“There’s 70 million people on earth – where are they hiding?”

David Gates was the lead singer in American soft rock band Bread. They were popular in the early 70s. The David Gates who contacted me was also a singer, but very much not American. He had a distinctive but quite high range vocal, which fuelled his quirky and intimate home recorded songs. If I had to make a comparison, perhaps Momus would be a half decent one. If you don’t know who Momus is, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

But don’t worry, it probably doesn’t matter. David Gates had contacted me in relation to an article he was writing for the music weekly Sounds about the then emerging Icelandic music scene. Why he’d also sent me a demo of his music is lost now in the mists of time.

So as I’ve doubtless said elsewhere, Iceland was the hip music place to be in the late 1980s due to the emergence and success of The Sugarcubes.  Their debut single in 1987, Birthday, had been a surprise break out indie hit. By pure coincidence, I was running a record label with two Icelandic bands on it. I’ve talked about the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm elsewhere. The other band were called S.H. Draumur – in English this translates to B/W Dreams.

I’d financed the pressing of their debut LP. This release was the cornerstone of the label in its early years. After dropping out of higher education, I’d signed up for a government backed initiative known as the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. The EAS had been dreamed up by the Conservative government and their then leader Margaret Thatcher. It was marketed as a way to encourage small businesses and budding entrepreneurs to get started. We were firmly in the era of private enterprise – selling back to the general public things they already owned. (Gas. Telecoms. The railways).

The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was also a way to massage the unemployment figures, which at that time were spiralling out of control for a government who had been elected on a campaign that mocked the previous government’s unemployment record. It was largely smoke and mirrors. But enough about politics…

What the EAS did was provide you with a guaranteed weekly wage for a year. You still had to go and sign on every fortnight and provide basic records of your business activities, but you weren’t required to look for work and you were technically removed from the unemployment figures. It was on this basis that I’d funded the development of my record label. To join the scheme I’d had to put in some of my own money to match that which the state were providing. This money went towards financing that S.H. Draumur album. (Back in Iceland, the band were very keen to tell everyone that Margaret Thatcher had paid for them to make an album).

S.H. Draumur sang in Icelandic. Their name was Icelandic. They started life as a basic, noisy, punk sounding three piece. On their album they benefited from higher production values and the addition of horns, harmonica and strings to broaden out their sound. They were not, however, obviously marketable in the same way Daisy Hill Puppy Farm had been with that Blondie cover version.

But the times were aligning in their and my favour. The Sugarcubes put Icelandic music on the map. They had an English name. They sang in English. (When asked why they sang their songs in English, their simple reply was that their record label had asked them to sing in English and so they did.) I would never have suggested to S.H. Draumur they should abandon their native language and sing in English, but then I wasn’t running a successful record label. Maybe that was the difference.

Two members of S.H. Draumur came to London to drop off or pick up masters from their album. Upon meeting up with them I was presented with a copy of an earlier ep they’d recorded, inscribed with the message ‘to our English manager’. This was slightly disconcerting. I would never have considered myself as a manager. I couldn’t manage myself, let alone anyone else. We were touring central London, shopping in some of the big record stores of the time to pick up records by bands they liked but couldn’t find back in Iceland. Randomly as we entered a busy Tottenham Court Road tube station we bumped into four of the six members of The Sugarcubes. Plans immediately changed. Next thing I knew we were sat in a dingy backstreet pub just off Leicester Square hanging out with members of The Sugarcubes for several hours.

It sounds glamorous in retrospect, but I need to highlight a couple of things. Most importantly was that Bjork was not among their number. The four people we were hanging out with constituted the (no offence intended) lesser members of the band. Bjork was the star. But there was also a male lead who sang/ shouted vocals and played the trumpet. Neither of them were present. The other thing to highlight was that everyone was speaking in Icelandic. They were having a great old time catching up, but frankly the best I could do was nod along, keep drinking and entertain myself as best I could. I didn’t speak a word of the language.

It made for a great anecdote though - providing you neglected to fill in those crucial details.

But what about David Gates? Where does he fit into all this?

Let’s jump forward and try and tie up these loose ends. At some point in the late 80s The Sugarcubes came back to England to play a short tour. Three dates. Glasgow. Sheffield. London. They brought two support acts with them. S.H. Draumur were one of those support acts. As their ‘manager’ the band asked me to join them for the tour. This was wild. A young, introvert invited to be part of a rock ‘n’ roll tour. To hang out with a successful and hip band like The Sugarcubes. As if. I would have … I don’t know what I would’ve done.

As it happened I had a ready made excuse to turn down the offer. One of my sisters was getting married. The wedding clashed with one of those northern dates. I couldn’t possibly not attend the wedding. So a perfect (for me) compromise was reached. I’d be there for their London gig and miss the other two. (Honestly I still have no idea what I would’ve done ‘on the road’ even for only three gigs.)

Now we return to David Gates. He was based in London, or in the suburbs just outside. He’d contacted me because he was writing this big feature on the Icelandic music scene for Sounds. The London Sugarcubes gig was the perfect place to meet up. I’d got him a ticket. We’d arranged to meet pre-gig in a nearby pub. I took my brother along for moral support. This was how I assumed the music business worked. You schmoozed a journalist and in return they wrote good things about your bands.

I do not possess a photographic memory in the true sense of the word. Far from it. But I do have snapshots of events that I can recall and extrapolate into some vague memory of events. I can picture the inside of the pub we met in, the table we sat at and I have a dim sense of the residential street that the pub was located on. At the concert we sat in a balcony area, above the main floor, looking down on to the stage. We must’ve talked about many things during our time together, but the one that sticks in my mind was a conversation about Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire.

Their innovative electronic music had been a huge influence on the music I was making. I owned pretty much every record they’d released and had followed their career since the early 80s. David was a more recent convert. He’d been captivated by their crossover dance hit Yashar, famous for its use of a sample from cult US TV show The Outer Limits:

“There’s 70 million people on earth – where are they hiding?”

Cabaret Voltaire and their adoption into the emerging club scene seemed a million miles away from that demo tape of introspective acoustic songs David had sent me when he first made contact. But he was an interesting guy. About my age. Softly spoken. Clearly as passionate about music as I was. Not just the Iceland scene – he’d spent some time in Iceland which was why he was writing this feature – but music in general. A decade later, as a founder member of the dance music trio Salt Tank, he had a chart hit with a song called Eugina.

By then Icelandic music had had its brief moment in the sun. By then Bjork was an international pop star. By then I was no longer running a record label. Eugina doubtless sold more copies than all the various records I’d put out on my own label. And somehow I don’t think that Sounds feature ever made it into print.

Nothing turns out quite how you expect it to. And that's just life.