Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  The soundtrack to these diverting events is an ethereal symphony of strings and synths; the lyrics, all in English, tell of stars being swallowed and stingrays lying in silt. One couplet rhymes ‘soft moss’ with ‘amorphous’. It was going to be very hard, I understood, not to describe the artist responsible for all this as The Male Björk.

  Given what I’ve just witnessed it’s hardly a surprise to find that the biography accessed via leg three finds no place for the most conspicuous aberration of his musical youth. The compact resumé confirms what I’ve already learnt from my nul-pointers: that a career in entertainment is blighted more drastically by Eurovision triumph than scoreboard-propping ignominy. Win and you’re forever shackled to whatever it was you sang, which by well-worn precedent is unlikely to age well. Lose, and you can reinvent yourself. Dan’s CV reads, in full: ‘Was in an icelandic pop/rock band which had six gold records and topped the Iceland charts on numerous occasions. Did some theatre work in Iceland singing and dancing and acting (West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and more). Done some film and documentary soundtracks in Iceland as well as some music for dance theatre. Was the lead singer in GusGus. Made a solo album which will be released by One Little Indian in 2005.’

  GusGus? That would be the indie stuff Birna had mentioned. Even I’d heard of them, though without actually hearing them. An electro-dance collective with a shifting and usually extensive line-up, they’d broken out of Iceland in the late nineties and – it says here – sold 250,000 albums in Britain and the US. The band’s biggest hit, Ladyshave, was a salute to depilated masturbation. If my visit to Turkey had taken me to the dark side of planet Eurovision, Daníel Ágúst had long since relocated himself to its most distantly orbiting moon.

  I fired off an email through his website and waited. For three days, a week, two weeks. Figuring he might be on tour or in the studio or tying string to his toes, I approached the press office at One Little Indian records (also Björk’s label): a friendly young woman there supplied me with a mobile number. There was no answer; I left a message. I did so again perhaps five further times in the following week, without effect. There was only one thing for it. With time running short and the Daníel trail as cold as a silted stingray, I let Birna loose on to the densely tendrilled Icelandic grapevine.

  It took a little longer than I’d thought. Icelanders are as Eurovision-fixated as the next man (assuming he’s Norwegian); no other televised event empties the streets of Reykjavik more effectively, and the expatriate community in London organises a well-attended big-screen bacchanal on that special Saturday in May. Yet when Birna spoke to friends and family, she found herself fighting through a thick fog of collective amnesia. ‘Daníel Ágúst?’ they’d repeat, incredulously. ‘But I thought you said this book was about the zero-point people.’ Even when she persevered, citing the year, they still wouldn’t have it. ‘But I remember 1989! I watched it at Siggi’s house. You remember Siggi – tall, glasses, went out with your dentist’s first wife’s cousin … Look, I know we’ve never won it, Birna, but I think I just might remember getting nothing at all. It’s your husband again, isn’t it? He’s put you up to this. Filthy little cod-thief.’ Well, that was one way of dealing with it. Some nul-point nations took it out on others, some on their own, but when that Lausanne scoreboard got too much for the Icelanders to bear, they simply stuck their fingers in their ears and went la-la-la-la. For sixteen years.

  Birna was putting out Dan-feelers all over Reykjavik by now. She had a cousin on the case who knew a bloke who knew him, a TV journalist. An old schoolfriend weighed in with his girlfriend’s number, but again it went stubbornly unanswered. A couple of days later Birna got the TV bloke’s number off her cousin, and that night gave him a ring. I listened in growing trepidation as her cheery Icelandic salutations subsided into sympathetic clucks and hums and a muted farewell. ‘It isn’t looking great,’ she said, clicking the phone off. ‘Apparently Daníel never wanted to do Eurovision at all. He was sort of bullied into it and found the whole thing a complete embarrassment.’ She let out a small, defeated sigh. ‘He hasn’t talked about it for years and his mate doesn’t think he’s about to start now.’

  Oh, Björn and Benny’s bared bottoms. I had never for a moment imagined that the land of my in-laws would let me down. But what could I say? After Koh Samui I wasn’t about to twist any arms: if Danny didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to force him. How could I, in any case? Those I’d met up until now had to varying degrees seen our encounters as a chance to put the record straight, point the finger, share the blame; in general, to make it plain that they hadn’t deserved their nul points. But Daníel’s stigma, it seemed, was harder to shift. The shame he was still trying to live down wasn’t that he’d come home from Eurovision without a vote to his name. It was that he’d gone there in the first place.

