Four Trips to the Actual North Pole (For Real!)

Some gigs come with a green room and a rider. This one came with a survival suit, a polar bear watch, and a stage that was, quite literally, the top of the planet.

Between 7th July and 25th September 2025, we worked four separate voyages aboard Le Commandant Charcot, Ponant’s extraordinary polar icebreaker, sailing out of Longyearbyen in Svalbard — the world’s northernmost town, and about as far from a soundcheck as you can get. Each voyage pushed north through the ice towards 90° North, the Geographic North Pole, and each one gave us a completely different story to tell.

Singing at 90° North

It’s incredibly surreal to stand on the sea ice at the North Pole with a guitar in your hands. The light never really goes, the ice groans and cracks before the mighty ship, and somewhere out there — usually closer than you’d like — there might be a polar bear heading towards the amazing smelling ship full to the brim with French delicacies.

We were lucky enough to sing at the North Pole arrival ceremony on the ship itself, and then again out on the ice, feet away from 90° North, harmonies drifting off across a landscape with genuinely nothing else on it. As a duo built entirely around vocal harmony, it’s the strangest and most humbling performance place we’ve ever performed even despite the FREEZING COLD — no walls, no ceiling, just ice to the horizon in every direction.

The Three Poles Party

Le Commandant Charcot made history in 2024 as the first ship ever to reach all three of the Arctic’s poles in a single expedition — the Geographic North Pole, the Magnetic North Pole, and the fiendishly remote North Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on Earth furthest from any land. We were fortunate enough to be aboard for one of these “three poles” voyages and played the celebration party when the ship completed the feat — a properly joyous night, dancing the not-night away after days of pushing through metres-thick ice to get there.

Polar Bears, Polar Plunges, and Packing for the Ice

We lost count of the polar bears across the four voyages — mothers with cubs, bears investigating the ship’s wake, bears just going about their business on ice floes as we drifted past. It never stopped being surreal.

And yes, we did the polar plunge. At the actual North Pole. In water that’s technically the Arctic Ocean and practically liquid ice (-2c). It is, without question, the single coldest either of us has ever been, and also one of the proudest “we actually did that” moments of our whole career.

Gear-wise, this was one of the trickier ships we’ve worked. Between the two of us we travel with a genuinely absurd amount of equipment — because you never know what a ship will or won’t have — and on an icebreaker in the high Arctic, that’s doubly true. We were packhorses long before we got anywhere near the ice.

Over the Top of the World

Our fourth and final voyage of the summer was the big one: a full transpolar crossing, sailing north from Svalbard, directly over the Geographic North Pole, and continuing down the other side of the planet into Alaska. Watching the ship’s track on the chart slowly bend from “north” to “south” without us ever changing direction is one of those facts that still doesn’t quite compute, even having lived it.

Lucky Pair

We know how lucky we are for having been to these places together. We can’t believe how much we’ve seen and done as a duo and are so grateful for all the experiences we’ve had.

Four trips to the North Pole in one summer isn’t something we ever expected to write in a blog post. We’re already wondering how we top it.