by Tim Moore
Stricken by artistic ennui – ‘I just got tired of making music the same way, over and over’ – Daníel left Ný Dönsk in 1994; the band continued in his absence, and he’s joined them for a couple of reunion gigs. Newly fascinated with the musical possibilities presented by technology, Dan bought a computer and taught himself the arcane art of sampling and sequencing. In Iceland’s fertile creative community it didn’t take long to find a group of likeminded collaborators, and in 1997 GusGus, a sometimes seven-piece, sometimes ten-piece group whose name in print generally appears after the words ‘seminal electronica collective’, released their debut, ‘Polydistortion’.
The album’s instant success meant tours of Europe and the US: eight years have passed since ‘that gig in Lausanne’, and here he is living the rock dream. But Daníel is not a man for whooping self-congratulation. He might have been GusGus’s chief vocalist, and its most prolific songwriter, but even as ‘Polydistortion’ nosed up the US and UK indie charts – and spawned three Icelandic number-one singles – he remained studiously underwhelmed. ‘I like being on-stage in front of a crowd, but all the stuff around it …’ He sighs. ‘Touring I never liked, that whole rootless feeling.’ How great, though, I suggest, to have gone from nul points to that level of jaded stardom: oh no, not another coast-to-coast tour of the States. The pause that follows allows Daníel to crack a thin smile. ‘Yeah, I guess as a Viking I should have loved all that stuff, going off around the world, conquering new territory.’
His arch, slightly robotic tone suggests he’s encountered this sort of trite cobblers in many a GusGus profile. Yet how extraordinary that this should be so, that in eight short years Iceland should have progressed from a mysterious, jury-alienating cultural enigma to the land of a thousand music-page clichés. Daníel’s own post-Eurovision reinvention was impressively radical, but it surely couldn’t have happened without his homeland’s abrupt and bewildering emergence as a major exporter of offbeat international hits. It’s a telling indicator of the speed and extent of this metamorphosis that not one of the many foreign journalists who interviewed GusGus was ever aware of their lead singer’s Eurovision past. For an achingly hip electro-dance outfit, that was a brontosaurus-sized skeleton to keep wedged in the closet. Yet no one even tried the door.
For some time, as that dusty shaft of sun moves slowly across the dark planks, we debate how Iceland’s unlikely musical revolution came to pass. Most conversational roads lead us to the Sugarcubes, the influential but bonkers punkish mavericks whose late-eighties line-up famously incorporated Björk. ‘They definitely encouraged people like me,’ says Dan, ‘but only because there’s something in the Icelandic character that makes us more confident in our own abilities, prepared to try different things, artistically.’ The seamless flow of his words, and their earnest clarity, suggests this is something he’s pondered at length. ‘When you live on an island, in a harsh weather environment where you can almost hibernate for six months of the year, in total darkness, you have to keep yourself busy with something creative or you just wither away,’ he says, which as the veteran of many Icelandic Christmases I’m not about to dispute: my preferred seasonal creative outlet involves Photoshopping mythical beasts into those round-the-tree family line-ups. ‘Plus to make a living here you have to be multi-talented, prepared to take on many different jobs, to be adaptive. And everyone in Iceland wants to be their own boss.’
GusGus appears to have been the unstable essence of this national ethos. ‘We did bits of everything: some experimental tracks, some chart-topping stuff … We’d work in groups of three or four, then try to pool our ideas. It was kind of a humanised factory.’ Hardly a sustainable creative process, you’d think, particularly with the own-boss gene thrown in the mix; after a slightly less successful second album, Dan once again succumbed to the five-year-itch that drove him away from Ný Dönsk. And so, albeit with significantly less brazen chutzpah than I’m accustomed to, our conversation reaches the stage when a nul-pointer hands me a copy of their Latest Solo Offering.
The usual response is to thank them and politely stick the CD in my bag, but I’m frankly curious to hear what Daníel has been doing up here, alone in the beamed and vaulted gloom, eight hours a day for two years. ‘Sit here, between the speakers,’ he says, inching my wheeled chair towards his with an outstretched foot until it’s optimally placed for full stereo reception.