  An hour and two bitterly ingested stiff drinks later, the phone rang. It was the TV guy, who tonelessly dictated to Birna a strangely prefixed number where he said Daníel was now awaiting my call. ‘0032?’ I mumbled, jabbing the relevant numbers into the keypad. ‘That’s not the code for Iceland.’

  An insubstantial voice answered after half a dozen rings. ‘Is that Daníel?’ I said, a little tensely.

  ‘Yeah,’ came the whispered reply, ‘it is.’

  Icelandic has a soft, almost lisping intonation, and here was a definitive example. Trying not to sound desperate, I began to outline my project. Almost instantly I was politely interrupted. ‘Yeah, I know what it’s about. You’ve been sending all these emails and leaving messages.’

  ‘Oh … OK,’ I said. ‘So you got them, and, um …’

  ‘I got them and I didn’t reply. But, you know, in the end I had to admire your, ah … determination.’ An expression of reluctant, wry amusement, more nasal than oral. ‘I’m living in Brussels. Come over here any time and we can talk.’

  With as much decorum as a man hoisting a clenched fist in triumph can manage, I wound down the conversation. ‘Dan!’ I yelled, not yet aware that in doing so I’d woken up two-thirds of our offspring, and in fact hardly caring even when the blearily alarmed evidence tottered downstairs. ‘You the man!’

  Slumped against the Eurostar window I watched the relentlessly arable flatlands of northern France spool by. The bare trees flicking past, the pylons that marched in columns across bald, brown fields: it was a skeletal, colourless landscape, half-viewed through eyes that hadn’t yet come to terms with our 6.26 a.m. departure. All the business about soft moss suggested that Daníel took a lot of his lyrical inspiration from the Icelandic landscape, and I could only hope for the sake of his creative wellbeing that he wasn’t trying to coax poetry from this sort of prospect. There isn’t much mileage in sileage.

  The next time I creaked open an eye we were in Brussels, the derivatives traders and grey-haired daytrippers who’d shared my carriage rummaging about for bags and briefcases. As arranged I phoned Daníel, who’d kindly agreed to pick me up. ‘I’m just outside,’ he murmured. ‘In a white Saab.’

  ‘The one from your video?’

  ‘Yeah – same one.’

  I can’t tell you how cheered I was by the bonding chuckle this exchange engendered. In all our communications to date Dan had exuded the sombre resignation of a dutiful but squeamish child who knows it’s his turn to clean out the guinea-pig hutch. The email he’d sent to confirm the date of our meeting read, in entirety, ‘Tim. Thursday 10th is fine. Daníel.’

  With the keen eye of a moto-dullard I spotted the Saab from a great distance, pulled up in a taxi rank. Propped against it, conspicuous against the white paintwork, was a slight, bearded figure in a black velour tracksuit. Had it not been for my familiarity with the fuzz-faced bush-emerger pictured on his website, I’d never have recognised him.

  ‘Tim, right?’ And the pale lips visible through his Edwardian face hair twisted into a shy, slightly ironic smile.

  Daníel drove us smoothly away from the modestly bustling centre ville and
into the low-octane, mid-rise suburbs of Eurovision’s spiritual home. I could sense we were heading north-west, edging ever closer to the Grand Palais, where two years before Dan’s lunar serenade, Locomotif had gone off the rails. Then we turned into an unremarkable sidestreet, passing a sign that identified it as a cul de sac. Oh dear, I thought, glancing left and right at the drab and rather forlorn retail premises to which it was home. From a quarter-million album sales to a flat above a shop.

  The Saab slowed, but didn’t stop. At the end of the road stood a pair of lofty, wrought-iron gates, the apparent entrance to a small park. We bumped across the dividing threshold, from tarmac to gravel, and there before us, hemmed in on all sides by the massed flanks of sixties apartment blocks, was a moated castle. Feeling my jaws part company, I turned in dumbfounded awe to Daníel. A half smile, raised eyebrows, enigmatic silence.

