Iceland review - 2019, Qupperneq 24

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Iceland Review
poet. His poetry book Hreistur (2017) draws its inspi-
ration from his stint as a young fisherman, which he
says shaped him profoundly. “I went into it as a boy and
came out of it as Bubbi Morthens.” The brutal lifestyle
was one of Bubbi’s earliest inspirations, leading him
to write and perform songs for his fellow workers, who
found them instantly relatable. “I was singing them for
the fishermen my age, and they understood them. They
said ‘These aren’t the songs
mom and dad listened to on the
radio, you’re singing about our
reality.’”
Public success, private turmoil
In 1979, at the age of 24,
Bubbi released his solo debut,
Ísbjarnablús. A folk-rock record
with a dash of punk, the album
was an overnight success. “I
remember that I had imagined
what it would feel like when
everyone knows who you are.
And then it happened to me, in a
single day. But nothing changed.
I felt just as terrible. I was just
me, still, in my own skin, with my
problems.” When the album’s
distributor called Bubbi to pick
up his cheque, he tells me, he
used it to buy hash, down to the
last penny. “I had many months’
worth of drugs. I was stoned
every day, for 18 years. When
you’re a young musician, you
dream about being a rock star.
You think ‘I’ll get girls and drugs
and it’ll be great. But slowly and
surely, you start to realise that’s
not really how things are.”
Despite struggling with
addiction and its underlying
causes, Bubbi was incredibly
prolific in his early career. He
released more than a dozen
albums in just a few years.
“There were no problems in
music. Every single album I made
was a success. But everything
was a mess in my personal life.
I didn’t know what was wrong.
When you experience bad things
in your childhood, like violence,
the first thing you do is you take it and bury it. And
slowly but surely, it grows and grows. It was a really
long journey to be able to face things and work through
them. I’m still working through these things.”
“I REMEMBER THAT I
HAD IMAGINED WHAT
IT WOULD FEEL LIKE
WHEN EVERYONE
KNOWS WHO YOU
ARE. AND THEN IT
HAPPENED TO ME, IN
A SINGLE DAY. BUT
NOTHING CHANGED. I
FELT JUST AS TERRI-
BLE. I WAS JUST ME,
STILL, IN MY OWN SKIN,
WITH MY PROBLEMS.”