There’s more than a little of The Shining about this attic: as he clicks play and rotates the volume, I wonder if I’m about to hear, loudly and incessantly, that all work and no play makes Dan a dull boy. And though I don’t, ‘I Swallowed a Star’ proves a consistently eerie work, with mournful strings underscored by Dan’s breathy, sinister musings on overwhelming darkness and other forms of void. Sometimes he’s a mid-pubescent Tom Waits; at others, and he’s going to hate me for saying this, he’s Björk played at 12 rpm. It’s difficult to square this funereal paranoia with the soft-voiced, slight young chap nodding gently along beside me, even if he is wearing nothing but black and sitting up here alone in a castle attic. Even the moss-and-stingray stuff sounds inestimably more haunting than I remember, like incidental music for a slow panning shot of the Somme’s dawn aftermath. I think: You’ve been up here too long, mate.
After three tracks Dan abruptly leans forward and, wincing slightly, hits eject. I wonder if I’ve allowed my harrowed inner shudderings to manifest themselves, particularly when he roots through a pile of hand-labelled CDs and sticks one in, saying, ‘Here’s a song I’ve been working on more recently – more kind of … up.’ It’s called OK, and – merciful Saint Jahn – it’s a veritable finger-clicker after the unsettling dirges, music that’s life affirming rather than life ending. As its pulsing beat fades, the room already seems brighter: if Daníel was in a dark place, he’s come out of it.
‘Well,’ he says, rising from his chair, and walking slowly across to the window behind me. Dan looks out, scanning the squat, glowering apartment blocks that he’s evocatively described as ‘tenement fortifications’, then peering down his nose at the distant moat. ‘See here,’ he says, beckoning me with a soft chuckle. I press my face to the ancient, mottled pane: staggering back from the trees behind the moat with a vast bundle of fir branches clutched to her chest is Kristin-Maria. ‘Bit early for a fire, isn’t it?’
‘Ah, no,’ says Dan. ‘That’s for Gabriela, my wife. She needs them for her work.’ As we stand there by the window he talks me with quiet pride through Gabriela’s burgeoning artistic successes: the ongoing studio endeavours relate to her pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, the contemporary art world’s most prestigious exhibition. Daníel cheerfully announces that in the post-GusGus era she’s the big breadwinner, and that he now spends a lot of his attic hours editing the video works that are a major part of her artistic output. ‘I’ve got a few on my Mac here if you’d like to see,’ he says, and we clomp back to his desk over the bare boards.
I spend the next ten minutes wishing I was more aesthetically aware, more critically articulate, and much, much less childish. The first video, one Gabriela recently directed for her close friend Björk, opens with the dependably unconventional songstress emerging from a hayrick, almost unrecognisable beneath a Sumo-sized cladding of sandbags. As she squats down to spawn a lard-smeared dancer, I sneak a nervous sideways glance at Daníel: his otherwise inscrutable features show the barest hint of amusement, which is good enough for me. ‘That must have been fun to do,’ I say, to excuse the preceding giggle.
‘A lot of mess,’ he says, with a half smile.
The second, featuring Dan in a cameo as a medieval vagrant, is dominated by a hessian-skinned, bulbous-headed monster. At its climax, this unsettling, faceless being is laid down in a white room and cut open, bleeding a thick black fluid that Daníel quietly identifies as ‘the bile of melancholy’. A woman – ‘that’s Gabriela’, says Dan, and it’s the only time I’ll see her – bestrides the leaking entity, dips a sackcloth tail in the grim ooz
e and energetically spatters her surroundings, hula-hoop style. Her Venice installation was to win much acclaim, which as a Dan-clan well-wisher and the father of three half-Vikings gave me great pleasure. But as a creatively stunted philistine, when I get home I’m quietly reassured to find a Biennale press release that describes Gabriela’s work as ‘bizarre’. Not a word bandied lightly about at Venice, where a child with Down’s Syndrome was once put on display with a placard reading ‘Second Solution to Immortality’ hung around his neck.
When it’s over I issue a complicated, upwardly inflected hum, which in the absence of an appropriate artistic vocabulary is intended to express my approval. Daníel nods forgivingly, and we troop out of the attic. A moment later Kristin-Maria is snapping our farewell pictures in the early-evening sun, Dan and I leaning against the Saab, looking over the moat bridge, beaming foolishly into the lens from close range, all with that perpetually remarkable edifice towering up behind us.
