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My fascination with Iceland began in 1988, when an elfin girl with a voice like a cat being strangled first appeared on Saturday morning TV fronting a band called The Sugarcubes. I was a music journalist living in Belfast and I had never heard anything like Björk. The Sugarcubes only became more compelling when I learned that they were from Iceland.
Now the idea of ‘foreigners’ invading our charts was not uncommon – I remember Vanessa Paradis cooing ‘Joe le Taxi’ and German siren Nena baring her hairy armpits on Top of the Pops as she sang a paen to ‘99 Red Balloons’ – but these divas were from France and Germany, countries I was familiar with from childhood camping holidays. Iceland was altogether more exotic. It was north of Ireland for a start. (My parents only headed due south for summer breaks. Anything north of Ireland could not be considered a holiday … it could only be considered punishment, like being sent to work in a Siberian salt mine).
So I was hooked on The Sugarcubes. Mostly because their interviews made great reading as they gave me (and many teenagers like me) our first insights into their barmy homeland with its lava lagoons and its rock dwelling elves.
I promised myself that I would one day visit Iceland and so, when I moved to London to work in adland as a young copywriter, I was always trying to weave Iceland into my ad scripts. It’s a cliché on the creative floors of ad agencies that you should always begin a script with ‘open on a beach’ to guarantee an exotic film shoot. Mine invariably started: ‘Open on some elves dancing round a geyser in an Icelandic moonscape.’ Which is not an easy way to begin an ad for Kellogg’s. Unless, of course, the elves are dressed in red bikinis and they’re watching their waistlines with bowls of Special K.
Of course none of my ‘Icelandic’ scripts ever saw the light of day (or night, as is the case in summertime Iceland) because my creative directors always saw through it. But when I got older and wiser, not only did I sensibly move out of London to Edinburgh, I was finally presented with a legitimate opportunity to shoot an ad in the so-called ‘ Land of Fire and Ice.’
The brief was to create a new campaign for Tennent’s lager in Scotland, something that would appeal to that highly desirable socio-economic group known as ‘opinion formers’. The brand was looking for something cutting edge, something intelligent, challenging and even obtuse.
So I figured, where’s the most ‘obtuse’ place to set an ad? Well it had to be Iceland. I reasoned that it may only be two and a half hours from Glasgow but it’s a cultural world away.
Now all I had to do was write the script. But when I came to put pen to paper, I realised that all I knew about Iceland was that the locals sang kooky songs about finding spiders in their pockets, and that they believed in the little people (not unlike my own countrymen).
I’m afraid I didn’t get much beyond: ‘Open on some elves dancing round a geyser, each one cradling a golden, frothy pint of Tennent’s.’ After some research, however, I learned a little more about this unique island and the things that make it so compelling.
What did you learn, Zane?
Well, I learned that the islanders like to eat strange food.
Historically, fruit and vegetables have never featured heavily in the Icelanders diet. It’s not the most fertile place, most of the country being covered in lava and resembling a burnt lasagne.
See that’s one thing I did learn about Iceland; it’s badly named. There isn’t much ice. That’s if you ignore Vatnajókull, Europe’s largest glacier. Admittedly it’s pretty hard to ignore Vatnajókull, given that barely three months ago it blew lava 12,000 feet into the air and sent ash clouds over Holland. But apart from the odd glacier, there isn’t such a huge amount of ice in Iceland. You are more likely to encounter black sand deserts or fields of mossy lava. And I’d challenge even Hugh Fearnley Whatsisname to conjure a prize-winning courgette from land as infertile as that.
So vegetables do not feature heavily on Icelandic menus. Nor do Icelanders tend allotments or visit Garden Centres. Makes you wonder what they do with their Sunday afternoons.
Without recourse to salad, the Icelanders had to draw sustenance in other ways. And that’s why they turned to the sea. Whale, dolphin and rotten shark still feature in the national diet. As does dried fish, known as harðfiskur (if you visit Iceland, bring some back with you and give it someone you hate).
I also learned that Icelanders like to eat seabirds - most notably, puffin - and that the puffin appears on Icelandic stamps. Now you have to question the attitude of a people that eats one of its national symbols, but I reckoned that the ‘weird food’ angle was as good a way as any to start my Tennent’s ad and introduce this kooky nation.
