The honeymoon period

Sometimes the most wonderful things come out of the most unlikely of events.

Take The Honeymoon for example. What are the chances of two complete strangers bumping into each other in a city the size of London, even if they did have mutual friends? What then the likelihood of them not only hitting it off, but both being musicians? And finally, who’d put money on them coming together and making an album as good as their debut Dialogue?
Yet this has all happened to Wayne and Thorunn from The Honeymoon. When they had their first chance meeting in a London pub two years ago both had had some degree of experience of the music business, Wayne with the Thirteen Thirteens and Thorrun in her native Iceland. “Up to that point it had been the best time of my life,” says Wayne. “We’d toured with bands like JJ72. I wouldn’t be doing music now if I hadn’t enjoyed that so much. I think we both always wanted to do this.” Thorunn meanwhile had always been immersed in music. “My dad was a musician so I grew up singing from an early age. It was always in me, I didn’t want to do anything else.”
Was coming to London part of that? “Definitely. I’d spent so long in Iceland and been in lots of bands that there came a limit to what I felt I could do. I got really excited about travelling when I met these two producers who invited me over to London. I met Wayne soon after I arrived.”
The coincidences kept on coming. The production duo Thorunn had met were the Away Team, who had risen to prominence through their work with Badly Drawn Boy. As for Wayne…. “I was just writing songs. Funnily enough, I had ambitions to do something a bit like Badly Drawn Boy so that was one of the first things we talked about. I offered to play a bit of guitar for Thorunn and went down and met everybody.”
Suddenly from nothing a band was born. All they had to do now was make an album. “As the demo had happened so fast and happened so naturally, we just thought that the album would come easily,” he says, “but of course that wasn’t the case.” The result, when it finally arrived, has been lauded in quarters as diverse as The Times, Rocksound and Company magazine, perhaps a nod to the album’s mixture of lush, boy-girl pop music and more traditional rock dynamics.
Wayne sums up the experience so far. “I think we’re both perfectionists and what the record company maybe thought they were going to sign and what we wanted to do was a little different. We wanted to make it more leftfield, melancholic and dark but still have that pop element. Our sound evolved really naturally. I think every band should have its own sound and its own identity. That’s the most important thing. I like to think that we’re at least trying to break new ground.” Thorunn too has her own views on what has happened. “I do believe in fate but I think you make your own luck,” she says. “You can’t sit around waiting for things to happen. Good things come to good people.