Rock And Hard Places Part 18

Tonight has been the third of the twenty-three-date Rock'n'Roll Means Well Rock'n'Roll Means Well tour. Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady are taking turns to headline, and in Atlanta, in deference to the Truckers' local roots-most of the band live in nearby Athens-The Hold Steady had taken the early slot, and demonstrated that they had friends of their own in the building: the signature shout-along refrains of "Stay Positive," "Constructive Summer" and "Ma.s.sive Nights" had all but drowned out the band. Even by his own hyperactive standards, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn had been animated, whirling and twitching and conveying the impression that his guitar strap was all that was holding the const.i.tuent-and apparently unrelated-parts of his body together (he dances about as much like a late-thirtysomething white guy from Minnesota as might be imagined). It's a jarring, compelling spectacle, these wordy, coolly literate songs, soundtracked by the supercharged bar blues of The Hold Steady, delivered by this seething, bespectacled, anxious apparition: Bruce Springsteen trapped in the body of Elvis Costello. tour. Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady are taking turns to headline, and in Atlanta, in deference to the Truckers' local roots-most of the band live in nearby Athens-The Hold Steady had taken the early slot, and demonstrated that they had friends of their own in the building: the signature shout-along refrains of "Stay Positive," "Constructive Summer" and "Ma.s.sive Nights" had all but drowned out the band. Even by his own hyperactive standards, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn had been animated, whirling and twitching and conveying the impression that his guitar strap was all that was holding the const.i.tuent-and apparently unrelated-parts of his body together (he dances about as much like a late-thirtysomething white guy from Minnesota as might be imagined). It's a jarring, compelling spectacle, these wordy, coolly literate songs, soundtracked by the supercharged bar blues of The Hold Steady, delivered by this seething, bespectacled, anxious apparition: Bruce Springsteen trapped in the body of Elvis Costello.

It was always going to be Drive-By Truckers' night, though-most of the audience had looked like one or other member of the band, many men sporting beards rivalling those of drummer Brad Morgan, women favouring the high-piled hair of ba.s.splayer Shonna Tucker despite the style's recent disgracing by Sarah Palin. Patterson had lumbered on ahead of his group looking, in silhouette under the spotlight, like a grizzly stalked by hunters. He'd beamed out at the crowd, just beamed, until Cooley had cranked up "Three Dimes Down." From there, the Truckers had unleashed a stellar selection of their bleary boogie, culminating in a furious version of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World," Finn joining in on backing vocals, followed by a barrel through Jim Carroll's "All the People Who Died," involving a certain amount of instrument-swapping between the Truckers, The Hold Steady, road crew and friends of the bands.

Tonight's show has also, like this tour as a whole, functioned as a heartening national unity ticket, set as it is against the backdrop of the final stages of a sensationally rancorous presidential election. Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady appear, at first glance, a positively cartoonish ill.u.s.tration of America's enduring North-South divide. The Truckers seem almost an archetype of Southern rock-thick of facial hair, heavy of riff, lyrically interested in drink, despair and defiance. The Hold Steady seem an hysterically stereotypical exemplar of Northern college indie-wordy, nerdy, bespectacled. What can be said of both bands is that, in both cases, there's far more going on than the pa.s.sing observer might conclude. The Truckers, Hood in particular, have omnivorous musical interests (over dinner before the show, Hood had launched, quite unprompted, into an impa.s.sioned and detailed soliloquy on the genius of Squeeze) and a lyrical outlook that is curious, compa.s.sionate and really not terribly philosophically congruent with much of the writings of Lynryd Skynyrd. The Hold Steady, for their part, rock as hard as any old-school bar-room rattlers, the unreconstructed fretboard-wringing of lead guitarist Tad Kubler suggesting what might have resulted had Steve Gaines survived the 1977 plane crash which wiped out Skynyrd, then-in an admittedly unlikely career move-successfully auditioned for The Attractions (Kubler has also impressed the heck out of me, at least, with what must be the first unironic live deployment of a twin-necked Gibson since the release of Hotel California Hotel California).

Another thing the two groups have in common, for the next twenty shows at least, is a h.e.l.l of a tough act to follow.

THE ATLANTA TABERNACLE is the kind of place that bands tell themselves they'll play in one day, as they toil to make the endurance of lesser dives and dumps feel worthwhile. The room itself is spectacular enough-a former Baptist church and hospital, built in 1910, now a 2,600-capacity venue with three layers of seating beneath a soaring ceiling. However, it's the separate backstage annexe that has all present grinning involuntarily as they wander the corridors. The catering is terrific, the toilets are clean, the dressing rooms sufficiently plentiful that a visiting journalist and photographer get one to ourselves and-these things really do matter much more to the itinerant musician than the colour-sorted M&Ms of popular legend-there's a was.h.i.+ng machine and tumble dryer. As Drive-By Truckers' soundcheck thuds through the walls, The Hold Steady's ba.s.splayer, Galen Polivka, sorts piles of socks, s.h.i.+rts and boxer shorts. "Living the dream," he smiles, and he's not entirely joking.