And so the ad did not open on those dancing elves, but instead opened on Sigga Gudmundsdóttir, a local girl who loves Tennent’s lager because it is ‘perfect to wash down her wind-dried puffin.’
That was the opening four seconds sorted. I only had another thirty five seconds to fill with more insights on Iceland. So what else did I learn about the place?
That there are six women to every man?
Don’t ask me where I got this from. Let’s just say that it was a shock for me to land at Keflavík for the first recce and not be leapt on by half a dozen sex-starved blonde Valkyries.
In fact, that was another thing I learned pretty quickly about Iceland: all the women are not blonde. You’d have thought I would have realised that from Björk. People tend to lump Iceland in with Norway and Sweden and have you believe that downtown Reykjavík resembles some huge Abba convention.
I knew that I was writing an ad with an Icelandic girl as the main spokesperson, and I became obsessed with making sure she wasn’t blonde. Unfortunately, the best actress in casting had blonde hair right down to her waist. There was only one thing for it: we had to dye it red. Our actress – Birna - wasn’t too happy. We assured her the dye was ‘wash in, wash out.’ What the stylist didn’t tell us was that when it washed out, her blonde hair turned green. And that’s as much as I’m permitted to say about it. The matter now rests with her lawyers.
So no, there aren’t six women to every man. And there weren’t six Valkyries waiting for me at Keflavík airport. Although, and this is bizarre, at the time I visited, Icelandair were using beautiful young Icelandic women to target foreign tourists with thinly veiled promises of sexual adventure. Posters on the London Underground featured semi naked girls in the Blue Lagoon, rubbing mud on to each other, under the headline: ‘Fancy a dirty weekend?’
To be fair, though, Icelanders do have some reputation as being a little more upfront and laid back in their attitudes to sex. This is only partially true. Iceland is a small country of perhaps 280,000 people, 90% of whom live in Reykjavík. Locals will tell you that everyone already knows each other, so nobody bothers to chat each other up. They tend to dispense with such formalities and go straight to the nitty gritty. But do not assume that they behave in the same way with foreign visitors. Iceland may boast the world’s most beautiful women, but be careful what you say to them as their boyfriends are likely to be the world’s strongest men.
So no, there aren’t six women to every man. There are, in fact, 1.3 women to every man. But I only realised this after the script was written. So after Sigga enjoys her wind-dried puffin, the ad cuts to her standing immersed in the Blue Lagoon alongside five girlfriends, all of them competing for the attention of one solitary man.
Now here’s something I didn’t know until we filmed this scene: there is more than one blue lagoon in Iceland. In fact, there are a few. The one we shot at was way up north in Reykjahlið. The more famous lagoon near the airport enjoys its notoriety simply because it’s near the airport.
Admittedly the shoot at the Reykjahlið lagoon was not without its problems. For a start, the calcified water was strongly alkaline and we were worried about the actresses’ skin. We had to use lemon juice on the girls’ legs to neutralize the alkaline. And the lagoon was hot. Really hot. A sign at one end informed us that the temperature was eighty degrees. We were literally cooking our cast.
At this point I’ve caused caustic burns to six Icelandic girls and poached their internal organs, and I’ve forced our lead actress to dye her blonde hair permanently green. If it had been any other country than Iceland, where such lunacy seemed perfectly normal, I would have been kicked out before you could say the words ‘corporate social responsibility.’
So the six-women-to-one-man thing made it into the ad. Anyway, it had to stay in because it teed up a dreadful pun about ‘geysers’. In the lagoon, Sigga bemoans that she has to compete with five friends for the attention of one lager drinking man, but cheers herself that she can still drink Tennent’s with her favourite geysers...
And I already knew a bit about geysers.
The great ‘Geysir’ herself sits north east of Reykjavík and is the geyser that gave its name to all others. Unfortunately it only blows if you pour several tonnes of soapflakes into it.
For the next scene in the lager ad we positioned Sigga on a rock, and the idea was that two geysers would explode when she opened her can of Tennent’s.
This obviously posed a logistical nightmare, one that I revisited in The Killer’s Guide to Iceland when Callum is tasked with getting geysers to blow on command for a Renault commercial. Where do you get geysers that erupt when you say ‘action’?
