Surviving Aldrei fór ég suður, a festival at the end of the world

Cherished reader, what makes a festival for you? The camping, the friends, the enticing line-up? Forfeiting your booze to a security guard, or finding yourself misplaced in an unidentifiable field at 3am? All of this, of course, and often very much more – but none of these past experiences can go towards explaining why I find myself on an unnaturally choppy fjord, paddling helplessly in a kayak while wondering where the hell my centre of gravity has got to. But this is Ísafjörður, not Pilton or Larmer Tree Gardens or anywhere else recognisable to your average mollycoddled Brit – and as music festivals go, it’s several thousand light years from normal.

Aldrei fór ég suður, or just plain Aldrei for short, has been running in the small fishing town of Ísafjörður (Eesa-fyur-dthur – try it with an Irn Bru-strength Scottish accent and you’re close) since 2004. The festival’s name translates directly as “I never went south” – a song lyric and a reference to the town’s remote location in the West Fjords region, 450km north of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík. We arrive after a 35-minute internal flight, the pedal-it-yourself 40-seater plane landing effortlessly on what’s said to be one of the world’s most dangerous runways (a fact I’m pathetically glad not to have known till our flight back to Reykjavík has taken off).

Although we can clearly see Ísafjörður just across the fjord, it seems nobody’s thought to operate a shuttle boat. We grab a lift in a 4×4 from an endlessly cheery man called Gústaf, who over the course of the weekend will prove himself helpful beyond all words. Every home should have a Gústaf. Tired from travelling, it’s now that I remember the response posted on the Aldrei fór ég suður Facebook page, following my request for first-timer tips: “Leave Grumpy Charlie at home and only bring fun and happy Charlie!” I’d thought it a little presumptuous at the time – not to mention suspiciously observant – but it turned out to be perfect advice; Aldrei is not a place for the downcast, and if you arrive wearing an overcoat of misery, it’ll quickly be replaced by a Lopapeysa (Icelandic sweater) of joy.

So let’s zip through that festival checklist again.

Camping? Nope – it’s close to freezing, despite the day before the festival being Iceland’s official first day of summer. (The only way to know this, says Ísafjörður’s mayor at the pre-festival reception, is to look at a calendar, although the mountains surrounding the town are noticeably less snowy by the time we leave.) Bands and fans alike stay with friends, in Ísafjörður’s solitary hotel, or in neighbouring towns – only accessible through tunnels – so if Aldrei’s on your festival wishlist, best get chummy with a local beforehand. (In Sigur Rós’s 2006 tour movie Heima, the band’s second stop-off is in Ísafjörður.)

Friends? Well, the town is said to nearly double in size (to up to 5,000) during the festival, with hundreds travelling across Iceland by car and plane, and we’re a little bowled over by how welcoming everyone is – even leaving aside the please-be-nice-to-the-journo factor. Ísafjörður residents open their doors to me and the other visiting hacks, the mayor welcoming a Danish correspondent into his home. Not sure she was expecting to walk in on Mr Mayor sitting naked in the sauna, but at least that experience gives us all a bellwether with which to measure the bands: “Ah, but are they as good as the naked mayor?”

Enticing line-up? Here’s where the real fun starts. Each year’s bill is chosen by a three-strong panel that remains deliberately as anonymous as possible, due to the crazy demand for Aldrei festival spots. Co-founder Mugison – literally the only act on this year’s bill I’d heard of prior to arriving – explains that 2011 is the first year they specifically asked people not to submit requests to play, and yet they still received 150 begging letters. To keep the bill fresh, no act is allowed to play more than two years on the trot, and the running order reflects not the perceived “importance” of any given year’s big name, but the general ebb and flow of the evening. This rule is sure to annoy the more prima donna-ish acts, but it harks back to a blissful time when festivals weren’t ruled by chequebooks and egos and were just a fun, relaxed party for all, created by a community pooling its various talents.

