In the early 1960s, Iceland didn’t have the music of Bjork, or even the quizmaster skills of Magnus Magnusson, to put it on the cultural map; it didn’t even have television. But, somehow, Iceland did have its own home-grown garage-rock group, every bit as vibrant and vital as the more famous counterparts then flowering in Thames Valley blues clubs or at Midwestern fraternity hops.

Hljomar stormed out of Keflavik in 1963, earning themselves the unlikely epithet of “the Icelandic Beatles”. The following year, they set off on a 60-date tour of their native land in an estate car, with no mass media to smooth their path. Hljomar’s bassist, Runar Juliusson, recalls them playing to bizarrely mixed audiences, throwing crowd-pleasing versions of Icelandic folk songs in among a set of covers and originals. “All people came to see us, young and old,” he remembers, “but with our seriously long hair and strange clothes, we were treated more like aliens.”

Hljomar came to London in 1966, under the new, export-friendly name of Thor’s Hammer, and recorded a classic set at Lansdowne Studios. “The fuzz box had just come out, so we used it a lot,” recalls Juliusson, ruefully. “We thought it was a great device and sounded mean. But I think maybe we used it too much.”

Despite Juliusson’s retrospective misgivings, the fabulous Lansdowne session suggests some shiny, happy Merseybeat group crossed with the dirtiest American garage band. Still, for most of the past 35 years, rock fans could be forgiven ignorance of Thor’s Hammer. However, Ace

Records’ compilation of the band’s earliest recordings, From Keflavik With Love, has suddenly upgraded the forgotten combo’s status from utter oblivion to hopeless obscurity. And Hljomar’s belated rediscovery evinces a growing trend.

For the obsessive music fan, or the conscientious music writer, the past used to be a country of finite boundaries. Once the back catalogues of the critically accepted favourites – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground – had been absorbed, and the usual approved cult figures – Big Star, Can, 13th Floor Elevators, the Pretty Things – had become nodding acquaintances, you could sit back and watch the future unfold. Now, as ever more esoteric items emerge from record-company vaults long assumed locked and forgotten, the past, it seems, is growing at an unprecedented rate.

Consider some recent reissues. In the wake of Normal Records’ successful compilation Love, Peace & Poetry – Asian Psychedelic Music have come Simla Beat 70/71, which showcases Indian garage-rock bands, and two collections of 1960s Turkish beat groups, Hava Narghile and Turkish Delights. And Germany’s Shadoks label has just released the Juan de la Cruz Band’s Up in Arms, a 1970 recording by a Filipino progressive-rock group.

Meanwhile, recent box sets devoted to the Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival featured unheard material by each band’s earlier incarnations, the Warlocks and the Golliwogs respectively. Why is this happening? Where are these things coming from?

Alec Palao, formerly a guitarist with the 1980s indie rockers the Sneetches, today researches box sets for heavy hitters such as the Dead and Creedence, and also assembles more obscure items. Among those bearing his fingerprints are From Keflavik With Love, Nuggets II – a brilliant compilation box set of British psychedelia – and Let’s Go Spiders, an anthology of recordings by the Spiders, a 1960s Tokyo band fronted by Masaaki Sakai, later the eponymous simian hero of the cult Japanese television show Monkey. According to Palao, CDs have sustained the market for reissues and archive releases. “The high resolution of the format demands that the best master-tape sources are used. Everyone from the major labels down, who would once just pull the first tape they found in their vault, is forced to really research the material. The knock-on effect is that one uncovers the unissued sessions, the archive material, etc. They allow the music to be appreciated again for what it was, and give it life.”

While it’s easy to understand the market for Grateful Dead rarities, surely something like the Thor’s Hammer reissue is operating at the edge of commercial viability. How did it come about? “If you truly love music, you devour it 24 hours a day. It wasn’t long before I’d hoovered up the obvious, classic stuff,” explains Palao, unashamed and proud, “So, I investigated the fringes. Thor’s Hammer are a great example of a band with a tremendous and audible power who, in previous years, would have been ignored by casual listeners, as opposed to monomaniacal collectors, because of their obscurity. Thankfully, Ace Records is run by enthusiasts like myself, who love to put out wild and crazy compilations as much as they do more sale-able reissues. That said, there is a small but devoted cult of twenty-and thirtysomethings across the world who are familiar with Thor’s Hammer via their interest in 1960s garage rock, and they will snap this up.”

In his sleeve notes for From Kef-lavik With Love, Palao writes: “The story of Thor’s Hammer’s valiant attempts to achieve overseas success reads like the sagas of old Iceland.” There’s also a romanticism attached to the efforts of collectors like Palao, raiding the lost

archives for forgotten musical artefacts. “I’m chuffed that you put it like that,” he concedes. “The process can be mundane, but the thrill of uncovering a heretofore unknown gem makes it completely worthwhile. If you’re fastidious, it happens reasonably frequently, but you must be able to decipher the hieroglyphics on a tape box. Like, for example, finding the original master tape, long thought lost, to Bob & Earl’s soul classic Harlem Shuffle, buried in a garage in northern California. I do occasionally come across people who say they would love to be in my shoes, but you really have to be completely enamoured of the subject matter to do the job. I’m probably one of the few sad obsessives in that regard!”

And what effect have the efforts of this “sad obsessive” had on the former members of Thor’s Hammer? “The reissue was a nice surprise,” says Runar Juliusson, “and it goes to show – you never know. (Looking back) I am very proud of this effort. We were only maybe one or two years old as a band, and it sounds high-energy, with good music and words. It lives up to (my memory) pretty good.” Today, Juliusson has his own record company and plays solo – an Ace employee described him as “the Icelandic Bruce Springsteen” – while the band’s former drummer, Engilbert Jensen, according to Juliusson, is “very much into fishing and the art of fishing”.

Meanwhile, a re-formed Hljomar played their first gig of 2002 on January 6 and will be appearing at Kaffi Reykjavik, in Iceland’s capital, on February 1 and 2. Die-hard fans of 1960s Icelandic beat music have no choice but to make the trip.

www.acerecords.co.uk For sad obsessives everywhere