Iceland’s alternative scene grew out of a tiny nucleus of alternative musicians including Björk, whose influence now extends to the Broadchurch soundtrack. How did they do it?

In 1986, Icelandic television viewers were outraged by a performance by the avant-garde anarcho-punk band KUKL, featuring a heavily pregnant Björk. “The switchboards were on fire,” remembers Sigtryggur “Siggi” Baldursson, who drummed behind Björk in KUKL and then the Sugarcubes. “I was at a party at my grandmother’s when it was broadcast and everyone was shocked and disgusted. Björk was 20, but looked about 14. People were going, ‘My God! It’s a pregnant child!’”

Fast-forward 29 years, and Björk is an international star – and Iceland has been transformed from an isolated community whose musicians were ignored by the rest of the world into an internationally renowned, ultra-hip musical powerhouse, its output far above that expected of a country with a population (328,000) the size of Leicester’s. John Grant lives here, Damon Albarn has a house and Yoko Ono visits. And homegrown musicians – Björk, Sigur Rós, Gus Gus, Ásgeir, Ólafur Arnalds, Hjaltalín, Of Monsters And Men among many, many more – thrive. However, the unlikely roots of this fashionable Icelandic scene in 1980s post-punk have long been overlooked.

“So many people come up to me and say, ‘I’ve wanted to visit Iceland ever since I heard the Sugarcubes, or Sigur Rós,” muses Einar Örn, Björk’s co-singer in KUKL and the Sugarcubes, as Sigur Rós’s Valtari album wafts across one of Reykjavik’s trendy modern bars. “But it’s only lately that people have started to realise that it has been the music that got Iceland where we are.”

Iceland in the 1970s was a world away from the country today. There was one TV channel, virtually no beer (a legacy of early-20th-century prohibition) and “discotheques” had killed off live music. “All our heroes had turned to shit,” remembers Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, the lyricist/conceptualist for Þeyr, one of the key 1980s post-punk bands. “We were watching corpses. It was time for a changing of the guard.”

Everyone I speak to insists that the first punk in Iceland was a 14-year-old Einar Örn. He says he had read about Johnny Rotten vomiting on an aeroplane, then realised that if he parked his mother’s Sunbeam car in the right place, “on a clear night, I could listen to John Peel, playing the Ramones”. Because his father worked in London, the teenage Örn was able to spend the summer of 1977 making connections, which meant Reykjavik’s arts festival could book the Stranglers in 1978 and the Clash in 1980; later, as a student in London, he invited the Fall and anarcho-punks Crass to play in Iceland’s capital.

Punk had some impact in Iceland, but British post-punk particularly connected. “I could come up with a cliche about the music being cold and bleak,” muses Gunnar Lárus Hjálmarsson – who works as Dr Gunni, bassist turned author of Icelandic music history Blue Eyed Pop. “It was just because it was such good music. I stopped listening to Sham 69 and started listening to Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen – all those bands with overcoats and badges.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Purrkur Pillnick. Photograph: Einar Falur Ingolfsson/Morgunbla i /Einar Falur

When Örn’s friends Asmunder “Alsie” Jonsson and Guðni Rúnar Agnarsson began playing the music on their radio show, Afanger, a wave of post-punk bands emerged very quickly. Jonsson opened the hip Grammio Records shop and started Gramm, the first Icelandic indie label, which, he says, “became as important as Rough Trade in the UK”.

Siggi Baldursson remembers how, over the summer of 1980, his band Þeyr “morphed from a pop band playing silly country dances to this weird experimental post-punk thing”, which dedicated its first single to Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

When a young director, Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, started filming the bands playing in the rundown Hotel Borgfor his 1982 film Rokk í Reykjavík (Rock in Reykjavik), he expected to film a dozen, but ended up with 21. The movie became a box office hit, after initial problems with the censors.

Now a genial, long-haired 60-year-old, Friðriksson insists he had no idea that the performance art group Bruni BB would behead a chicken and was relieved they abandoned plans to slaughter a pig. “I was carted off to the police station,” he sighs. “They asked, ‘When did you last see the swine alive?’ I said, ‘The day after filming. It was eating a ham sandwich.’”

From teenage punks Sjálfsfróun (“Masturbation”) talking about glue sniffing to Q4U’s edgy, feminist pop, the film captured the radicalism of a scene exploding with possibilities. “It was about new Icelandic music, with Icelandic lyrics about our reality,” says Örn, who fronted Fall/Wire fans Purrkur Pillnikk (which means “Sleepy Chess Player”). “It was anti-disco, live rock’n’roll music.”

A young Björk – fronting jazz punks Tappi Tíkarrass (“Cork the Bitch’s Ass”) – adorned Rokk í Reykjavík’s posters, although Baldursson had earlier spotted her fronting a group called Exodus. “She was this tiny little thing, 13 or 14, but sang with the poise of a fully developed artist. She’d grown up in a hippy family and aged seven, her parents had got her up on a table to sing for guests. When I saw her, I was blown away.”

