Siggi Baldursson - The Sugarcubes Interview
Tell me about growing up in Oslo, Norway. When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the drums? Was this something that was relevant in your household growing up, or did you make that connection on your own? I understand your parents are Icelantic, were they in any way involved in the arts?
I was born in Stavanger, Norway and lived there to the tender age of 2 when my family moved back to Iceland, where the family owned a house. I don't have much memory of my time in Stavanger, but my siblings say that we lived in a house on the beach for a year and I would have to be watched closely if they were on the beach with me because I would crawl straight for the waves even though I was only approaching 1 and starting to crawl. I had picked up a few words in Norwegian, like “her kommer kongen” (here comes the king) and "det er mit” (that's mine), but that's about the amount of my assisted memory of the era. I had some great times in Kopavogur, Iceland between 2 and 6 when I moved to Long Island, to a quaint little town called Babylon. It started while living in the states from 1969 to 1972 that I started becoming aware of music and my first impressions are from my big sister’s record collection that had staples like “Sgt. Pepper”, “Aqualung”, Crosby Stills Nash and Young and I started getting into drumming when my father gave me a snare drum when I was 10 years old. We had just moved back to Iceland from the states. He was an engineer who worked for Icelander and was their head of maintenance, and that was the reason the family was moving from Stavanger to Iceland to Long Island and back again. Icelander was always moving their maintenance headquarters around. He had always had a sweet spot for the drums as an instrument and was influential in that way, helping me to get my hands on a drum set and being very supportive in my drumming endeavors as a teen. My parents mostly listened to easy listening stuff and artists like Nat King Cole, Patsy Cline and Kay Starr were often on the stereo. I was leaning more towards other things, as I was making new friends in Iceland as an early teen, around 12 years of age and started hanging out with a pal by the name of Birgir Mogensen, who is still one of my best friends. He had quite a few older siblings that were very into music. Names like Steely Dan, Santana and English prog rock like Yes, Gentle Giant, Earth Wind and Fire and many more.
Prior to The Sugarcubes you performed in Peyr. Can you tell me about this group and this initially came about? Segwaying into The Sugarcubes, how did you first meet your bandmates and what was that initial chemistry like between everyone? I’m curious to know how the band’s name came about and to clear up the legend for our readers. Is it true the band was established in the summer of ‘86 when Bjork gave birth to her first son?
We put together our first teen band called Hattimas, which actually ended up writing all our own music at the tender age of 15 and playing our first performances as musicians, with Birgir playing bass. We ended up together in the experimental outfit called KUKL that proceeded the Sugarcubes and that's where I started working with Björk and Einar Örn, who ended up with me in the Sugarcubes. But my first band to cause waves in Iceland and take me touring outside the country was indeed Þeyr (there is a letter in Icelandic and Greek called the Theta, which is like ‘þ’ that makes a sound like the beginning of the English word - thought). Þeyr came about in 1980 after an explosion in our musical world where the so-called English post-punk of Joy Division, Siouxie and the Banshees, Wire, Sex Pistols and many more that were causing every other kid in Iceland to join a band. Completely regardless of whether, or not they could play an instrument. This molded me as a drummer as I started getting into world music and utilizing those influences in my drumming. We worked with Killing Joke’s lead singer Jaz Coleman here in Iceland when he came to visit in 1982 and we recorded 3 tunes that were never publicly released. Þeyr only existed for two years yet we released 2 LP's, 2 7 inches and 2 EP's. The Þeyr stuff is mostly available on YouTube, or Soundcloud. When Þeyr disbanded in early 1983, I was asked, along with some 5 other musicians, mostly survivors from the creative post-punk scene in Reykjavík, to write some music for the last episode of a legendary radio show in Iceland called Afangar. That group became KUKL and was composed of a young singer by the name of Björk Guðmundsdottir, singer, MC and trumpet player Einar Örn Benediktsson, bass player Birgir Mogensen, guitarist Gudlaugur Kristinn Ottarsson and keyboardplayer Einar Melax.