In between soundchecks, with the accordion practice of The Hold Steady's Franz Nicolay providing a soundtrack from an adjacent dressing room, Hood and Finn gather to survey the road ahead. Rock'n'Roll Means Well Rock'n'Roll Means Well: discuss.

"I came up with the name for the tour," says Finn, "but it's based on one of Mike Cooley's lyrics [in the song 'Marry Me,' from the Truckers' Decoration Day Decoration Day]. I thought there was something in that was kind of what people who understood rock'n'roll would . . . well, we're both kind of older, as bands, and we have a pretty good take on what's cool about rock'n'roll. And, you know, there's a humour in there."

Finn is thirty-seven, Hood forty-four. For Finn, success has come late, and quickly. He first took the stage with The Hold Steady in his adopted New York in 2003-partly inspired into action, he wants it noted, by seeing Drive-By Truckers live-and has already led them through four alb.u.ms even as they discharged a relentless touring schedule. For Hood, this is all he has ever wanted to do, ever since he saw Bruce Springsteen on The River The River tour, having spun his disapproving parents a sensationally elaborate web of deceit to explain his night away from home. Rock'n'roll was founded as a youth cult, and perhaps for that reason there remains a reflexive tendency to sn.i.g.g.e.r at those who insist on practising past the point of that first fervid flush. Both men acknowledge this, but insist that they are (at least slightly) wiser, as well as older. tour, having spun his disapproving parents a sensationally elaborate web of deceit to explain his night away from home. Rock'n'roll was founded as a youth cult, and perhaps for that reason there remains a reflexive tendency to sn.i.g.g.e.r at those who insist on practising past the point of that first fervid flush. Both men acknowledge this, but insist that they are (at least slightly) wiser, as well as older.

"It's that middle era of touring where I think the problems are," says Hood. "In the early days, you're in the van and you're just glad to be there, and you go and you go and you go. The middle is where it's getting better, but it's still really rough, and it's nothing like you think it's gonna be when it gets better-you're riding in a bus for the first time, but it's a s.h.i.+tty bus, and breaking down all the time, and the aircon don't work, you get a record deal, and it turns out it sucks."

"That's also when the partying can kind of get a little weird for a while," says Finn, "before you think, 'I don't wanna feel this way all the time.' Now, I can go on tour like a normal human being, whereas two or three years ago, I was just on tour."

The formalising of the Drive-By Truckers/Hold Steady mutual admiration society into this tour took place by email between Hood and Kubler after the two met in New York last summer. Hood loves The Hold Steady: the line "I'm trying to hold steady" in a newish Truckers song, "The Righteous Path," is a deliberate homage.

"And I just thought," says Hood, "this tour might be the best chance I ever have to see them play."

Hood's favourite Hold Steady song is "Chill Out Tent."

"That's the one that made me fall in love," he declares. "I heard it a couple of times before I really listened to it, and the first time I got it, it was like . . . wow. Let me hear that again. But I've been on such a big kick with the new alb.u.m lately, and I'm really loving 'Lord, I'm Discouraged.' Y'all have got the best t.i.tles."

"I stole that from Charley Patton," admits Finn, acknowledging the legendary Delta bluesman. "Well, that and the fact that whenever I upset my mother, she'd shake her head and sigh 'Discouraging.' My favourite Truckers song changes daily, but I was thinking about two. One is 'Zip City,' which is Cooley's song, and one is 'Heathens,' which is Patterson's. They both feature cars that have gone into ditches. I was thinking there should be another song, and it should be the ditch trilogy."

"'Zip City' is my favourite Drive-By Truckers song," agrees Hood.

"Yeah," nods Finn. "There's something tender, in a weird way, about that song."

Hood laughs incredulously, as well he might. "Zip City," from the Truckers' 2001 epic Southern Rock Opera Southern Rock Opera-a hugely ambitious concept alb.u.m studying what Hood calls "the duality of the Southern thing" as expressed in the lives and works of such Alabama totems as Skynyrd, Bear Bryant and George Wallace-is a typically mordant Cooley lyric, recalling thwarted teenage l.u.s.t for an underage girl resident in the t.i.tular Alabama hamlet. The song is, it's fair to say, somewhat unkind to her family ("Your brother was the first-born, got ten fingers and ten toes/And it's a d.a.m.n good thing 'cos he needs all twenty to keep the closet door closed").

