Well, I recently partook in a short and sweet revival of Uncle Moss (Mosi Frændi) my band - started in 1987....revived in style in 2009 and 2010 (dormant since) I joined a bit later. I mostly play drums and sometimes I vocalise (not singing, not rapping.... something .... ). We do not fit the classic angry working class disenfranchised stereotype often associated with punk - we rather fit into a (vaguely) Icelandic tradition of middle class (semi-) 'arty' sort of punk. Our focus has primarily been on poking fun at pop music (and recently punk) and having a laugh - doing covers of all kinds of songs and also writing our own variety of dadaistic punk songs, excellent simple rock songs and other stuff that well.... We have a solid DIY ethos, and we do not place a very large emphasis on virtuosity in our playing styles - and maintain our youthful charm by not practicing.
The reason we got together this time was Rock in Reykjavík 2.0 - organised by Wim Van Hooste, a Belgian doctor who is crazy about Icelandic underground music; for his birthday - a big salute to him! The classic Rock in Reykjavík film which depicted the Icelandic punk scene of the early Eighties also had a birthday (30)... of course we were not in that film - but I feel that we very much belong to the tradition started .... or ongoing .... in it....
As is my wont I started digging around and thinking a bit about punk music and stumbled across some stuff on Crass (a band I never listened to) and was fascinated to find out that Penny Rimbaud, one of the founders of Crass was an upper class kind of bohemian born in 1943! He is a die-hard anarchist and idealist, and sees punk as a progression of the underground culture represented by poets like Rimbaud, the Beats, the hippies etc..... The story of the band's rise and fall, the struggles with-in it - and also the way that anarcho-punk distinguishes itself from commercial punk is an interesting one - when you look into any cultural phenomenon you'll find a lot more intricacies and complexity than you'd expect.
So I home to bang a bit more on me drums and scream into the microphone in years to come, nothing like it really....
