Eurovision 2003 - Number 7 - Botnleðja - "Euróvísa"
This video is 2:52 long. The band only start singing and performing 35s in, after engaging in some audience encouragement and instruction in how to clap in time. If you thought t.A.T.u. were rough and propulsive, I give you Botnleðja from Iceland's amazing national final.
The band have been going since the mid 1990s, have a string of four previous albums and one released this year as well as another two released under the band name 'Silt'. What will really interest Eurovision fans is that shortly after 2003 two-thirds of Botnleðja will head-off to form another band - Pollapönk.
Euróvísa is what they do - alt-punk/alt-rock played fast. Very fast. It is noisy, feedback-loving, shouty, percussive (perhaps concussive) and has a little bit of audience participation/reassurance at the top of the song. It's followed by some jangly guitar before bassist Ragnar Páll Steinsson plants his foot firmly on the accelerator and the band take off.
There is an English language version of this song on their final album (Iceland National Park) but it's called Human Clicktrack and I'm pretty sure those English lyrics bear no relation at all to the Icelandic ones. This is a band that's effectively an outburst from an exceptionally tight rhythm section (Haraldur Freyr Gíslason on drums) accompanied by howls of expression from lead singer Heiðar Örn Kristjánsson.
Confession time, this is very like the stuff I listen to in my day-to-day non-Eurovision life and again, I may have seen them live without realising. They supported Blur on tour in the UK in the 1990s. Did all UK tours involve Icelandic support bands post Britpop? I love the idea that something like Euróvísa was even considered by a national broadcaster as a possibility for Eurovision.
It did very well. In fact it came second on a 100% televote. Iceland you crazy, crazy country. Iceland got drawn to open Eurovision 2003. Can you imagine Terry Wogan's reaction to this?
The band broke up between 2003 and 2006, but out of the ashes, came Pollapönk. A very different proposition with their own Eurovision history that I'm sure I'll get to eventually. But one little Pollapönk fact that illustrates how close Botnleðja are linked to the UK 90s and 00s indie music scene. The English language version of their Eurovision song had the translation written by John Grant