"Tender meaning wounded," insists Finn. "Painful to the touch."

"Man," hoots Hood. "You should have been there the day the girl turned up at the show."

In other respects, the two groups are very different. Drive-By Truckers hold open house backstage more or less until showtime, and arrive onstage with nothing planned beyond the first song-the set from thereon is improvised according to the mood of the room and the band. The Hold Steady take turns by alphabetical order to write a setlist, and prefer to be left alone before the show, listening to music-including, in Atlanta, The Cars' "Let's Go" and Boz Scagg's "Lido Shuffle." They engage in a clearly ritiualised circle of high fives just before taking stage. Then, of course, there's that North-South thing . . .

"I know we had to cancel those UK dates when Tad got sick," says Finn (Kubler had been hospitalised with pancreat.i.tis a few months previously). "But my plan was to buy one of those Newcastle United s.h.i.+rts with [Newcastle's sponsors, a building society] 'Northern Rock' on it. But really, you can't say Northern rock and have people understand what you mean the way you can with Southern rock."

"I'm envious about that," says Hood, "because I f.u.c.kin' hate the phrase Southern rock. But I always loved music that had a real sense of place-Springsteen's Jersey Sh.o.r.e, The Ramones' Queens, The Replacements being so obviously from Minneapolis. When I was in high school, I didn't know what any of the stuff they were singing about was, but I wanted to."

"When I watch a movie," nods Finn, "I get really obsessed with the location, almost to the point where I can't concentrate on the film. When I get to spots on tour, I need to walk around for a while, just to understand where I'm at. I think that's very much part of writing, just being rooted, figuring out where you are."

Are there worries, putting together a tour like this, that there'll be locations where one band gets called back for three encores, while the other gets showered in empties?

"We broke up North first," says Hood. "The South and the Midwest were difficult for us. Actually, the South was brutal for us. All our songs are about small, f.u.c.ked-up little hick towns, and in the South the only places where there are venues to play tend to be college towns which are full of kids who just got the f.u.c.k out of some small, f.u.c.ked-up little hick town. The last thing they want to hear is someone singing about where they came from. They want to hear someone singing about somewhere exotic. Like Minneapolis, or Brooklyn. And I love that. I also like the fact that both our new records end with songs that namedrop directors, and they're almost representative polar points-John Ca.s.savetes [in The Hold Steady's Slapped Actress Slapped Actress] and John Ford [in the Truckers' Monument Valley Monument Valley]."

"We were on this tour this summer," says Craig, "and we hadn't really done the Southeast much at all, and we went to Baton Rouge, Oxford, Charleston-roadhouses, you know, putting 400 people where 300 people should be, and it was great."

"The lines in this country now," says Hood, "are more red state/ blue state, rather than North and South, because so many Southerners moved up North in the hundred years after the war."

There is laughter all round at this reminder that Hood is the only one in the room who comes from a place where "the war" is shorthand for the US Civil War, rather than World War II.

The collective regard for each other notwithstanding, is there a sense of compet.i.tion between the bands?

"It's not super-compet.i.tive," says Finn, "but if someone goes on before you and plays really well, you want to do at least as well."

"It's the good kind of compet.i.tion," says Hood. "I wouldn't respect 'em if they didn't go up there and absolutely try to wipe the stage with us every night. That's good for the rock."

This last line is delivered utterly absent of irony. Something else the two bands have in common: an unswerving belief in rock'n'roll as a means and expression of redemption and succour. Even on nights it feels like neither of those things.

"MAN," SAYS COOLEY, leaning on the bus, in the parking lot behind a Tallaha.s.see nightclub called The Moon. "That was like f.u.c.king your sister. I mean, respond, G.o.ddammit."

It's one night and another Drive-By Truckers set later. Cooley's gift for deadpan coinages is no surprise: his songs heave with glorious zingers. It is clearly his view, however, that these have been insufficiently appreciated this evening: the Truckers went on first, playing to a room barely half-full, and barely half-full at that of Sunday drinkers who seemed to be coming down off a big weekend.

"The one time of day I don't want to be alone," he continues, "and where is everybody? This is Florida, dammit. Holler. Show me some t.i.tties."

Today has been a study in the unglamorous reality of the touring life: overnight on the tour bus, all day hanging around a venue in the kind of town in which there's nothing much to do but hang around the venue. At one point in the afternoon, Cooley had discovered i) a golf cart, and ii) the interesting fact that you can start one by jamming a bottle opener into the ignition, but there are only so many piles of empty beer cartons a grown man can satisfyingly drive through in a day. The only thing which has distinguished today from hundreds of others like it that Cooley has had, and hundreds more he is yet to have, has been the quite startling manifestation in the backstage parking lot of rooster-haired funk G.o.d George Clinton (he lives up the road, for reasons surpa.s.sing understanding, and is apparently a friend of the venue's owner).

