Sigur Ros - Do Away With Death

Fri 5th May, 2006 in Features

”...Most music is quite boring to me and it’s kind of soulless…”

It’s backstage at the Enmore Theatre, a few hours before Sigur Rós and Amina are due to hit the stage. Some sound guys are milling about, waiting for the bands to turn up and soundcheck. When they finally arrive, I’m introduced to vocalist/guitarist Jón þor Birgisson (Jónsi), and I’m surprised. Up close, he looks even more frail than he does on stage. He’s wearing a check train driver’s hat, brown pants and a brown hemp jumper, which he excitedly tells me he bought in Melbourne a couple of days ago. It feels really soft, I tell him. “I know! It’s really good – I’m really happy about it,” he says in his thick accent.

There is an innocent and childlike quality to Jónsi, like the way he sucks the water bottle lid to his lips during the interview and the tongue clicking rap he performs into the recorder. What comes as another surprise is the fact that Jónsi doesn’t listen to a lot of music, which maybe has something to do with the uniqueness of Sigur Rós. He says “most music is quite boring to me [and] ... it’s kind of soulless or too much like this,[put his hands to his heart in a death feigning manner].” His problem is that he’s too critical of other music, something which he hates.

“I don’t analyse anything until I hear something and think ‘Why did they have to put this in’, or they ruin some really nice music and one element can ruin it for me, like one really bad chorus or guitar or if the singer is singing fake. A lot of singers nowadays are singing really fake. [He adopts a poseur tone] ‘Ah, I’m so jayyyyded’.

“It’s so weird – it’s so obvious that it’s just all exaggerated emotions and stuff and it obviously sounds fake. If you sing totally honestly [and] you just throw your heart in, it’s how it should be… I actually don’t understand why people don’t see it.” Jónsi says he also doesn’t understand why musicians do it. “I’m just not in that headspace to understand it … It’s so far away from me.”

With images of glaciers and sharp misty mountains coming to mind, Jonsi’s homeland, Iceland, is also another world away. Jónsi says because Iceland is so isolated from the rest of the world, notions of rock stardom and fame wasn’t something he thought about when he first started creating music. “All your fans are so far away and seem so distant, so you never thought about anything like being able to do something with your music.”

He grew up listening to metal and got his first acoustic guitar from his parents. Initially, he found playing it boring because it was a bad guitar and “really hard to learn [and] hard to play – it was really sore fingers and stuff”. Then his father bought him an electric guitar from someone at his work when he was 13, and that’s when playing music really started to kick in. It was around this time that Jónsi also started playing in his first band. “Everything was just about having fun with your friends and creating something for yourself,” he says.

Halfway through the interview, he points to the door behind me. “It’s a really scary door – you can’t open the door,” he says. I turn around and see he’s right – there’s no door handle on the inside. Looks like he’s trapped in a room with a journalist, quite possibly a nightmare for the sometimes media shy Jónsi. Another nightmare of his is being buried alive.

We get onto the subject of burials and death when I ask whether it gets frustrating for the band when they make television appearances and the end of songs are cut off. Bassist Georg Holm has said it’s like cutting out pieces in a painting – something that doesn’t happen to art but does to music. But Jónsi says although he finds it a little weird, “it’s just some song” and it doesn’t matter because “some years you just die”.

I tell him about my recent visit to Rookwood Cemetery and wandering around reading gravestones and how being surrounded by death really makes you think about it. “You kind of never think about that and you are taught not to think about that,” he says.

Then Jónsi relates a story he was told by his grandfather. Before his great grandfather died, he wanted to make sure he was dead before he was buried. “In Iceland at that time, when people died, there was like a common practice to put people in the ground before they were dead or their heart stopped – they were just buried,” he says. “They found scratch marks on coffins and stuff.” So to make sure he wasn’t one of those, his great grandfather went to the doctor with his son, Jónsi’s grandfather, “to make sure the doctor cut his wrists – both wrists – just to make sure he was totally dead”. So they make sure they go and cut everyone’s wrists now? “No, just my great grandfather makes sure,” he laughs.

Death seemed like an ever present feature in Sigur Rós’ first few albums. But the latest release, Takk... is a much happier sounding album with pretty and uplifting glockenspiel and keyboard lines. There’s also a lighter quality to Jónsi’s voice, like the weight of the world isn’t bearing down on his heart anymore and he can finally breathe easy. “I think we’re all less worried about life and stuff and things around us,” he says.

The recording and songwriting process was also somewhat different for Takk… as well. With the previous albums, Jónsi says the band had been playing the songs for years before they recorded them, so the band was tired of the songs. “But this time around, we had only written one or two songs and came into the studio quite excited and looking forward to recording songs. We just wrote songs and kind of just recorded right away and experimented and just played around and stuff.”

All too soon, the allocated 20 minutes is up and someone knocks on the door and opens it – Jónsi has been saved from entrapment. Luckily Sigur Rós’ music doesn’t escape from people so easily.