Answer is, you build them. Now don’t ask me about the technicalities. You basically need an oil drum filled with water, a CO2 canister and a school chemistry set, and – whumph! – you’re away.
But this presented us with another problem. The oil drums had to be buried to impersonate geysers, but you can’t just go digging up any land in Iceland. The reason: it might be inhabited by elves … huldufólk … the ‘hidden people’. Not all Icelanders believe in these hidden beings but they certainly respect their habitats.
There is a road south of Reykjavík that bears a sharp left for no apparent reason. It does this in order to avoid an elf hill. Elves even have house numbers attributed to them. On the main street of Grundarfjorður, a rock stands between the houses numbered 82 and 86. Number 84 is home to the Elves.
If you try to dig up an elf habitat, strange things are reputed to happen; diggers break down, lights pop and workmen fall ill. The same would no doubt happen if we put our geysers in the wrong place and tried to film; our actress would lose her voice, or worse than that, her hair would turn green.
Mercifully no such curse befell us.
So Sigga has washed down her wind-dried puffin, and she’s enjoyed a Tennent’s with her favourite geysers. What next in the script? What other insights could I exploit?
Iceland is light all the time … when it’s not dark all the time.
This is because of Iceland’s proximity to the Arctic Circle. The tiny island of Grimsey at northernmost tip of Iceland, just dips its toe in the Arctic.
In Scotland I’m familiar with long summer nights and short winter days but Iceland takes the biscuit. In winter there are perhaps two hours of daylight in some parts of the island. Little wonder they call it the suicide season … a time when Icelanders reputedly hibernate (though whenever I have visited they all seem intent on partying all night).
The same can’t be said about summer, which is when we shot the ad. In summer you can’t sleep at all. It’s just light all the time. Even the black out curtains in our hotel seemed to vaporise in the midnight sun. And it is really unsettling to walk out of a bar at two in the morning, straight into retina frying sunlight.
The persistent summer light does have its advantages. You can, for example, enjoy the unique sport of midnight golf. And Iceland does boast some challenging golf courses, many with fairways carved out of lava fields. You need to hit a straight ball. Veer off the fairway in Scotland and you might end up in a gorse bush. Hit an erratic drive in Iceland and your ball will dissolve in a fermenting pit of burning sulphur.
So Iceland has long days in summer, and long nights in winter. This provided the next scenario in the Tennent’s script, where Sigga informs us that: ‘Great nights start with Tennent’s … which is lucky, because in Iceland our nights can last three months.’
To dramatise this we showed Sigga and her friends outside a typical Icelandic bar. Of course, never having visited Reykjavik at that time, I naturally assumed that a typical Icelandic bar was a subterranean ice cave in the middle of a vast glacial expanse. As you would.
Not content with taking six Icelandic girls, sticking them in a lagoon of boiling alkaline and turning their legs to pork crackling, we flew twenty Icelandic girls to the western side of the island, dressed them ‘frugally’ and forced them stand for a full day’s filming in the middle of an ice lagoon.
And the Jökulsárlón ice lagoon – where they filmed a car chase in the James Bond movie ‘Die Another Day’ – is very cold indeed, having its own microclimate. So cold, in fact, that one actress complained that her hair was chattering.
We created ‘Bar Frikki’ at the ice lagoon by building a fake nightclub exterior on the ice, a gateway to my imagined subterranean ice cave. The ad concludes with Sigga and her friends enjoying Tennent’s with ‘reindeer balls’ (the Icelandic version of beer nuts, naturally).
The bar snacks may be dodgy and the national tipple of Brennivin or ‘Black Death’ may be used to wash down putrefied shark, but the most p ainful part of drinking in Iceland is paying for it. So for the final gag in the ad, Sigga suggests that in Iceland, Tennent’s is a bargain at ‘only fifteen pounds a pint.’
The resulting ad paints a completely twisted, tongue-in-cheek view of the Icelanders – one that my Icelandic friends find hysterical - but hopefully I have redeemed myself with the publication of my new (thoroughly researched) novel! I have enjoyed returning to the island on many occasions and I know that I am not the first writer to be inspired by Iceland’s unconventional beauty, its volatile landscape and its lively eccentricities.
Zane Radcliffe
March 2005
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