And the show, at least in the Truckers' view, hasn't gone all that brilliantly. They're back in the bus, consuming the superb roast dinner that ba.s.sist Shonna Tucker has concocted on the onboard kitchenette from locally sourced organic meat and vegetables. Hood, as ever, is talking eight beats to the bar about music-about his father's recent induction into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame (David Hood played ba.s.s in the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section) and about the alb.u.m the Truckers have just made as a pick-up band for Booker T, with Neil Young contributing guitar (Hood plays me some rough mixes: the version of Outkast's "Hey Ya" is astounding).

By common consent, tonight belongs to The Hold Steady. From the moment they bound on to their intro tape, David Lee Roth's "Yankee Rose," they're focused, furious, determined to wring what gold there is from the base metal of a smallish, diffident audience. The group's enthusiasm swiftly proves overwhelming, and the screams-actual screams, by the end-for an encore are rewarded with the biggest convening yet of The Drive Hold By Steady Truckers supergroup. Hood appears in a Barack Obama t-s.h.i.+rt to help out on The Hold Steady's creeping, malevolent take on AC/DC's "Ride On," and further Truckers wander on for Blue Oyster Cult's "Burning For You," The Band's "Look Out Cleveland"-Cooley has not deigned to change back out of his after-show apparel of sweats.h.i.+rt, pyjama bottoms and slippers-and The Hold Steady's "Killer Parties."

In normal circ.u.mstances, all that both groups would now have to look forward to is another interminable bus ride. However, the schedule is disrupted by one of those strange, surreal surprises that makes the b.u.mpy bunks and boredom of touring worth enduring: would we, someone asks, care to drop by Clinton's studio, where he is not only awaiting us, but has apparently switched on the Mothers.h.i.+p-the famous flying saucer stage prop in which Clinton would descend stageward in his 70s heyday. And so, at two in the morning, two vast tour buses follow a car through the outskirts of Tallaha.s.see, to a house distinguished only by a poetically apposite address-1300 Hendrix Road-and by colourful flas.h.i.+ng lights in the windows. The bemused groups troop inside, through a couple of recording studios, past walls of gold and platinum alb.u.ms won by Parliament and Funkadelic, to the source of the illuminations: the Clinton mothers.h.i.+p, now parked permanently in one room in the complex. The craft's pilot duly appears, poses for photos, offers handshakes, bestows blessings and exits without betraying the vaguest hint that he knows or cares who any of these people are, or why they're in his house at this hour. Patterson leans unsteadily on my shoulder.

"Andrew," he says, "It's been a long day, and I'm tired, and I've had quite a lot to drink, but ..."

Yes, I rea.s.sure him. That's a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. And that was George Clinton.

THE LINE AFTER "Rock'n'roll means well" in "Marry Me" is "... but it can't help telling young boys lies." I bid farewell to Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady outside Clinton's studio, and commiserate with them on the sixteen-hour drive between here and their next a.s.signation in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Both these bands are, as they freely admit, old enough to know better, but both are full of people still driven to scratch furiously at that itch caused by that first brush with Bruce Springsteen, The Replacements or whatever you're having yourself. And somewhere in America, though that person may not know it yet themselves, is someone who was in the crowd at the four shows played or the nineteen still to go, and who is, twenty or even thirty years hence, going to struggle for sleep on a bus, curse a flat crowd, be introduced in bewildering circ.u.mstances to a legend of popular music and his flying saucer and wonder whether to thank or blame Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady.

25.

CRAZY NORSES.

Iceland FEBRUARY 1997, JULY 1997, JUNE 1998.

