The Honeymoon - a short film and biography

The Honeymoon, Icelandic singer, Thorunn Magnusdottir, and Hackney-born songwriter, Wayne Murray, made a short film showing the genesis of the duo. The film joins Thorunn in the starkly beautiful landscape of Iceland, as she makes the decision to leave the country for the bright lights of London. Once in London, a chance meeting with singer-songwriter Wayne Murray leads to the kind of creative partnership that both have been longing for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZupjFCg6Eo

Sometimes, the lightest touch has the greatest impact; the gentlest voice can impart life-changing words. With a lack of fuss that also typifies their music, Wayne Murray and Thorunn Magnusdottir have spent the last year quietly locked away creating an album thats a triumph of intensity over volume, and firm proof that nothing has more power than the delicate approach. Such beauty only came into being thanks to a series of coincidences and accidents. Wayne and Thorunn, in fact, should never really have met.
Thorunn, 20, was born and raised in Reykjavik, Iceland and was already well on her way to carving out a career in music there before fate intervened. Her dad is a celebrated songwriter and musician in Iceland and Thorunn learnt to sing while he played acoustic guitar to her as a child. "I loved music," she remembers. "I was sleeping in his guitar case as a baby, just wanting to be part of it." After her parents divorced when she was three, she would spend every other weekend with her father in various studios. "He'd feel guilty that he would always have to work but I just sat there amazed by all the buttons, with all the biggest stars in Iceland coming into the studio to work with my dad. I totally grew up in that environment." When she was 5, her dad bought her a tiny Barbie grand piano which she taught herself to play before progressing onto a small keyboard two years later. At 16, she made a demo, which a record company plastered in "horrible pop effects" and tried to push abroad, before Thorunn fled in horror from the whole fiasco. "It wasn't my thing to be this girl in a bikini on a beach. I hate that idea." Thorunn realised she'd had enough of Iceland and wanted to make music elsewhere with new people in new surroundings. She headed to London.
In comparison, meanwhile, you could say Wayne was a late developer. Brought up in strict Catholic schools where even long hair was frowned upon, he didn't discover music until Nirvana changed his life when he was 16. He soon attended his first gig at ULU, convincing his mum Daisy Chainsaw were perfectly harmless. "She asked what they sounded like, and MTV was on in the background playing Crowded House, 'Always Take The Weather With You'. So I said "They're like that". The next thing, I'm in this world of stage diving, spliff smoking, Thunderbird- drinking bedlamIt was a dream come true." Wayne took to his newfound love of music and taught himself bass, then guitar, started writing songs and playing in bands. "I had this picture in my mind that I wanted to be a rock singer in the classic mould and write big rock songs - screaming vocals, distorted guitars that kind of thing. But whenever I tried to write and perform songs like that it didn't feel right somehow". Just before Thorunn arrived in London Wayne had arrived at a watershed in his song writing. "I decided to relax, be myself and not try to force something I wasn't. I found myself inspired by film and that cinematic, soundtrack feel to songs". These influences are also apparent in Wayne's lyrical content. Within a matter of months, Thorunn and Wayne met through mutual friends in a pub in London. "I'd heard about this Icelandic girl who was causing a bit of a stir," Wayne laughs. They started chatting, hit it off and Wayne gave Thorunn his phone number (accompanied, he promises, with the most honourable of intentions). Without a phone or address book, Thorunn put the scrap of paper in her pocket and forgot about it. The next day, in true Icelander-in-London style, Thorunn ended up in a strange house somewhere in Camden with equally strange people and no clue where she was. Finding Wayne's number in her pocket, she rang him and he came to meetsave her. Within hours, they started talking music. Thorunn told Wayne of her plans to work with Badly Drawn Boy production duo, Away Team, and asked him to contribute the odd guitar part. Together in the studio and out of nowhere, they came up with the hushed elegance of Passive Aggressive, now the lead track on their debut EP. With its shared lovelorn vocals, Wayne and Thorunn listened back and realised their voices fitted together in a classic boygirl pop combination. They soon realised they had inadvertently stumbled onto something a bit special and Wayne had realised the perfect outlet for his songs. Three months later on the strength of these initial demos, the pair (first called The Lovers and later, The Honeymoon) had signed to RCA and were spending five days a week living together in residential studios near Oxford, shaping their sound as they formed their friendship. "We worked together so closely, it became like a relationship. The songs are gentle because they're like a one on one dialogue. You wouldn't scream into someone's ear if you're sitting close to them. Our songs are like interaction between two people because that's what was happening," Thorunn explains before summarising it perfectly. "It's like sexy, Sunday music"; the perfect soundtrack for the morning after the night before.
Full album "Dialogue" on RCA (2004)
More on The Honeymoon:
http://www.myspace.com/thehoneymooniceland