“We kind of kept our clothes on,” says Trabant drummer Doddi about the band’s performance this winter at Bessastaðir, the president’s house. “Though Ragnar did open his shirt.”
When last the Grapevine reported on Trabant, they were all but naked and simulating sodomy while screaming “I’m a nasty boy.” Now they’re releasing a CD recorded at Iceland’s White House. In America, this would suggest that the band had found Christ and/or rehab. Here it just means the president – or the president’s wife actually – has remarkable taste.
Dorrit Moussaieff coordinated the show after Ólafur Elíasson requested that the band play at the reception for his “Frost Activity” exhibit. It was she who undertook the sizable task of convincing the Master of Ceremonies at Bessastaðir that the band was trustworthy.
As the recording of the show, sold as a limited edition EP, indicates, the band did control themselves. “We just played lounge versions of our songs. We were waiting to see if we would get kicked out or not,” says Doddi of the evening.
The band wasn’t kicked out. They were invited to play a second set, this time improvising with jazz musicians Tómas R. Einarson and Ómar and Óskar Guðmundsson. The result, the third track on the EP, was a surprisingly smooth modern funk.
And the result of the strange evening, was, well, more strange evenings.
The Baroness Francesca Von Habsberg enjoyed Trabant’s Bessastaðir performance so much that she invited them to the city of Basel to play at a reception.
As the band relates it, the Baroness “had a festival party where the guests were only millionaires and art collectors. There was a dinner and then they cleared the tables and we came on.”
For this gig, Trabant allowed themselves to cut loose, freeing themselves of their clothes as quickly as possible. Though there was one limitation. “We were upset that we couldn’t use stage bombs.”
Trabant’s single “Nasty Boy” will be distributed this summer, and the band will begin recording their next album in the fall. They will be playing very few shows while planning the next album, although they will be playing at the Iðno theatre at Verslunarmannahelgi (first weekend of August).
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