It can be believed that blues music suits only dark and creepy whisky bars and is the only place where this music really sounds good. The place where musicians can bleed their hearts out and regular customers exactly understand their pain. Well, maybe it seems like the perfect surrounding but the first time I’ve ever seen the band Johnny And The Rest was at the fancy and elegant Hotel Borg in Reykjavík. For a few minutes these musicians were able to take me for a real blues ride in this place that absolutely doesn´t fit into this specific musical mood. After Johnny And The Rest was announced at the Secret Solstice Festival in Reykjavík, I had a chance to chat about the band with the guitarist and singer of Johnny‘s gang, Hrafnkell Már Einarsson.

Who is Johnny actually?

Johnny is a mystical figure. No one is Johnny. We all are The Rest. Johnny is, of some sort, an idea, because when we started I had a theatrical view on this. I saw Johnny as the idea like John Lee Hooker, some black guy.

What about the rest? The band met for the first time in 2005 but how did it happen? Who did invent this?

Gummi, the drummer, and Bragi, the singer and guitar player, while they were working together at a big warehouse they started to talk about music. They both were playing instruments and listening to oldschool rock and blues. So they started jamming together in the Gummi’s garage. Gummi was on this website called hugi.is that was the place that everybody was connected before Facebook. My uncle and Gummi started to talk together there, I think. We all lived in the same neighbourhood so he went to the rehearsal. My uncle is also a guitar player. The three of them were playing together and my uncle said “I know this singer”. He was talking about me and then he called me and said that his band just broke up so I was like “yeah, why not to try it out?”. That was the first set-up. I was the singer, they were guitar players and Gummi was on drums. Then we had a couple of bass players and like in 2006 we fired my uncle from the band for some reasons and the bass player too. I got my really good friend to play bass. We’ve been friends since we were 6 years old. So the line-up has been like that since then.

It’d been a long time before the second album entitled “Wolves In The Night” saw a daylight finally in 2013 that means 5 years after releasing the debut record. A little thing about pauses between Johnny And The Rest’s adventures…

Our first album [“Johnny And The Rest”] came out in 2008. We just thought that maybe we had to let it flow since we’d been in the band for 4 years. We hadn’t practised for the half of a year and everybody had been doing something else and then when we met again and it was just great. We started rehearsing together again and writing new songs for a new album. It’s more just like a friendship and a family. This band will never break up like “uh, we quit, whatever”. We could go our separate ways for 10 years and then come back and play together. We will be 90 years old and we will still be playing. It has become more like the addiction.

Johnny And The Rest is this kind of the band that whatever they do they do it themselves. Well, almost everything. We cannot forget about their manager Atli Snær Keransson who brought the band about to play a lot in the Reykjavik downtown, not only in the suburbs.

We do it by ourselves, like business things, especially for the new album. We took out a bank loan and paid a lot of money. When you think about it, it was actually a really good way to do it. When you always try to save up money, it ends up like being too much expensive and eats way too much time, we often get far too tired of the process. When we were releasing the album we felt like “oh my god, I can’t take it anymore”. But it all changed while playing the release concert.

The lyric of the most successful song of the last record, “Wolves In The Night”, was written by the entire band that is not so usual in the composing process of Johnny And The Rest. There’s also a story behind shooting a video for this song entitled “Mama Ganja”. As you can see, they do a lot on their own.

That was a very funny story too. There was this guy who was controlling the rehearsal space that last summer we were at. He was a good friend of ours and was enthusiastic about us. He used to work for the main TV station in Iceland and he wanted to make a video. His friend came and we just made it very simple and cheap, no money. We only had two cameras and we just set up in our rehearsal space and played the song. That was the first attempt. But we wanted something more and then Gummi, the drummer, he’s a genius. So, he took that, he has got a camera and always shoots the nature and us doing something. And then he went and cut it like a crazy man. As you can see on the video.

Secret Solstice presents an amazing line-up with 150 acts on the 5 stages. What is the most interesting thing that Hrafnkell is looking forward during the festival?

Maybe I’ll see Massive Attack and it’ll be nice. Well, actually I will be working this weekend at Café Flora that is situated in Laugardalur in the Botanical Garden. I’m in the music department there and we are doing concert series and all kinds of stuff. We’re actually going to be a morning off-venue for the Solstice. It’ll be a crazy weekend cause I´ll be helping organising and working at the café and playing at Secret Solstice too.

Well, why should people choose to see Johnny And The Rest show at the Secret Solstice?

We’re gonna give them a hell of the show. With Johnny and the rest we’re still more like a live band. I think we’ve never fully captured on the albums what we do on concerts. Maybe next time we should record a concert album [laughs].

Check Johnny and the rest out during Secret Solstice Festival! In the near future they will be touring around Iceland presenting the brand new record in their highly explosive way of blues performances.

Justyna

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