Baldursson’s own Þeyr was a highly original mix of post-punk, Krautrock, electronics, ancient wisdom and mischief. Conceptualist Hilmarsson is now the high priest of Iceland’s burgeoning Pagan religion. Over several dark ales, he is full of tales of how he made his teachers “ill with magick” and plotted Þeyr’s outrages. They goose-stepped around the island for a video for the anti-fascist song Rudolf and announced they were broadcasting into space via wires placed into plant pots.

On a visit to London, the band played what he calls the “Icelandic sweater trick” on John Peel, giving the DJ and his wife woollen pullovers. “Her father had been stationed in Iceland during the war,” Hilmarsson says, so when he saw his daughter wearing her gift, old memories came flooding back. The gift worked, and Peel started playing Þeyr. “It was magick.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mammút … fiery Photograph: Hör ur Sveinsson/H r ur Sveinsson

The UK music press had also noticed that Iceland was becoming cool. Although the first Icelandic international hit was 1983’s Garden Party by the decidedly unpunky instrumental jazz fusion band Mezzoforte (“music industry guys laughed at them because they were Icelandic,” sighs Dr Gunni), music press interest in the country was piqued when Killing Joke singer Jaz Coleman went to Iceland to work with Þeyr. The Fall recorded in Reykjavik and took Purrkur Pillnikk on a UK tour, while Echo and the Bunnymen shot their Porcupine album sleeve and video for The Cutter in Iceland’s snowy landscapes.

KUKL recorded for Crass Records and scored several British indie hits, before Björk, Örn, Baldursson and PP’s Bragi Olafsen regrouped as the core of the Sugarcubes. According to Baldursson, they formed a “pop group for a joke, to raise funds for an artist collective”. Once they signed to fledgling One Little Indian label (founded by Derek Birkett of the Crass-affiliated Flux of Pink Indians), the Sugarcubes became international stars.

“All the threads suddenly came together, by magick,” Baldursson says, noting that the Sugarcubes’ otherworldy 1987 breakthrough debut single, Birthday, was first championed by John Peel – presumably wearing his Icelandic sweater.

Today, there’s no single Icelandic sound, but there is a particular attitude, rooted in community and DIY. “We never had that tradition of hysteria or Beatlemania,” muses former Sigur Rós keyboardist turned composer Kjartan Sveinsson. “So we don’t think, ‘Form a band, get big.’ It’s always, ‘Let’s do something different.’”

Meanwhile, the ripples of the RiR era continue. Sigur Rós’s first album appeared on the Sugarcubes’ label Smekkleysa (“Bad Taste”) and the group have worked with Hilmarsson. Einar Örn’s son Kaktus plays in new One Little Indian signings Fufanu, while KUKL bassist Birgir Mogensen’s daughter Katr fronts the fiery Mammút, who listened to Purrkur Pillnikk and thought, “If they can do it, we can!”

Even Ólafur Arnalds – classical composer of the elegiac theme to ITV’s Broadchurch – is a former hardcore punk drummer whose manifesto is a Purrkur Pillnikk lyric: “It isn’t what you’re capable of, it’s what you do.”

And if you really want proof of the indelible mark left by extreme music in Iceland, just pay a visit to Reykjavik’s city hall on the northern shore of Lake Tjörnin. Ask to the see the mayor, Jón Gnarr, and maybe you’ll get the chance to see what he did to celebrate his election in 2010: he had the Crass logo tattooed on his arm. Like the glaciers, punk’s progress in Iceland may have been gradual, but it was inexorable.

Mammút and Fufanu are among 19 new Icelandic bands appearing at the Eurosonic Festival in Groningen, Holland, from 14-17 January. Details: icelanderupts.com. Dave Simpson’s trip to Iceland was paid for by Iceland Music Export



When rock came to Reykjavik

The Kinks’ Dave Davies on being one of the first bands to play in Iceland in September 1965.

Being in a pop group and going to Iceland in the 60s felt like landing on the moon. It was very cold and the landscape was completely different, although when we stepped down the ladder which planes had in those days we were met by screaming kids, like there were in London. I think the Tremeloes had been before us, but otherwise it all felt alien. I remember someone showed us round the island and took us to this big greenhouse, where they were growing one orange on a tree. I picked that orange! I was quite proud of it. I bought a giant white coat at Reykjavik airport so I looked like a giant sheep. I’m told we played eight shows over four days. I don’t remember all those details, but I do remember the shows being amazing. On the journey back, we were all in very high spirits and quite drunk and rambunctious: the captain of the plane threatened to drop us off in Glasgow.