I HAVEN'T BEEN TO Iceland since I wrote what appears below, st.i.tched together from three a.s.signments-one for HAVEN'T BEEN TO Iceland since I wrote what appears below, st.i.tched together from three a.s.signments-one for The Independent The Independent, one for The Sunday Times The Sunday Times and one, as it turned out, for reasons explained shortly, for n.o.body. What happened, essentially, was this. For the first time ever, Iceland exported a famous pop group, The Sugarcubes, from which emerged an even more famous pop singer, Bjork. The inevitable result was that everybody in Iceland, more or less, then formed a pop group of their own. Most of these, as is the way of such opportunist cl.u.s.terf.u.c.ks-see Manchester circa 1990, Seattle circa 1993-were neither use nor ornament, but this did not deter the pertinent departments of Iceland's government from displaying the blithe largesse with public money characteristic of Scandinavian societies. Frequent flights and generous accommodations were laid on for foreign music, arts and travel journalists interested in visiting Reykjavik-and the aeroplane seats and hotel rooms filled briskly as word spread of Iceland's apt.i.tude for sodden revelry, and (not incidentally) of the frostbitten island's womenfolk, whose poleaxing beauty was secondary, as an attraction, only to their cheerful, enthusiastic and altogether refres.h.i.+ng lack of discrimination where visiting males were concerned. and one, as it turned out, for reasons explained shortly, for n.o.body. What happened, essentially, was this. For the first time ever, Iceland exported a famous pop group, The Sugarcubes, from which emerged an even more famous pop singer, Bjork. The inevitable result was that everybody in Iceland, more or less, then formed a pop group of their own. Most of these, as is the way of such opportunist cl.u.s.terf.u.c.ks-see Manchester circa 1990, Seattle circa 1993-were neither use nor ornament, but this did not deter the pertinent departments of Iceland's government from displaying the blithe largesse with public money characteristic of Scandinavian societies. Frequent flights and generous accommodations were laid on for foreign music, arts and travel journalists interested in visiting Reykjavik-and the aeroplane seats and hotel rooms filled briskly as word spread of Iceland's apt.i.tude for sodden revelry, and (not incidentally) of the frostbitten island's womenfolk, whose poleaxing beauty was secondary, as an attraction, only to their cheerful, enthusiastic and altogether refres.h.i.+ng lack of discrimination where visiting males were concerned.

There were two severe, and eventually terminal, problems with this otherwise splendid arrangement. One was that commissioning editors rapidly grew bored with-and suspicious about-story pitches involving Iceland: one began to run up against responses like "What, again? Won't this be the fifth new Bjork and/or Sigur Ros you've interviewed this year?" The other was that we serial junketers failed to organise ourselves-somebody, on one of the flights back, should have struggled to their feet and reminded the whimperingly hungover and hopelessly lovelorn pa.s.senger manifest that if at least one of us didn't get something into print sometime soon, our hosts would wise up and we would be reduced, once again, to spending our weekends in places which didn't seem like some alien planet where everything was just like it was on Earth, but weirder and better.

So I haven't been back to Iceland. The spirit has been willing, but the bank balance weak-even by the uproarious standards of Scandinavia, Iceland was always very much a place you want to visit on expenses. I therefore missed riding along on any part of the up-as-a-rocket, down-as-a-stick economic trajectory that Iceland pursued over the subsequent decade. So I wasn't there as Iceland's financial services industry boomed, bequeathing every citizen with (one prefers to a.s.sume) their own platinum-plated snowmobile, and I wasn't there when the undignified implosion of that same banking sector, which has (or so one reads) reduced Iceland to a subsistence economy under which everyone is forced to dine on thin soup made from puffin beaks, and the currency is now the herring.

THEY DO THINGS differently in Reykjavik. This much can be gleaned, on this long, northern-lights-illuminated winter's night, from the polite, apologetic demeanour of the young chap who has been dispatched upstairs by his superiors at the Loftleidir Hotel's reception desk.

The scene before him would test the humour, and the credulity, of any hotel employee. In the corridor, three people lie unconscious, the worse for the evening's hilarity. The plate gla.s.s window on the landing is rent by a large, suspiciously foot-shaped hole. At the end of the hall, a half-dressed blond man with a length of blue rope tied around his waist is crawling on all fours and barking like a dog; at the other end of the blue rope is an unfeasibly tall red-haired woman dressed in black rubber, who appears to be taking him for a walk. There are parties occuring in at least five rooms, involving a volatile mix of musicians, local scenesters, foreign media and two pizza delivery boys who thought it all looked like more fun than going back to work. Leaning against one wall is a decent-sized tree that someone has liberated from its pot in the lobby.

Most hotels would have sent for the police, or possibly the army, some hours ago. The bloke from reception knocks on one open door, barely audible above the music blasting out of the room's television set. Unheard, he steps over the shattered form of Baldur Steffanson, the manager of Gus Gus, the Reykjavik band everyone's come to spend the weekend with. Baldur is dozing peacefully, a bottle of vodka cradled in one arm and the words "Love Me" printed on his forehead in black ink by some prankster.

"Excuse me," the bloke from reception says, dimming the volume on the television. "Could you all possibly please keep it down a little bit?"

It's just gone eight in the morning. So, they won't let you bring your c.o.c.ktail into the breakfast room, but that aside, Reykjavik's credentials as a the kind of place you'd want to spend more time in seem, on first acquaintance, impeccable.

