Rokk ?ɬ? Reykjavik is an excellent documentary about the Icelandic post-punk scene in the very early eighties. The film strings together interviews and concert footage from a couple dozen post-punk bands, including ?É?æeyr (started by Hilmar ?É‚Äìrn Hilmarsson, later to collaborate with Psychic TV and Current 93) and a very young, pre-Sugarcubes, pre-KUKL Bj?ɬ?rk.

Though the film is apparently impossible to buy, you can probably find it if you really want to. And it’s well worth the search. The music scene documented in the film is much more exciting than anything that came out of England or the American Hardcore scene?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùimagine if gray Manchester was built on a Viking burial ground haunted by elves and pixies, and you’ll get a fair idea of the type of energy that pours out of the young bands depicted in the film.

Bands portrayed run the gamut from gutter punk to Hermann Nitsch-style performance dread, with a lot of politics (both extreme left and extreme right) and tongue-in-cheek button-pushing (?É?æeyr marching around in self-parodying Nazi regalia and playing in underground bunkers comes to mind).

My favorite moment in the movie, however, has to be the appearance of a band of four twelve-year-old crusties who look like a cross between punks, a kid street gang and reincarnated Viking berserkers. After concert footage of the crazed prepubescents raging into a couple of pretty good jams and then attacking their instruments with steel hatchets and lighting shit on fire for an appreciative audience, we’re treated to an interview with the lead singer, who speaks with the weary, jaded voice of a man three times his age about how much the band loves to snort glue and all the times they’ve had to fight to keep the local police from confiscating their glue and paint thinner stash. They’re the hardest punks I’ve ever seen.

In all, the movie is a rare glimpse into a little-known scene, one that spawned some of the most creative acts in the music world but which has been seldom documented or even heard of outside Iceland. Well worth the time spent tracking down.

(Previously on Dangerous Minds: J?ɬ?n S?ɬ¶mundur Audarson: He Who Fears Death Cannot Fully Enjoy Life)