Will Carruthers

Akranes Lighthouse, Iceland

A former Spaceman takes a ramshackle sabbatical.

In this virus-stricken summer of postponed tours and cancelled festivals, few places in the world are still hosting live music. One of them is Akranes Lighthouse on Iceland’s rocky west coast, Covid-19 having been virtually eliminated from the remote island nation through rigorous testing and tracing.

Fortuitously, former Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized bass player Will Carruthers arrived in Iceland for an extended sabbatical before the pandemic peaked, and became the star attraction at IceDocs film festival accidentally. Sharing a louche hour of poetry, profanity and boozy blues ballads, the whiskey-chugging ex-Spaceman bassman appears to have stumbled out of Withnail And I. He has come on holiday by mistake, after all.

But behind his dishevelled dandy image, Carruthers proves to be a wily and witty raconteur. Mining his cultish junkie-rocker past for maximum comic irony, he enlists an audience member to help recreate Spacemen 3’s one-note psych-drone sound, spins a confessional shanty about being kicked out of Spiritualized, and performs a musical extract from his hilarious memoir Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands. He also throws in some vintage covers, gleefully unpacking the coded drug references in Cab Calloway’s jazz standard Minnie The Moocher, and apologises to any Irish people watching for his ragged take on the 19th-century folk ballad The Rocky Road to Dublin.

It’s a rambling, ramshackle show, but a welcome reminder that live music can be a warm, funny, spontaneous, intimate, communal experience.