IN ICELAND IN the summertime, the sun doesn't set, it bounces. Just after midnight, it dips below the horizon before emerging minutes later, like some vast celestial digit that has been dipped gingerly into the North Atlantic and found the water too cold. It doesn't really get dark at all. I spend days feeling jetlagged-my body clock, deprived of its day/night mechanisms, demands hot dinners at four in the morning and plunges me into deep sleeps at five in the afternoon. There are few feelings as appalling as staggering out of a dark nightclub at three in the morning to get a face full of blazing mid-afternoon suns.h.i.+ne.

The acclimatised locals regard the relentless daylight of June and July as a fine excuse for staying up all night, getting uproariously drunk and staggering around Reykjavik until dawn trying to find someone to get into a fight or bed with. Though, given that Icelanders seem to feel pretty much the same about the other ten months of the year, not too much should be read into this.

For most of its thousand-odd years of human settlement, Iceland has been a wallflower at the dance of nations. On the rare occasions that the toadfish-shaped island has made the nine o'clock news, it's generally been due to forces beyond its control. These have originated either outside Iceland (the Cod War with Britain in the 70s, the Reagan/ Gorbachev summit in 1986) or under it (the sudden appearance of the island of Surtsey in 1963, the volcanic eruption that forced the evacuation of the island of Heimaey in 1973, 1996's spectacular meltdown of the mighty Vatnajokull icecap).

In the last couple of years, though, Iceland's stock has risen dramatically. At last count, every magazine in the world has packed a feature writer off to knock up a piece t.i.tled "The Coolest Place On Earth." These pieces invariably mention that Bjork lives here, that Damon Albarn of Blur lives here sometimes, that Icelanders drink a lot and eat puffins, and that the drink, like the puffin, and like everything else for that matter, is terribly expensive.

This is all true enough. Bjork has become only the third internationally famous Icelander in history, after Leif Eiriksson and Magnus Magnusson.

Eiriksson achieved his fame by discovering America nearly five centuries before Columbus, even if he did keep getting chased out of it by the natives; Magnusson by spending years and years on television asking mad old librarians and retired colonels arcane questions about P.G. Wodehouse and steam trains.

Bjork has done it by dressing up as an a.s.sortment of Christmas tree decorations and warbling, to periodically beguiling effect, in a voice which sounds like an angel with hiccups; I always kind of preferred the records she made with The Sugarcubes, myself. Her success has invigorated Iceland, encouraging Reykjavik's large subcla.s.s of bohemian dilettantes to entertain ambition as well as delusions of artistic grandeur. Everybody under the age of forty that I meet in Reykjavik gives their occupation as singer, poet, actor, novelist, photographer, director or sculptor. I have no idea who, if anyone, is doing Iceland's actual work. If this generation ever decides to replace Iceland's national anthem, the only realistic t.i.tle for the new one will be "I Have a Number of Projects in Development."

It's not surprising that a few British artists have been tempted to find out if there's something stimulating in Iceland's sulphurous tap water. Blur recorded much of their fifth, and best, alb.u.m in a Reykjavik studio. Several other celebrities of various description have been spotted beneath the tables of the city's nightspots. It's been enough to prompt Albarn to worry out loud that Iceland will turn into "the new Ibiza," but he shouldn't concern himself overmuch-Iceland's prices will continue to prove the most effective deterrent to package tour invasion a country could possibly muster, short of staging a civil war or ebola epidemic. A modest round of drinks for four leaves little change from thirty quid. The McDonald's takes credit cards.

REYKJAVIK IS HOME to half of Iceland's population of 260,000. It's a cosy, low-rise town almost completely lacking in such traditional signifiers of munic.i.p.al stature as pollution, crime and poverty. The poor parts of town-the colourful new pre-fab flats that sit along the road in from Keflavik airport-don't look all that poor. The rich parts-the colourful old wooden houses that cl.u.s.ter around the body of water in the city centre that is either a small lake or a big pond-don't look all that rich.

Reykjavik has only two landmarks. One, Hallgrimskirkja, is a large basalt church that presides over the centre of the city; built from unblemished, monotone grey stone, it look like it was a.s.sembled last week from a kit. The other is Perlan, an excellent but riotously expensive revolving restaurant which sits atop four silver water tanks, and looks like something that might have been inhabited by the bad guy in the black jumpsuit in a Jon Pertweeera episode of Doctor Who Doctor Who.

By day, Reykjavik has the forlorn, deserted feel of a theme park closed for repairs. The only times I see crowds are on the Tuesday, when they're out celebrating Iceland's national day-the birthday of nineteenth-century nationalist hero Jon Sigurdsson-and on the Friday and Sat.u.r.day nights, when they're out celebrating Friday and Sat.u.r.day night. Nothing happens in Reykjavik until midnight, and after midnight everything that does happen in Reykjavik looks and sounds like a crowd scene from Caligula Caligula.

