Getting Smashed in Iceland at Airwaves Festival

We were asked to head out to Iceland for the 15th installment of the marauding musical viking that is Iceland Airwaves and we simply couldn’t turn down the chance to go slaughter Europe’s frozen kingdom of chaos. They say northerners go at it harder, well this arctic-skirting moonscape is as granite as it gets when it comes to feasting on the finer sides of life.

We went on the hunt for the best it has to offer, and here’s what we found:

Rekjavik’s Mayor Is A Dude

The day we arrived, Reykjavik’s cross-dressing mayor of municipal mayhem, Jon Gnarr, announced he was to step down next May, after his current term in office, to the despair of many thousands of lovers of his free spirited approach to governance. It became our immediate mission to find out more about this guy.

As a child Gnarr overcame serious learning difficulties and ADHD, but has gone on to build a career that includes taxi driver, film star, stand-up comedian and punk band member on its varied CV. In 2009 as Iceland suffered a seismic financial prolapse, the self-proclaimed anarchist decided to turn his hand to politics. He and a few friends formed the imaginatively named ‘Best Party’ under the manifesto that every promise they made would be broken in a commitment to be openly corrupt instead of secretly so, like all political competitors. They quickly set about promising free access to swimming and towels, a polar bear for the local zoo, a drug free government, free bus rides for cripples and more.

They were voted into office in May 2010, and since then Reykjavik has been an altogether more entertaining place to be, as Gnarr ripped up and ridiculed the political rulebook, openly attending gay pride marches in drag, publicly protesting the Pussy Riot imprisonment and occasionally slipping into his finest Jedi outfit for important official engagements.

When faced with the question of forming a coalition with a rival party he insisted that anyone who wants to go into office with him become an avid viewer of his favourite TV show, The Wire. Surely a cooler politician does not exist anywhere.

Nature, Fuck Yeah!

Ok, we were in town for Reykjavik’s annual sonic orgy Iceland Airwaves, but one of our promises-to-self was to spend less time fighting titanic hangovers and get out and see some of this incredible country. So we hired what’s known locally as a Sad Car, an old banger, for €100 and headed out into the wilds in a machine you could kick the arse out of on dirt tracks and mountain roads. The country is simply awesome. The road to the south of Reykjavik traverses incredible waterfalls, black sand beaches, volcanic landscapes and floating iceberg lagoons, where you can take the boat trip of a lifetime through icy bergs. Going north took us to geysers and glaciers, and to top it all off the famed northern lights were out every night raving their little cosmic tits off in the frozen sky above.

Bands Love Iceland, and Iceland Loves Bands

OK, back to the music. Iceland Airwaves operates across 10 official venues and also plays host to an unofficial "Off Venue" program that sees punk gigs in hairdressers, record shops turned into micro-raves, pubs literally bounce for days, and even the local bus station and the Lutheran church Hallgrimskirkja get in on the action.

Airwaves festival is about taking Icelandic music to the world, by bringing the world to Iceland, and half of the 8000 tickets sold are sold abroad. The local talent is out in force, with FM Belfast delighting their pogoing mob, Mum packing out a local church, which looked great from the window outside and new hero Asgeir who brought a welcome mellow moment on a war-weary Saturday night. Others worth a check are disco kids Boogie Trouble, songstress Lay Low, the multi talented Sin Fang, shoe-gaze art-rockers For A Minor Reflection and

electro-synth stalwarts Sykur.

Headliners for the weekend are Kraftwerk, who give a nod to the setting by playing a rare version of their 1975 release Airwaves. Other notable imports are ex-wedding singer Omar Souleyman who has the crowd in raptures to his frenetic rave-pop take on traditional Syrian dabke music, Goat whose guttural bass driven tribal filth is one of the weekend’s true highlights and as ever Fucked Up drip and drool all over a rabid audience. One of Iceland’s newest residents, the soul-bearing John Grant is joined by Conor O’Brien from Villagers for a

poignant rendition of his hit "Glacier", providing one of the weekend’s many perfect moments.

Iceland is head over heels for music and raving, and boy do they like to show it as you bounce from venue to venue amongst throngs of pissed-up party-hungry hipsters in various forms of fine wool. In a country of 300,000 people, the proportion making music, working together in bands, and celebrating it at events like Airwaves is quite incredible. They’ve even invented a festival up north in the icy fjords that skirt the Arctic Circle for the bands that didn’t sell out and move to Reykjavik. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s pretty goddam inspiring to see a scene so strong and proud of what it’s doing, in a place so extreme and beautiful it practically makes you high.

Check out our more photos from the weekend below:

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