To Be Humbled in Iceland - Adventures in Reykjavik with Wounded Knee, Withered Hand and Benni Hemm Hemm
In a dimly-lit
wood-lined bar-restaurant, Burns Night is in full swing. Haggis and
whisky are on the menu, there's Irn Bru behind the bar, and the
kilt-clad staff more than look the part. In a book-lined corner of
the room lined with tat-shop Saltire bunting and a lion rampant, a
band are playing My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose, while on the tables
Oor Wullie grins cheekily on little tartan flags. Watching over all
this on the walls and behind the band is the bard himself, his heroic
head-and-shoulders visage captured in an image made iconic by
Alexander Nasmyth's 1787 portrait, and made immortal on shortbread
tins and poetry compendiums for ever after.
At first glance, such a
gathering looks and sounds like a million and one similar events
taking place on January 25th. Look closer, however, and
you notice that Nasmyth's image of Burns has been altered in such a
way that he now seems to be sporting a Nordic-patterned wooly jumper,
while a volcano appears to be erupting out of his head. The band,
meanwhile, made up of an ad hoc super-group of alumni from
Edinburgh's lo-fi DIY music scene, have somehow conspired to imbue My
Love Is Like A Red Red Rose and other works from the Scots canon with
a drone-based urgency more akin to The Velvet Underground than a more
regular Burns Night turn.
One look out of the
window of Kex Hostel and the blanket of thick white snow outside is a
bracing reminder that this Burns Night is actually taking place, not
in some Highland village hall, but in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, in
a former biscuit factory (Kex means 'biscuit') which has become one
of the coolest venues in town, where they clearly do things
differently. This is something Dan Willson, aka Withered Hand,
realised when he opened his front door in Edinburgh to take receipt
of six kilts for the Kex staff, only to be greeted by just departed
Hibs player and Icelandic international, Victor Palsson.
The Burns celebrations
form the opening night of Kex Hostel's inaugural Scottish Festival
Week, a seven-day celebration of all things Caledonian with gigs
every night featuring Withered Hand, en route to a Celtic Connections
show and a forthcoming EP on Fence Records, plus Archive Trails
veteran Drew Wright's Wounded Knee project, which soon travels to
Sweden to play shows with Muscles of Joy. Drummer Owen Williams, who
plays in a multitude of acts including The Pineapple Chunks, Two
Wings, Eagleowl and Jesus H Foxx, provides the backbone of both.
Also in attendance is
artist Tessa Lynch, who has exhibited at the Collective and
Transmission galleries, and who did the posters, as well as collating
the filmed back-drop of some lesser-sung Scots icons in action. Tom
Weir's up there, climbing the hills in his wooly hat in weir's way,
as is Jesse Rae, who, Claymore in hand, was an early pioneer of
bridging oceans, as his magnificently over-the-top video for his 1983
almost hit, Over The Sea, testifies to.
Making up the rest of a
band cheekily dubbed The Sassenachs are Icelandic bass player Pall
Ivan Palsson, and local hero Benedikt H Hermannsson, who, as Benni
Hemm Hemm, has released several albums in Iceland and the UK.
Hermannsson spent two years in Edinburgh, playing and recording with
a host of acts, including Wright, Wilson and Williams. While the
release of an English-language album from that period is pending, a
bi-lingual song-cycle written with Alasdair Roberts has been
performed with a choir in Reykjavik. Despite the best efforts of all
involved, the piece remains unseen in Scotland.
Kex's Scottish Festival
Week was initiated at the behest of Petur Marteinsson - another
former Icelandic footballer who once played for Stoke City - and
film producer Kristinn Vilbergsson, two of six shareholders in Kex.
Like Marteinsson, the other four are also ex-footballers, who got
involved in the project after Vilbergsson was sourcing locations, and
stumbled on a then deserted building beside the sea which smelt of
vanilla, and which had been left behind in Iceland's financial crash.
Eighteen months on, Kex has enlivened a part of Reykjavik previously
neglected. With cutting-edge rtist-run gallery space The Living Art
Museum next door and a dance studio above, that has all changed, with
The Living Art Museum hosting an opening during Scottish Festival
Week.
The real credit for the
week must go to ex-pat and former Dundee University student, Verity
Flett, who currently works at Kex, having moved to Reykjavik from
Scotland two years ago. Flett had the idea during a brainstorming
session on how to lively up an otherwise quiet January, and, despite
never having heard of Burns, Marteinsson and Vilbergsson went for an
occasion that tallied with their idea of Kex as a 'social hostel'. A
ceilidh band was mooted, but the one they approached had a gig in
South Korea, so Benni Hemm Hemm was approached instead.
Burns Night begins with
solo sets by Willson and Wright, before The Sassenachs join forces
for a mixture of original songs by all three writers onstage. These
are interspersed with Scots classics normally dealt with in a more
timorous fashion. The evening closes with a rousing, startlingly
modern take on Hamish Henderson's anthem in waiting, Freedom Come All
Ye. With Wright's Scots-accented baritone and two-fingered guitar
leading, the song sounds thrillingly like a cross between Sister Ray
and All Tomorrow's Parties.