  Daníel swung the Saab round on the wide bridge that crossed the moat and crunched to a halt before the overwhelming edifice. I got out and craned up at its hefty central section, a stolid and plainly medieval block of pale stone topped by an extraordinary, bulbous-tipped spire, like a Leonardo-designed space rocket. The rather fancier wings attached to each side were brick built and slate roofed, added at a time when gracious living had replaced the foiling of murderous enemies as the castle’s chief purpose. And this was no windowless ruin: squinting through the expanses of leaded glass I caught a twinkle of chandelier.

  Daníel eschewed the imperious arched entrance, and I followed him under a small side doorway. We passed through a workshop, a dim studio filled with hessian-clad dummies and into a small, comfortably domesticised kitchen. A young blonde woman was in there, stocking the fridge from the supermarket carrier bags piled about her feet. Who’s a naughty Dan, I thought: she had to be many years his junior. Then she looked up, with a brilliant, expectant and suddenly very familiar smile. Ten years was a long time, but she hadn’t changed much. It was Kristin-Maria, our first au-pair girl.

  Daníel oversaw our happy greetings with a knowing smirk. ‘I talked to Kristin about this English Tim guy who was coming here,’ he said, once I had finished expressing my many-sided astonishment with clucks, chuckles and a tumbling stream of befuddled light profanity. ‘She worked out pretty quickly it was you, but we thought it would be funny to make it a surprise.’

  We picked apart its sister surprise, their occupation of Chateau Rivierin, over a light lunch on the moat-side terrace. (It had by now been established, to my paternal relief, that I wouldn’t be souring our encounter by taking Daníel aside for a stern lecture: the girl I had last known as a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old was here not as his bit of skirt, but as his artist wife Gabriela’s studio assistant.) One of Iceland’s growing army of adventurous millionaires had acquired the chateau after a business associate put it up as collateral on a loan he was then unable to repay; for the last three years, while halfheartedly trying to flog the place, he’d allowed it to be used as an absurdly grand workspace for his artistic compatriots (also resident here, over in the east wing, was an Icelandic architect).

  ‘We’ve had quite a time here for the last two years,’ sighed Daníel, as at my feet a carp broached the moat’s surface with its gaping, alien gob. ‘Last spring we drove down to Bourgogne and came back with 160 litres of wine. We had a couple of parties here, and the whole lot was finished before the end of summer.’ He shook his head, mulling over those memories of untrammelled debauchery, but sadly opting not to share them. And now the party was almost over. In the last few weeks an offer (of €2.5 million) had been accepted; they’d have to be out in two months.

  Daníel ruefully scanned the grounds, and following his gaze I found my eye snagged by the props and backdrops of his more recent artistic endeavours. There was the bench he’d sat on while spraying his bandaged feet gold, there was the bush he’d stuck his hairy head out of. At some point, I supposed, a nul-pointer would politely welcome me into the comfortable, modest family home that befitted their stolid, uncomplicated post-Eurovision existence. But it didn’t look like happening soon.

  He showed me around after lunch. It was almost too much. The palatial halls of the ground level were weighed down with ornate plasterwork; a shed-sized, crest-topped Gothic fireplace presided over each. We took the lift – the lift! – up to the top floor, where Daníel opened a trap door that granted access, via a stepladder, to the interior of that peculiar spire. A tiny window set into this allowed confirmation that we had reached vertical parity with the spectacularly incongruous apartment blocks around. ‘See here?’ said Daníel, indicating a graffito carved into the window’s wooden frame. ‘1915 – Guerre!’ it read.

  We clomped back down the ladder. ‘That’s it, really,’ said Daníel, although the lift buttons had told me that at least two floors remained unexplored between the ground and the top. ‘Maybe we can talk where I work. Up here, in the back.’ I followed him along a route I could not have retraced unaided. Up a small section of spiral staircase, across a panelled hallway, round a few more twists and turns and into a dimly yawning attic, a beamed roofspace of ecclesiastical enormity inadequately illuminated by a trio of small dormer windows. At one distant, lonely end, emerging from a jumble of upended microphone stands, cables and keyboards, stood a monitor-topped desk. We walked up to it, our footsteps filling the dark eaves with echoing creaks. ‘I’ve been up here eight hours a day for the past two years,’ he announced, easing himself into a leather executive chair. I actually gulp: forty-five minutes up here on my own and I’d never blink again. Dan leans over to extract a typist’s stool from under two guitar cases, and pushes it over to me. ‘So,’ he murmured, smoothing his moustache with thumb and forefinger, ‘what do you want to know?’