He graciously offers me a lift to the station; getting into the Saab I spot a pair of filthy football boots in the rear footwell. Daníel confirms that they’re his, which I find more surprising than I probably should: anyone familiar with European club football will be aware that this is just another field of human endeavour in which his homeland has achieved a success wildly disproportionate to its population. And then we’re scrunching up the gravel, over the moat, and I look over my shoulder to exchange waves with Kristin-Maria and pay final homage to the Chateau Rivierin and its resident bohemians. A collision of the antique and the avant-garde, a beacon of shrieking incongruity in the definitively dull suburbs of a city that is Google’s top match for ‘most boring European capital’.
As we coast up the darkening boulevards I ask Dan where he’ll go when the chateau’s new owners turn up in two months. ‘Back to Iceland, I guess,’ he murmurs, non-committally. Dan and Gaby’s daughter, now fifteen, is about to go to college in Reykjavik, and they’d like to be there with her. ‘But it’s hard to say,’ he murmurs, bumping over a tramline. ‘I never really know what I’m going to do next until I do it.’
He pulls up alongside the station taxi rank; I turn to face him, we shake hands over the gearstick and I thank him for an extraordinary day. Another nul-pointer I was very glad to have met, another happy stride away from the fading miseries of Kalvikland. Walking up to the quiet, rather gloomy concourse, I turn round for a final wave and a last glimpse of Daníel’s gentle, beard-shrouded smile. The nul-pointer who never was, or never should have been; a laconic, understated anti-star, almost dismissive of his undoubted talents. And I’m not just saying that because he voted for my mother-in-law when she ran for his homeland’s presidency.
4 May 1991 Cinecittà Studio 15, Rome Thomas Forstner Austria Venedig im Regen
BORN JUST A few months after Daníel Haraldsson, Thomas Forstner was working in an antique shop when he entered an Austrian national talent show entitled ‘Newcomer of 1988’. An angel-voiced, angel-faced Vienna Boys’ chorister, young Tom had been winning such contests since the age of three; perhaps at eighteen he may have worried that his career had nosed over its Aled Jonesian peak. His triumph as Newcomer of 1988, secured with a ballad pertinently entitled Still Hoping, proved it hadn’t.
Part of the prize was a studio session with permatanned hitmeister Dieter Bohlen, who in a couple of months knocked out Nur ein Lied (Only a Song) for his latest protégé, and produced the resultant single. ‘Meeting up with Dieter Bohlen is a fantasy come true for Thomas,’ was the rather overwrought judgement of whoever wrote the 1989 Eurovision final programme notes. Austria’s state broadcaster ORF was no less excited, failing to heed the Wilfried lesson by selecting Nur ein Lied as its Eurovision entry without recourse to a national qualifier.
Daníel didn’t want to go to Lausanne, but for Thomas it was the stuff of dreams. You can see it in his eyes in the short film that preceded his performance, cheerily tilting a glass of Switzerland’s apparently famous wine at a bucolic fraulein. Mainly, though, you can see it in his hair. If Dan’s chemotherapy crop was an act of alienated Eurovision rebellion, then what of Tom’s stupendous mane, a bouffant, Farrah-Fawcetted flick-fest that was the contest’s follicular essence? And few Eurovision historians discuss the 1989 final without reference to Thomas ‘The Hair’ Forstner’s outfit, a satin-lapelled lilac bolero jacket with matching voluminous trousers. With a fringe and a heart-shaped beauty spot, he could have been Adam Ant’s valet.
Part Richard Clayderman, part Jason Donovan, fine-featured Tom was the full Eurovision package; what with that and a powerful Bohlen ballad to belt out, he couldn’t fail. And didn’t. ‘Bravo, Thomas, bravo, Thomas Forstner!’ cheered the ORF commentator as their man took his bow – I’ve been listening to him since 1981, and that was the first time he’d raised his voice. After two rounds of voting, Nur ein Lied was actually in the lead, and despite fading came home a solid fifth: the best Austrian result since 1976 (as indeed it remains), a track record that helps explain the state-funeral tone now familiar to me from many hours exposure to the ORF booth’s output. Coming the year after the Wilfried debacle, this was heady stuff for Austria, not so much Eurovision’s bridesmaid as its confetti-eating tramp.