While a tartan-clad
ex-pat sings more traditional Scots songs, Marteinsson and Wright are
interviewed in a live on- location report for an Icelandic TV news
magazine. Wright explains the event's lack of bagpipes as being down
to Reykjavik’s only known player being unavailable, before
explaining how the banning of bagpipes, tartan and Gaelic after
Culloden led to the rise of songs being taught orally via cantarrach,
or, which he then proceeds to demonstrate. If any forthcoming
Scottish government, devolved, independent or otherwise, is looking
for an international cultural ambassador, Wright is clearly the man
for the job.
During the second
night's Kex show, Wright and Williams improvise a scratchy, free jazz
backing, Lynch reads the lyrics to Iceland, a song penned by Mark E
Smith in 1981 when his band The Fall were only the fourth
contemporary UK act to have played in Reykjavik. The first three were
The Clash, The Stranglers and Any Trouble. Smith's song references
Megas Jonsson, an Icelandic music legend whose eccentricities and
wilful singularity mirror Smith's own. The song is riddled with
inaccuracies, according to Hermannsson, but no-one seems to mind, or
even notice, even if it is probably the first time the song has been
performed in Reykjavik since it was written, possibly ever.
At a Saturday afternoon
choir concert that forms part of the neighbouring Dark Days Music
Festival, a new piece by Hermannsson is premiered alongside eleven
others, including a new work by Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Ros.
Jonsson, who keeps a close eye on the local scene, is in attendance.
Back at Kex,
Marteinsson, Vilbergsson and Flett are loving their Scottish Festival
Week, and already have plans for a follow-up next year. They may be
onto something. In the current political climate, with a Nordic-Scots
alliance being mooted ever more favourably, the potential for further
collaborations are endless. Beyond Kex, there is also Airwaves,
Reykjavik's premiere music festival, which, since 1999, has made the
city even more of a musical hub than ever. In 2011, Kex became a
fringe venue for some of the smaller shows, while an American radio
station, the coincidentally named KEXP Seattle, used the hostel as
its broadcast hub.
With some progressive
support on a par with that given to Scottish artists to attend the
Austin, Texas-based South By South West festival, there is no reason
why independent acts from Scotland couldn't be a force at Airwaves,
with Kex as their base. As if to prove this potential, the final
night of Kex's Scottish Week moves into another room. Waggishly named
Gym and Tonic, by day guests can square up to the vaulting horses and
punchbags nestled next to walls adorned with Mexican wrestling
posters. By night a set of long tables give what is essentially a
function room the air of a mediaeval banqueting hall with what are
possibly the best acoustics on the planet.
Tonight's gig will be a
more formal affair, with Wounded Knee supporting Icelandic singer
Snorri Helgason, whose three-piece band play fifty-seven varieties of
quality Americana. Gym and Tonic is hosting some kind of fashion show
first, and Kex's bar is awash with what may or may not be a party of
Icelandic supermodels. To mix things up even further, a hip crowd
from the art opening downstairs at The Living Art Museum show up, as
does an older artist in a red leather jacket, who has a show of
paintings he made by riding a motorbike over the canvas in another
gallery in town, and appears somewhat boisterously over-refreshed by
the gallery's hospitality.
Backed by Hermannsson
and Williams, Wright sounds more powerful than ever, and the response
to his set of reinvented folk songs and amiable rapport with the
audience is one of rapt silence. These are songs that need captured
on record in all their gloriously raw state as soon as possible.
Having honed their set over the course of Scottish festival Week
following minimal rehearsal, the band are a unified force by now,
and rise to the occasion as a somewhat more demanding foil to the
headlining act. Hearing such a full-on conflation of old and new
traditions in such a context is fascinating to observe.
Then, with Wounded Knee
and co going full pelt at Wright's own song, the jaunty Pentland
Jaunt, the long wooden table suddenly starts to shake unsteadily, as
if an earthquake was rumbling through the ground beneath. A glance
upwards makes it clear that this seismic shift comes from the
refreshed red-jacketed artist from earlier who, however unsteady on
his feet, has clambered aloft the table and is dancing precariously
from end to end like a court jester doing overtime. With the band
driving the music on, the not entirely fleet-footed stomper squats
low over candles and attempts to entice the females seated at the
table to join him before being wheeched off the table in a fireman's
lift by one of the be-kilted bar staff, who looks particularly
capable of handling himself.
“Thank you for making
me feel like I'm back in Scotland,” Wright joshes, before
introducing Freedom Come All Ye as a song that Nelson Mandela once
suggested should be the anthem of the entire world. In the hands,
voices, guitars and drums of The Sassenachs, it sounds even more
important than that, as Henderson's inclusive internationalist hymn
is reinvented as a poundingly relentless avant-garde epic where ideas
both simple and complex rub up against each other. Heard at midnight
on a Saturday night in Reykjavik in an old biscuit factory that's
been transformed for the twenty-first century, it sounds like the
future.
A shorter version of this appeared in The Herald, February 1st 2012
ends
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