The frenetic wa.s.sailing centres on a few clubs based on and around Laugavegur and Bankastraeti, all a short stumble apart in the middle of town. Places like Kaffibarrin, Cafe au Lait and Rosenborg begin to fill up properly at about 1:00 AM-due to the frightening expense of drinking in clubs, people tend to warm up by drinking at home. By chucking-out time at 3:00 AM, all of them are full of Icelanders enjoying themselves, which is to say all these clubs look like they are hosting a match of some Nordic variant of indoor rugby played with 200 on each side and no ball.

The natives, while occasionally terrifyingly exuberant, are friendly. It's not difficult, on nights like these, to find people willing to talk to someone from out of town (that said, it's not difficult, on nights like these, to find people happy to talk to mailboxes, streetlamps, potted plants and themselves). And when the people of Reykjavik address you, after a few drinks, it's like nothing you've ever heard, especially if you're male and not used to women so beautiful they could have put Helen out of the s.h.i.+p-launching racket for good saying the kind of things that women who look like that usually only say to you when you're dreaming. Their technique stops only just short of a club over the head, a hoist over one shoulder and a drag back to their cave.

"Icelandic men," explains one such vision, one night, "are no good. That's why we like it when foreign men come here. Fresh meat."

Right.

"Icelandic men drink too much and never speak of their feelings."

I've heard this complaint about other nationalities of my gender, funnily enough, but I don't have time to elaborate. She grabs me by the hand and leads me at a brisk march through the crowd to a table at the other end of the club, where two morose young men sit silently contemplating their drinks.

"You see these two s.h.i.+tbags?"

Evening, chaps.

"My ex-husbands. I have a son with that one and a daughter with that one."

G.o.d, but I wish she'd let go of me. Neither of the fathers of her children look that far descended from the Vikings. Happily, they don't seem to object to her, or her tirade, or me, much. In fact, I get the impression they're used to it-it does seem that everyone in Reykjavik has been married to everyone else at least once.

"Now," she announces. "I have never slept with an Australian."

I return to my hotel alone, convinced that there must be a catch to this somewhere.

ASIDE FROM REYKJAVIK'S lately acquired, and thoroughly warranted, reputation as the world's finest night out, Iceland's major appeal is its unique geological volatility. Everywhere else on the planet, the ground is what things happen to, or on, or above. In Iceland, the ground is what happens. On this vast, spherical bottle of agitated, bubbling rock that humanity calls home, Iceland is the twitching cork.

There are numerous sites around Reykjavik that confirm this, strung together on a route called "The Golden Circle." The Golden Circle isn't circular, and nothing in the bleak, rugged Icelandic countryside is golden, but tourist brochures have to call their excursions something, and n.o.body's going to sell many tickets for a coach trip around The Gloomy Ellipse.

The first stop is enchantingly pointless: a large greenhouse where the princ.i.p.al "attraction" is a collection of South American banana plants. I wonder if, under some reciprocal agreement organised in the name of Icelandic-Colombian friends.h.i.+p, there's a museum full of horned helmets and longboats on the outskirts of Bogota.

We are then driven to a large, geographically significant hole in the ground, which I have difficulty distinguis.h.i.+ng from the many large, geographically insignificant holes in the ground I have seen in my time. Things improve dramatically when the bus disgorges its cargo of German pensioners and me at the Gullfoss falls. Gullfoss, the most spectacular of Iceland's umpty-hundred waterfalls, is where the glacial waters of the Hyvita River tumble down two thirty-metre cascades at right angles to each other. The result is a rainbow-necklaced fountain of vapour that goes up as high as the falls go down. As is the case with most of Iceland's natural attractions, there is little in the way of fences or ropes to stop you from getting too close. It's possible to creep along one muddy ledge far enough to reach out and touch the fall, which is both a startling lesson in the fall's power and a sad reminder of how many of the world's natural wonders are as fenced off and inaccessible as zoo exhibits.

At Geysir-the field of bubbling, sneezing puddles that has given its name to similar phenomena everywhere-there are only desultory ropes and signs gently reminding visitors that falling into boiling volcanic mud can be bad for you. The actual Great Geysir packed it in some decades back, so the main reason for being here now is the Strokkur spout, which blasts water twenty metres into the air every five minutes or so. This is mildy entertaining the first time, and after that amusing only in proportion to the number of unwary German camcorder enthusiasts it drenches in hot sulphuric spume.

The final stop on the Golden Circle is Thingvellir, the lava plain that was the site of Iceland's-and the world's-first national a.s.sembly, the Althing, first convened in 930. The significance of the place is acknowledged only by an Icelandic flag flapping on the spot where chieftains would address this early experiment in democracy, but Thingvellir bears a much more imposing natural gravitas. The site is rent by a huge gash in the black rock that marks the boundary where the American and European continental plates grind together. The fissure in between the two cliffs is muddy, and carpeted with pale green moss. Climbing down to stand on it, I feel that with a big enough lever, I could prise the whole world apart.