There’s only one stage so everyone gets to see everyone – so long as you can get into the venue, which for the other 363 days of the year apparently serves as a tyre warehouse. Notable moments of past festivals include a Jónsi-free Sigur Rós, who played a unique country set a couple of years back; a solo show from Gruff Rhys, whose attitude to Welsh culture seems to me to be deeply aligned with Icelandic folks’ stance about their own; and a local band who accidentally got so trolleyed prior to hitting the stage that all they could do was beg the crowd to throw things at them. The jubilant audience cheerfully obliged.

And booze? The biggest difference a Brit may find at Aldrei is that despite Iceland’s patchy relationship with alcohol over the years (beer was only legalised in 1989, a ruling celebrated every year on 1 March, known as Beer Day) you can bring your own booze to the festival and there’s a bar onsite as well. We’d been warned it might not exist, but in fact the bar provides the free-to-attend festival with a much needed income stream. The remainder of the substantial bill is picked up by sponsors, domestic carrier Air Iceland (which offers artists cheap flights) and a local bank. All artists play for nothing, and half the town seems to be volunteering onsite – we spot the mayor selling T-shirts at one point.

Just to illustrate Aldrei’s gently freewheeling eclecticism, this year’s line-up includes electro-pop party kids FM Belfast, Iceland’s 1997 Eurovision entry Páll Óskar, alt-rocker Pétur Ben, jazz-funk pianist Lars Duppler, screamo/metal duo Lazyblood, and Grafík, Iceland’s biggest pomp-rock band in the ‘80s – but you’d best check out our Aldrei fór ég suður festival – The Bands feature to see if anyone might take your fancy. It seems acts are picked for numerous reasons, not all of them musical: several are still learning their craft, some stars have faded long ago, and others’ oeuvre is simply too esoteric a taste to acquire, but a significant proportion hail from the West Fjords and there’s a premeditated lean towards encouraging new starters and nurturing a community feel. What’s clear is it’s an honour to play, and all participants dive in with a vim often absent from complacent UK festival bills.

In fact, when faced with Icelanders’ smiling, healthy insistence that music be an integral part of life from as young an age as possible, I’m slightly ashamed to be English, with our inevitable, relentless denigration of anyone learning an instrument at school being seemingly the precise opposite of what happens here. In a documentary (helpfully shown on my Icelandair flight) about Iceland Airwaves, the country’s annual music jamboree that takes place every October around Reykjavík, Canadian musicologist Donald Gislason states: “Alternative music is mainstream in Iceland. There is no mainstream – everything is alternative.” These wildly differing attitudes might explain why Iceland’s default musical output sounds a little like Múm, and the UK’s sounds a bit like Scouting for Girls.

And what to do when the music stops? Aldrei itself doesn’t kick off till teatime and goes on till long after 1am, so even after factoring in much-needed lie-ins (to sleep off the effects of the lethal liquorice schnapps favoured by many festivalgoers, both during the festival and at afterparties across Ísafjörður), you’ve still got a fair few hours to kill. This explains why I find myself inexpertly kayaking in the fjord, and later bombing down a zipline at Raggagarður recreation park in neighbouring village Suðavík. Raggagarður was built by the community in memory of one local resident, whose father was killed in an avalanche – a not uncommon occurrence, sadly – and who himself lost his life in a motorcycle accident.

We manage to blast away our hangovers by hiking 300m up to the Naustahvilft (also known as The Troll’s Seat), a massive hollow scooped out of the mountains overlooking the airport, and getting royally stuck in the snow on the way down; and squeeze in visits to museums dedicated to the arctic fox (Iceland’s only indigenous animal) and the country’s Viking heritage. Just to seal Aldrei’s deal as quite the strangest, most rewarding and endlessly memorable festival experience this side of Mars, we bid Ísafjörður farewell in true Icelandic style by indulging in some underwater yoga at a local pool, freezing on an outdoor waterslide before simmering in the al fresco hot tub and boiling in the sauna – with sundry members of FM Belfast, Mr Silla, Mugison himself and many other performers all doing the same. The mayor’s here too – in swimming shorts, to the relief of all present.