working with Anthony

We’ve got mutual friends in New York and it slowly developed. He came here to Iceland two or three years ago and did a gig. We ended up in my cabin in the moutains, singing. I never usually do that with people, really. It was just a one-off, a mutual admiration thing. But life is pretty magic like that. You just bump into people and have a lot to give to each other without any effort whatsoever, it’s just very natural.

We would hook up in New York also. I googled a studio in Jamaica and we decided with three days notice to go to a studio in Jamaica, probably because it was only a three hour flight from Manhattan. And we ended up swimming in the ocean, plucking fruits from the trees, singing all day. Which is sort of hilarious, because we’re both pretty much northern hemisphere creatures, with white skin and black clothes. It was a new experience for the both of us. We’d just sing over and over and over again. We sang a lot of sort of quiet stuff, whispering and humming, probably because we were too afraid of stepping on each other’s toes or something.

And then one morning I woke up and said, "Okay, enough of this wimpy stuff. We’re gonna blast it out like proper divas, and we’re gonna be Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand." And I had a melody that I had woken up with in the middle of night and written down. "Here’s the melody, and here’s the lyric." Just to liberate us, so we didn’t have to sing about ourselves. A hundred year poem by a Russian poet, a passionate love poem. "Let’s just sing this." We just sang all day, singing into the same microphone. Which is kind of hilarious because he’s so big, and I just sort of stand on this chair. And at the end of the day we both expressed that we had forgotten who was who. He was doing noises like I do sometimes, and I was doing noises like he does sometimes. That sort of sensation when you merge into one, for sure.

XFM interview, April 2007