NICK Warren is famous for selecting offbeat locations
for his Global Underground mixes. Not for him balmy Australian beach ports
or funky Californian cities. He goes for the chaotic, 17 million strong
metropolis of Sao Paolo, or the anarchic grandeur of Budapest. Even so,
Iceland has to be the strangest place he's chosen yet. Quite simply, it's
one of the oddest places on Earth.
Bleak, barren, and yet eerily beautiful, with a tree-less landscape of forbidding
green moors that gives way to miles of black Volcanic rock, Iceland is troubled
by a windy, rain-soaked climate that makes you feel that you're living on
the deck of a ship. It's apparently the closest place to the moon they could
find to train astronauts. It's cold, but its people are warm. And its tiny
population - less than the size of Bath - bubbles like its many volcanic
geysers with musical innovation, throwing up, in recent years, acclaimed
acts as diverse as Bjork, Gus Gus and current rock faves Leaves.
"It's the middle of the fucking North Atlantic, really," says Gretar Gunnarsson,
the veteran DJ and promoter responsible for bringing Warren here. His partner
Arni - aka DJ Alfons X - concurs. "With the right attitude, it can be the
best place in the world to live," he smiles. "But it can also be the worst.
Everyone comes back for the same reasons they left. The closeness and intensity
of this small community." Arni drives me around Reykjavik, which doesn't
take long. We cruise along the harbour, past long, white fish sheds. "That's
the smell of money," he smiles, "the smell of fish."
But no one allows the weather to get them down. "We dress more by calendar
than weather," says Arni. "It's almost taboo to carry an umbrella," echoes
his flat-mate President Bongo, aka Stephan, from Gus Gus. Stephan quotes
an Icelandic saying: "No one is worse because he is wet."
Nick Warren arrives on a rainy Thursday and dives straight in. The Blue
Lagoon is a natural, open-air hot-spring the size of a lake, set unnervingly
close to a power station in a forbidding landscape of black, volcanic rock.
Nick floats on his back and looks round in relaxed wonderment. "It's like
the moon," he smiles. "It's quite spooky. I like it."
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IN a DJing and producing career that goes back
15 years, Nick Warren has always pursued the unusual. So his choice of Iceland
comes as no surprise. He emerged as the stand-out DJ in the fertile Bristol
music scene of the late 80s and early 90s that produced Tricky, Portishead
and Massive Attack. Then, as now, he excelled at finding great records either
before everyone else, or once they'd missed them.
He became Massive Attack's tour DJ then rose through the early 'Balearic'
network to become one of the best-loved and most reliable names on the international
DJ circuit. Yet he remains unassuming, stoic, stubborn, irritated by fuss,
quietly sure of himself, refreshingly devoid of star DJ airs and graces.
He's travelled here with his mate Mike, a Bristol scaffolder. Mike has armed
himself with facts about Iceland. He knows about income, average life expectancy,
the fishing industry. Most of all, he is an expert on the Eider Ducks. Ever
wondered where Eider Down comes from? Now you know. Nick Warren, Mike solemnly
informs us, is seriously considering retiring to Iceland to run an Eider
Duck farm. On a more serious note, Mike reveals he can never reconcile the
down to earth Nick Warren he hangs out with in Bristol with the star DJ
he reads about. Perhaps it's because Nick Warren is motivated by finding
and playing good music - not by the trappings of DJ stardom. "What I really
enjoy is going out and playing records," says Warren. "I'm not bothered
about getting a press agent and making sure my face is on the cover of magazines.
" This is why, he says, this fifth Global Underground mix will probably
be his last ever mix album. "If I stick out another one, what have people
got to say about it?" he asks. Where else is there to go?
Instead, he plans to concentrate on the next album by his Way Out West project
with Jody Wisternoff. Despite landmark hits like 'Ajare', 'Domination' and
'The Gift', Nick feels Way Out West have always under-achieved by not becoming
a full live band. He wants to rectify that.
Unlike a lot of key figures, Nick Warren is unfazed by UK dance music's
current, much-talked-about slump. "I think it's fantastic that people are
panicking about the business and all the doom and gloom. All the big fish
who have made money for years and years, all the big club promoters who
milked it without putting that much back into it, have had their comeuppance,"
he says. "You can't sit on your heels and expect the same people to be going
out for more than ten years. It never happens in music."
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