ALL OF ICELAND is apt to engender a sense of humanity's impotence before the forces commanded by nature, but Heimaey, more than anywhere else, is an eloquent confirmation of our status as barely tolerated parasites. Heimaey is the largest of the Westmann Islands, a cl.u.s.ter of small-to-medium-sized lumps of rock off Iceland's south coast, a twenty-five-minute flight from Reykjavik.

The Westmann Islands are a reminder that, before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it was only Iceland that kept the world's mapmakers in steady business. Contemplating the geology of the Westmanns, and comparing it with the stately pace at which the rest of the planet erodes and erupts, is as disorientating as listening to a 33rpm record at 78. One of the Westmanns, Surtsey, appeared out of the sea between 1963 and 1967. In 1973, Heimaey, the largest and the only inhabited Westmann island, was enlarged twenty percent by an eruption beneath the ocean that buried much of the town and forced the population to leave for six months-it can be imagined that Heimaey's insurance underwriters were the first aboard the fleeing trawler boats and its real estate agents the last.

This recently arrived portion of Heimaey still belches grumpy clouds of steam, and the ground below the top layer of dirt is hot enough to burn skin, which is something I discover the hard way. If you can be bothered, it is apparently possible to bake bread in it, by digging a hole and burying your dough overnight. It's a sobering idea to take on board, the notion of the ground as a living thing, capable of such fury. When I get aboard one of the cruise boats that sail around the island, it's striking how much the charred mountain spewed up in 1973 resembles an immense clenched fist in the process of s.n.a.t.c.hing lush, placid Heimaey back into the sea.

The inert, lunar landscape of the new Heimaey is a total contrast to the life that teems around the rest of the island. On Heimaey's cliffs nest uncountable thousands of puffins, terns and gulls, and in the water beneath the boat lurk otherwordly fugitives from Neptune's nightmares. These creatures are on display in Heimaey's small aquarium, and are almost enough to put me off lunch. The Icelandic catfish is, beyond any doubt, the single ugliest creature on earth. They look like diseased lungs with faces.

AT THE OTHER end of Iceland, Grimsey Island feels like the last stop before the end of the world. This tiny tumour of rock, home to eighty or so hardy, self-contained souls, would be disregarded by the world at large were it not for a fluke of cartography: Grimsey perches neatly atop lat.i.tude 6633' N-the Arctic Circle. A road sign embedded in a cement block set exactly on the Circle displays the immense distances between Grimsey and anywhere else-16317 kilometres to where I grew up, for want of a better phrase, in Sydney; 4445 kilometres to my last a.s.signment, in New York; 1949 kilometres to my home in London.

Despite Grimsey's windswept remoteness, I'm not keen to leave, for two reasons. One is that Grimsey's windswept remoteness is rather beguiling: its subtle colours are delicately enriched by the late-night suns.h.i.+ne, and the clouds of arctic tern that eddy and swirl around the cliffs have a hypnotic compulsion about them, at least until they realise I'm standing within a mile of their nests and start going for my eyes-I suddenly understand why all the children on the island are wearing bicycle helmets. The other reason I don't want to leave is that leaving is going to involve getting back aboard the plane I arrived on.

Flying at the best of times-by which I mean sitting in a posh seat up the front with movies and video games in a nice big jet-engined aircraft on a calm, clear day-is about my least favourite thing in the world, comprised as it is of long periods of extremity-numbing boredom interspersed with moments of pure, sweaty-palmed terror. This is not the best of times. The daily flight between Grimsey and Iceland's northern regional capital of Akureyri is a dice with the crosswinds that ensnare the island and befoul the Eyjafjordur fjord into which Akureyri airport's runway juts. Yesterday, the pilot tells me, the twin-propeller, twelve-seater winged lawnmower that plies the twenty-minute route had been forced to turn back halfway. Our flight here had inspired in me an unprecedented interest in prayer, and had ended with an almost vertical dive onto Grimsey's runway, which is carved out of the side of a hill. Since then, the wind has, if anything, picked up.

"You know," says the pilot, who has either been driven insane by the job or was born mad enough to apply for it, "sometimes we have to wait for the weather. Haha! Once, we couldn't leave for two weeks! Haha!"

Hilarious.

"Haha! Yes! One of the pa.s.sengers was supposed to be getting married! In Akureyri! You can imagine! Haha!"

Perhaps you had to be there. Half a dozen of Grimsey's cycle-helmet-enc.u.mbered children gambol up and down the runway, waving sticks and yelping, to clear the birds sitting along it.