
the moments where I realise that
the role of the performer or musi-
cian is one of service. That’s where
the musician comes into the picture,
because music can be so healing and
powerful.”
“I wish I could spend more of my
time in the studio,” Páll says. “I wish
I could be writing all of the time. I
wish I could be doing film scripts or
music videos or simply have more
dinner parties for my friends, but
mostly I am performing. And abso-
lutely I love it.”
Most emotionally charged
album:
Stuð (1993)
“What happened on this album was
something that probably only me and
a handful of people believed: that I was
going to be a popstar. The idea that I
would become a competitive popstar
up against the top artists in Iceland
wasn’t so common, because of my back-
ground and my being openly gay. Few
people thought I would make it to the
A-list. But this album gave a hint of
what was to come. I always think of
that album really fondly. I always had
childhood dreams of becoming Donna
Summer and this is the album where
those dreams took off.”
Most challenging to make:
Deep Inside Paul Oscar (1999)
“First and foremost, it taught me a les-
son: do not take the cake out of the oven
half-baked. It was almost there but not
quite. But I was in a hurry! That was an
expensive lesson to learn. I lost a lot of
money on it. It was the only album I’ve
lost money on in my career. It took me
a long time to recover from it. It was a
hard blow. But the next lesson I learned
was more important: it’s not how you
fall down that matters, it’s how you
stand back up. At the same time, I can’t
slag it off because it does have its mo-
ments.”
Album closest to his heart:
Ef Ég Sofna Ekki (2001)
“This was my first collaboration with
my harpist, Monika Abendroth, and
it has such a beautiful energy to it. I
met Monika through a mutual friend,
Hreiðar Ingi Þórsteinnsson, who is a
brilliant songwriter. This album was
the first time I really heard myself sing.
I discovered a brand new voice inside
me that I had never allowed myself to
express. It was much more complex
and technically challenging, much
more lyrical. I could not hide myself be-
hind all the noise. In some cases it was
just me and her. The result was a really
intense and raw performance and it has
a quality that I like a lot.”
His all-around favourite:
Allt Fyrir Ástina (2007)
“This is the best album that I’ve done,
hands down. It sums up my life in so
many aspects. I’ve always been an avid
fan of disco, Europop and trance, and
my songwriter, Örlygur Smári, and I
were just determined to make a great
pop album. So many good songs came
out of it that will be linked to my life
forever. I like performing them to this
day.”
A Brief
Biography
Words by RX Beckett
Photo provided by Páll
The Albums
According
To Páll Óskar
“The emotion of falling
in love was so strong
and so real, it was the
first time I felt some-
thing that I was willing
to do anything within
my power for”