  For three or four hours we’re up in that dark, churchy roof, our conversation kicking off with Dan the boy and progressing, via Eurovision, to Dan the man. He tells me his parents separated when he was two – Icelanders are generally pretty good at divorce, and theirs seems to have been amicable – and he lived thereafter with his mum in Reykjavik, humming along with her ‘great vinyl’: Nina Simone, the Beatles, Elton John, ‘and Bach, which I loved’. His father sang in a dance band ‘crooning tunes, you know, like Danny Boy,’ he says, a self-referential smirk bending his beard, and later became an actor. Yet despite the encouraging genetics, he insists that as a child he had no musical ambitions, indeed no ambitions of any sort, his financial and vocational needs satisfied by a weekend job in a bike shop. Until he was thirteen, when a school band asked if he wanted to front them at a concert they’d been asked to do. For a ‘youth celebration at a sports hall’, which in fact ended up with Daníel giving his first public performance at Iceland’s national stadium, singing for an audience of 5,000.

  Icelanders are splendid like that. An astonishing number make a living through some sort of artistic endeavour: both because they’re disproportionately talented, and because of their less gifted compatriots’ almost overbearingly enthusiastic support. Reykjavik, a city the size of Southend-on-Sea, somehow manages to sustain nine theatres and an opera house; at the last count (my wife’s), it hosted twenty-eight live-music venues. In short, it’s the sort of place where the first time you step out on to a public stage, you shouldn’t be surprised to find a significant percentage of the national population gathered expectantly at your feet.

  ‘You know, it was quite a trip,’ says Dan, smiling into his clasped hands as he recalls this youthful deflowering. ‘I wasn’t really interested in making a future out of being a pop musician, but even at thirteen I found I loved being on-stage, I really loved it.’

  None of my nul-pointers had enjoyed as auspicious a professional debut, but for Dan it proved something of a false dawn. It was only after four years of vocal inactivity that a former bandmate approached him at their high school, and suggested resurrecting the partnership. The consequence was Ný Dönsk (meaning New Danish, and culled from a newsagent’s foreign-magazine section: ‘to be honest I never liked the name�
��), a Dan-fronted ‘pop-rock’ six-piece. By the spring of 1989 they were recording their first album, which was to feature Daníel’s songwriting debut: with slightly more relish than embarrassment he describes this as ‘a completely silly and absurd story about a turtle who escapes the pet store’. That’s excellent, I tell him. Anything that differentiates a nul-pointer from Finn Kalvik is these days gratefully seized upon, and here is the polar opposite of the brittle soul-search described in To Find Myself.

  Daníel is also unique as a nul-pointer in declaring almost complete ignorance of the Eurovision phenomenon. Iceland was invited for the first time only in 1986, he reminds me, and he doesn’t recall it being broadcast before that. Yet it’s huge there now, I say, picturing the shiny-eyed enthralment that the Te Deum fanfare inspired in all but a glum couple of the dozen Icelandic au pairs we’ve had since Kristin-Maria. Dan fiddles with his mobile and shrugs. ‘I really know nothing about Eurovision,’ he mutters guardedly.

  His mild reluctance to discuss the contest’s domestic significance is understandable. A sense of Nordic isolation encouraged the Finns and Norwegians to elevate Eurovision from a singing competition to a poll of their homeland’s international worth, a rare opportunity to stand up and be counted, side by side with the Euro big boys. For Iceland, a remote enigma even to its fellow Scandinavian nations, all this was powerfully magnified. When Hofi Karlsdóttir brought home the Miss World crown in 1985, all the well-developed moral objections were swept joyously aside: she’d put Iceland on the map, and that was all that mattered. It was the same in 1984 when Jón Páll Sigmarsson triumphed as the world’s strongest man, and would be even after his sadly premature death was linked to steroid abuse. When it comes to raising the national profile, there’s no such thing as bad PR. In the thirty-three years since Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to become America’s first chess world champion he has blotted his copybook so fulsomely you can barely read it, yet the swivel-eyed anti-Semitism that made Fischer a passport-less pariah was no barrier to Iceland recently granting him residency and a hero’s welcome. The Spassky match, you see, had been played out in Reykjavik.