Kukl was signed by an English label Corpus Christi, which was the derivative label of Crass Records, of the legendary english punk collective by the same name. This was the group Einar Örn Benediktsson had befriended during his university years in London. He studied media there at the University of London, between the years of 1983 and 1987. This is where I started working with Björk and Einar Örn, which ended up with me in the Sugarcubes. Kukl toured in England and Europe in 1984 and 1985 and made two LPs on the label, both recorded at Southern Studio´s, which belonged to John Loder who was the so-called manager of Crass. Kukl also toured in Iceland with a group of poetry slammers from the literary and art collective Medusa, which was an active art collective in Reykjavik when we were all between 18 and 23 years old. KUKL disbanded in the spring of 1986 and shortly after, me and Einar Örn and Björk formed a collective called Smekkleysa (Bad Taste) along with the guys from Medusa. Björk was living with Thor Eldon, which was one of the Medusa writers, but also a musician, they had a performance based band called Van Houtens Cocao. This was in June of 1986, around the time that Björk gave birth to their son. We formed Smekkleysa (Bad Taste) as an umbrella organization for all sorts of art that was meant to shake up the state of the arts in Reykjavik. We handed out ‘Bad Taste’ awards to people in gatekeeping positions in the arts that we targeted. It was all done with a very punk attitude, tongue in cheek and most people accepted this with a smile. Eventually our little organization went on to make some money with a postcard depicting Reagan and Gorbachov during their summit meeting in Reykjavik in October of 1986.
What was the ultimate vision and approach for the band’s debut masterpiece “Life’s Too Good” and would you mind giving some details behind tracks such as “Motorcrash”, “Blue Eyed Pop”, “Sick For Toys” and the marvelous hit “Birthday”? When the record came up, how did this initially impact both personally as well professionally?
It was basically a bunch of good friends having a ball, but quite serious about our art. We used that money to make some recordings because by that time we had decided to create a ‘pop’ band to make money for our little art terrorist organization. That band was called The Sugarcubes and the first recorded song was called “Birthday”, which was released on an Icelandic 7 inch in December of 1986 here in Iceland. Those recordings formed the basis of the “Life's Too Good” record that we started working on in London in the early months of 1987 with another friend of Einar Örn in London, Derek Birkett. He was the bassplayer of a punk band by the name of Flux of Pink Indians. He was starting his own label and wanted to sign this new band that we had formed. Long story short, the single “Birthday” was released in August of 1987 and caused a stir in the English music press, with Melody Maker picking it for ‘single of the week’ and other mags like Sounds and NME following suit. That Autumn we were simultaneously on the cover of NME and Melody Maker for one week when our second single “Cold Sweat” was released. We wrote the songs all in collaboration with some tunes starting out as a riff, for example, "Motorcrash”, a bass groove and beat like “Birthday”, or even a jam like “Blue Eyed Pop”, but always in the rehearsal space. It was an unwritten rule that you couldn’t bring a finished song to rehearsal because everyone had to write their own parts. We actually wrote and recorded three records because “Its It” was an album of remixes.
What are some of your most fondest of some of these projects? When you reflect back on The Sugarcubes, what are you most proud of? You’ve been in a number of bands and projects since then such as Rangifer Tarandus, Dip, Grindverk and so many others. What keeps you most inspired to keep making music after all these in your career? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
I’m proud of the fact that we managed to stay friends through a very strenuous 4 years and even when the band broke up we still had the Bad Taste, which morphed into a record label, record store that has a track record of being an incubator for a lot of interesting Icelandic music coming out of here in the last 35 years. I just released a record on May 10th with a brand-new project I am doing called Paddan. “Fluid Time” is an instrumental EP that includes videos for each song. I have been working for the last 12 years for Iceland Music where I am now an advisor. During this century I have also worked extensively with a wonderful artist by the name of Emiliana Torrini, who has actually just released a new record as well. I have an alter ego by the name of Bogomil Font, among other things. Creativity is a must, ‘its life’s elixir’.
All the best.
