Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Bergur Ebbi Benediktsson’s eight-week-old daughter Gerða begins to cry, and he looks perplexed. He tries adjusting the blankets, and she hushes. “I think she’s doing fine,” he decides. “I’ve only had her for eight weeks, though, so I wouldn’t know if she wasn’t.” He looks closer. “I guess she’s drooling a bit.”

Bergur is having a busy day. As a project manager for the Trade Council of Iceland, the 26-year-old has just arrived from Canada (via red-eye) this morning. He spent part of the day at the office, part of the day watching soccer, and now he’s in charge of his baby daughter for the first time, while his girlfriend Rán meets some friends for a Sex and the City viewing party. Oh, and somewhere in there, he and his fellow band members met with their record label to discuss plans for their band, Sprenguhöllin, whose songs have reigned at number one on the Icelandic charts twice in as many years. That’s right—Bergur is one of Iceland’s biggest rock stars.

I had first heard about Sprenguhöllin from a friend. She is a huge fan of the band and, in a classic Icelandic coincidence, also receives emails from Bergur Ebbi in his capacity as a project manager at the Trade Council.

“They’re definitely in the top five, maybe even the top three bands in Iceland,” she told me. “You can’t really classify them. They play on the rock and adult contemporary stations and the national radio and FM 95.7 where Britney Spears gets played. They also sing in Icelandic, and that’s not something many Icelandic bands do.”

“Plus,” she added, “Bergur does a lot of good stuff for the export council.”

I’d heard Sprenguhöllin play on the radio constantly, and I was curious to meet Bergur. My friend told me I could find his contact information on the staff page of the Icelandic export council website. So I called Iceland’s number-one rock star (or possibly number two or three—Björk doesn’t count) at his day job , and he casually suggested that we meet up at his house.

Bergur’s kitchen looks out the back of his home, onto a tree-lined footpath between two rows of houses. The room is neat and spartan; a white lily sits in a vase on the table. His cat Snuli is perched on the windowsill and watches children running up and down the path.

Bergur pours himself a glass of milk and fixes me with an intent gaze. I ask him what it’s like to be famous. “Discussing your own reputation, it’s a risky business,” he hedges. “Even really famous people here, they always talk about themselves like they’re not famous. That’s the attitude you need to have."

Bergur is getting warmed up now. “Twenty percent of the nation has the ‘famous’ stamp. Fame in Iceland is not the same as fame somewhere else. We laugh about it all the time, we laugh about how people are famous in Iceland, stuck with some of the disadvantages, like people thinking you’re so full of yourself or whatever, but never the advantages—like being rich.”

Like many young artists in Iceland, Bergur is forced to lead a double life: As though he were a hipper, black-clad version of Clark Kent, he goes to his job and then goes off to do his real work—music.

The Icelandic attitude toward fame is simply this: We’re not impressed. Since I first arrived in Iceland to work on a geology research project, I have met famous (or at least semi-famous) people everywhere I go. A 16-year-old acquaintance from a conference on Arctic territorial claims turned out to be a national riding champion. A glaciologist at the government agency where I work admitted that he had taken all the photographs of insects that are used on Icelandic postage stamps. At countless parties, eager Icelanders have pointed at someone and whispered in my ear: “See that guy over there? He’s actually really famous!”

I even met the President of Iceland. After a Model United Nations conference, he welcomed our group to his house, chatted with us about the conference, and served us champagne and cookies. It was easy to forget that the white-haired gentleman with the grandfatherly glasses who spoke so openly was also a head of state, and that the adjacent storage room was filled with gifts from Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev—tokens of their appreciation for his role in international peace negotiations.

In Iceland, celebrity status comes from doing something adequately noteworthy in a country where not much escapes notice. With a population of about 300,000 (and a population density, by the way, of about four people per square mile), Iceland is in some ways not so different from a small town where the neighbors know everything about each other. Perhaps that is one reason the paranoid chess champion Bobby Fisher became an Icelandic citizen at the end of his life. Different rules apply to being famous when you’re on a small island in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Back at the house, Bergur tells me more about his band. There are five members, yet despite their relative success in Iceland (they have several television appearances to their credit, as well as a contract with Sena, the largest label in Iceland), almost all of them have day jobs.

“We have Snorri working at the Reykjavík Power Company, he’s in human resources. Siggi the drummer, he works for the power company, too—maybe Snorri pulled some strings, but they won’t talk about it. He does something in the basement of the building, but says if he didn’t show up for a week or two, nothing would happen. Gjorg, he works at the Icelandic business journal selling ads. And Akni, the keyboard player, he’s taken the best step toward being a musician. He works on musical ‘projects’—he has all kinds of projects.”

In her cradle, Gerða makes a burbling sound. She is becoming restless again. Bergur carries her upstairs to a toy mobile, and she seems entranced by the suspended jungle animals. He shows me portraits of his role models: Bob Dylan, Rimbaud, the Icelandic poet Einar Benediktsson, and Bruce Springsteen. I ask Bergur if he is also a role model for young Icelanders, and he laughs at the idea.

“We know personally our biggest fans, all of them,” he says. “That’s just how it works in Iceland. They are people we go to parties with. I think it’s very unlikely that there’s some guy out there who is a very big fan, and he’s thinking about all the lyrics, and we’ve never heard of him.”

I look at my watch and realize it’s getting late. I thank Bergur for meeting with me, grab my jacket and head out the door. As I do, he calls after me, “Hey, if you’re around this weekend give me a call, we might be heading out to the bars.”

Bergur Ebbi is a great guy, I say to myself. Two or three hours later, I hear Sprenguhöllin on the radio, and I think of Iceland’s number-one rock star at home in his kitchen, tending to his baby and drinking a glass of milk.