Growing up in rural 1960’s Iceland, Gunnþór Sigurðsson enjoyed his bucolic upbringing, wrestling with friends, blowing things up, and watching his father raise horses on the “last farm in Reykjavik.”
Devastated by the death of his best friend, Gunnþór left home to become a roadie for a small metal rock band and to find himself. After a band failed to show for an event, Gunnþór and friends jumped up on stage and proceeded to annoy onlookers by playing instruments they didn’t know how to play. Several shows later and with a little practice, Q4U was born. Their punk and glam metal persona gained them some notoriety on the small, ice-covered island.
During this time, Iceland also experienced a rise in notoriety experiencing a huge boom in tourism and an injection of global capital. The long isolated country soon saw outside visitors outnumber inhabitants and commercial buildings and suburbs around its capital city, Reykjavik, began to encroach on the surrounding agricultural lands.
For Gunnþór, this notoriety also came with the indulgences and abnormalities of punk rock life. But after years of living a nearly responsibility-less life, things came to a disastrous end when Gunnþór was electrocuted by a mis-wired amplifier throwing him from the stage.
After this near-death experience, Gunnþór found religion and gained a new appreciation for his upbringing, friendships, and the family he once nearly had. He soon came around to faith and a marriage of the long-held belief in the sagas and relatively new teachings of Western Christianity.
One day, Gunnþór found himself walking through a once public toilette-turned-punk rock museum, Gunnþór realized that he not only knew as much or more about the exhibits he saw on the wall, but was part of the history that surrounded him. In that commode-turned ode to rebellion and resistance, Gunnþór found a home. And that’s where we found him.