Nur ein Lied was already a hit when Thomas came home, charting in Switzerland and Germany and staying top of the Austrian pops for ten weeks. He was, quite suddenly, a huge star, that big-haired choirboy look irresistible to pre-teen Austro-screamers and their mothers alike. Forstnermania gripped the country, and held it tight throughout the summer of 1989. There were TV shows, public appearances and sell-out stadium gigs, all conducted in an atmosphere characterised by this contemporary joke: What’s 25m long, screams and has no pubic hair? The first row at a Thomas Forstner concert.
As a teen idol, Thomas might have been fleetingly concerned by the approach of his twentieth birthday. Particularly after the Dieter-composed Christmas follow-up to Nur ein Lied, released just two days before Tom bid farewell to his teenage years, peaked at number thirteen. Dieter gave him one more roll of the chart dice, but after the English-language Miles Away failed to break the top ten in June 1990, Tom was left to fend for himself. Herr Bohlen didn’t earn $250 million by throwing good studio money after bad. In the following year, Tom released two further singles, each on different minor labels and co-written with composers of proven obscurity. Neither charted. Before he’d even had the chance to release an album, his career seemed over. Until March 1991, when ORF came knocking at Tom’s once fan-thronged front door.
They did so in the aftermath of an unusually eventful but typically inglorious 1990 Eurovision campaign. The female half of pre-qualification favourites Duett fainted live on-stage, but swept to victory after being allowed a second chance; the day after, a viewer phoned up ORF to comment that the winning song, Das Beste, seemed uncannily familiar to a song of the same name, sung by a band called Duett at the 1988 German qualifiers.
None of Eurovision’s many statutes is more fiercely enforced than the ‘original song’ rule, which has been behind half a dozen disqualifications since 1968, when Norway’s Odd Borre (that’s right) accepted that with Cliff Richard due to follow him on to the Albert Hall stage, it might be an idea to come up with something that sounded a little less precisely like Summer Holiday. (Rather more in the spirit of that revolutionary year, Juan Manuel Serrat refused to make the trip to Britain when the Spanish authorities forbade him from singing their entry in Catalan, though being entitled La La La it’s unlikely that even Franco himself would have noticed. Juan’s last-minute replacement went on to pip Congratulations by a single point, and Cliff ended the evening – I just can’t say this often enough – locked in the gents.)
With Das Beste disqualified, Austria was obliged to make do with the 1990 qualifier’s runner-up, Das Second Beste, or rather Keine Mauern Mehr, which limped home from Zagreb with a double-figure finish. Despite Tom’s Icarus-like career path, the national broadcaster figured he was worth another go. As his presence in these pages wi
ll suggest, he wasn’t.
Surely aware that at the 1991 final in Rome he’d be singing in the last-chance saloon, Tom pulled out all the stops. His was a three-pronged assault on Eurovision glory: a host-flattering musical tribute (Venedig im Regen, or Venice in the Rain), a sparkly outfit, and his hugest-ever hair. Each in their way contributed to his looming notoriety as the only Eurovision veteran to score nul points. Though puffed and preened into an astounding beehived mullet, his hair is already thinning: poor Tom’s not yet twenty-one, but there’s a lot of scalp on show beneath the blowdried teasing. Plus he’s finally succumbed to a Teutonic tonsorial urge and had it cut behind his ears, leaving a bouffant beaver’s tail to flap against the collar spangles. Nein, nein, nein!
His outfit is that of a Torvill and Dean-era figure skater, a spandex jumpsuit teamed with a close-fitting, heavily sequinned waistcoat, and – oh, my – matching cuffs. ‘A game lad in an après-ski jumpsuit,’ was Terry Wogan’s verdict. As Thomas turns to face the camera he looks a little startled, and so do we: Eurovision fashion is typically a solid four years behind the times, but he’s just been shaken awake after nodding off with his finger on the sartorial rewind.
The song Tom now performs is consistent with his appearance. A study in cheesy bombast, Venedig im Regen is infused with the inane sentimentality of the Germanic musical phenomenon schlager, if not its uptempo, boompsadaisy beat. It’s a song written for a big voice, an Engelbert or a Tom Jones, and no matter how he strains, our ex-choirboy finds himself more than a few watts short. Thomas seems to know he’s already blown it: his expression throughout the performance never progresses beyond desperate, counterfeit enthusiasm. It hardly matters that he has one trick up his spandex sleeve that his compatriot Wilfried so conspicuously lacked – he can hold a tune.