#donalds

The main segment with them starts at about one minute in; the hosts start by discussing how Hatari is a performance art band, and how they have a gimp, unlike most bands. Then, after showing a bit from the intro of the KEXPort video with “Dansið eða deyið” and “Biðröð mistaka”, the actual interview starts.

MATTHÍAS: In the theater, as soon as a person steps onto the stage, they’re a symbol for something else, and you give them some meaning that transcends just the man or woman standing there.

KLEMENS: But the difference from being an actor in a play is that the play ends, but the band continues.

MATTHÍAS: The band continues, and the audience thinks this is what the people on the stage are like.

[Clip of Hatari at Reykjavík Pride 2019.]

HOST: Now the band has become known internationally, in these costumes, with this image.

MATTHÍAS: Yes.

KLEMENS: Yes.

MATTHÍAS: It’s hard to shake that off.

KLEMENS: Well, we have tried a lot of different things. Like at the protest at Austurvöllur, we dressed up in the regalia of capitalism.

HOST: You wore suits.

KLEMENS: We wore suits, with slicked-back hair.

MATTHÍAS: It was “Democracy, not plutocracy”, the protest that followed the Panama papers. [It wasn’t actually the Panama papers; it was the “Fishrot Files”, about corruption in the fishing industry. Matthías just misspoke here.]

HOST: Right.

MATTHÍAS: I thought it was very appropriate to sing, “The story has become familiar / This cycle would be tragicomic.” Which was then used in a Kveikur episode [in-depth investigative journalism show that originally exposed the corruption]. After the Fishrot Files they went back, and they had a clip of the protest. I was pretty happy to see that.

[Said clip of the protest and “14 ár”. For fun, the protest signs shown say: “Politicians shouldn’t write the constitution; the people should”, “Dracula wouldn’t get a job at the Blood Bank, so why -> [picture of Ásgeir Jónsson, director of the National Bank of Iceland]”, “Samherji exploits Iceland and Namibia”, and “Where is the new constitution?”, “Gitify the law corpus #gitifythelawcorpus #gitlaw”, “A Human Future”, and “Democracy, not plutocracy”.]

KLEMENS: We’ve always been working to break free of the image that people associate with us. From being an underground punk band to participating in Eurovision is such a breach of that image.

MATTHÍAS: It’s a goal in itself to fail to meet the audience’s expectations. You’ve got a bit... [He points out to Klemens that he said his entire last bit with a bit of marshmallow stuck on his chin.]

KLEMENS: Here?

HOST: Was it fun, participating in Eurovision?

MATTHÍAS: No.

KLEMENS: No.

MATTHÍAS: Well, fun is... it was a lot of things, but fun is not the first word I’d use.

[Clip of “Hatrið mun sigra” at Eurovision.]

KLEMENS: It was a real rollercoaster, and maybe in a different context it would’ve been great fun. But there was just so much going on, and of course we had certain goals for the trip, so... it was fun at times, yeah, but it was pretty exhausting.

MATTHÍAS: And it was just so paradoxical, and varied, and tragic.

KLEMENS: To be sneaking into Palestine and experiencing the apartheid and the conditions that Palestinians have to live with was just really absurd. And coming back to the Eurovision bubble and having to be in character somehow.

[Clip of the “Klefi/Samed” music video.]

KLEMENS: At first, of course, we refused all interviews, unless we had full directorial control over them. Then somehow came that jump into Eurovision, which exposed us so much we kind of lost our grip on the image cultivation.

HOST: I remember a fun interview before Eurovision, where the Eurovision participants [he means Söngvakeppnin; we kind of call it Eurovision a lot] were here at home in a set.

[Clip of that interview. The host asks, “You’ve been featured in the Israeli press and been on the front pages of newspapers and so on. How do you deal with all this media frenzy and the associated badgering?” Matthías looks around, Klemens whispers to him, and Matthías says “Hatari celebrates critical discourse!” before raising his hand robotically while Klemens twitches a bit as if to follow him but then just stares deadpan into the camera.]

MATTHÍAS: That was our first on-camera interview, and we still don’t really know how to do this. We kind of... experimented, and this is how it went, regardless of what you think about that. And then we did more experiments as we went on.

[Clip of the “cousin handshake”.]

That’s the end of the actual Hatari segment, but during the end credits there’s a little outtake of a familiar anecdote:

KLEMENS: There was some Spanish woman who was interviewing me and asked if I liked donuts.

MATTHÍAS [in English]: “Do you like donalds?”