BJÖRK free

Interview by Ekow Eshun

In this article the album "Gling Glò" is mentioned, but is spelled "Gling Glong" insteed. :-(

Picture links...

Photography by Juergen Teller

Credits to Aniello <dimeglio@emr.ca>

theface.cover.jpg

Björk on the cover page of The Face.
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sindri.and.mom.jpg

Björk and her seven-year-old son, Sindri, at the Blue Lagoon, the unnaturally hot, blue water that is the by-product of Reykjavik's main power plant.
(Size: 111136 Dim: 911x509 , JPEG format, 24 bit color) Download from ftp.uwp.edu

bjork.sindri.unmasked.jpg

Sindri hiding behind Björk. Peeking over her sholder.
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bjork.on.the.rocks.jpg

Björk in the countryside outside Reykjavik.
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with.teddy.bear.jpg

Björk with a HUGE teddy bear.
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bjork.eyes.closed.jpg

Björk with her eyes closed. She's got a long-haired orange jacket on.
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bjork.eyes.open.jpg

Björk with her eyes open. She's got a long-haired orange jacket on.
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hello.bjork.jpg

Björk speaking on the telephone.
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bjork.sindri.jpg

Björk and Sindri. His got an ape-mask on.
(Size: 23747 Dim: 597x476 , JPEG format, 8 bit B&W) Download from ftp.uwp.edu

close.up.tatoo.jpg

Close-up of Björk's left arm tatoo
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BJÖRK free

A few weeks ago, Björk received a call at home in London from the

foreign minister of Iceland. He was phoning to congratulate her on

the success of "Debut", her gold album. Before they spoke, the

elderly Icelandic operator connecting the call put in a word of her own.

"I'm a big fan of your music," she told Björk. "And by the way, would

you like me to pass on a message to your granddad? I see him every

morning at the swimming pool."

  "That's how it is in Iceland," says the singer. "They're not sure how

to treat me. When I do interviews, they ask questions like, `Are you

famous?' `How much money have you made?' `Have you met Michael

Jackson?"'

  Those of her fellow islanders too old to recognise Björk from her former

band, the Sugarcubes, know her for an album called "Gling Glong": a

jazz reworking of traditional folk songs, sung in Icelandic, that sent the

white-haired and the frail of limb into dewy-eyed bliss. Released in

Iceland a couple of years ago, it has sold more copies than "Debut", ensur-

ing that for a particular generation, Björk will always be the singer who

put the heart back into the old songs. International acclaim aside, she

seems, for the most part, too close to home, too familiar, to be a real star.

"Everyone is proud of her here," Björk's best friend Joga tells me. "But to

them she is like a little girl."



ALTHOUGH BJöRK MAY INSIST that she is "actually quite ordinary", it

would be difficult to find many who'd agree. She is strikingly attrac-

tive, small and dark where most Icelanders are blond and hardy; her

face is heart-shaped, and she wears an expression of wide-eyed, perpet-

ual wonder.

  Nine months ago, work and love drew her to London with her seven-

year-old son Sindri. The two of them are returning to their birthplace

of Reykjavik, Iceland's capital, for the first time since then, for some

long-overdue catching up with Björk's endlessly complicated and

extended family.

  In the gap between going and coming back, Björk has quit fighting for

elbow room among the six conflicting personalities of the Sugarcubes.

"Debut" has brought her celebrity status in her own right, even if much of

that new audience is still grappling with some tricky pronunciation. (Björk

is pronounced Byerk, her surname Gudmundsdottir, Goodmunsdoter.)

  Yet the album, which reached number three in Britain, is an unlikely

mainstream hit. From her pairing with 80-year-old harpist Corki Hale, to

the track apparently recorded "live" in the toilets of London's Milk Bar, it

is determinedly experimental and occasionally off-kilter. Björk's own

assessment is blunt. "This record was a bit of a rehearsal and it's really not

that good. I can do much better."

  But in a way the singer herself hasn't fully grasped, Björk is the face

of the moment. At a time when the charts are full of manufactured pop,

when supermodels and celebrities are prized for their skill at games of

artifice and glamour, hers is a singular voice of honesty. And "Debut" is

the sound of an artist, sometimes winning, sometimes failing, but always

struggling to be herself.

  "When I first heard her album I was so surprised," says her mother

whom I meet fleetingly in Reykjavik. "Because for anyone who knows

Björk, it is so very much her. It is a bit to do with being here, to do with

the light and dark, the dramatic contrasts. It is very honest and I love

to listen to it."



THE NIGHT WE ARRIVE in the city, I find myself staring up into the

glistening polar sky, watching the Northern Lights - the aurora borealis.

Green and purple stripes of astonishing luminescence shiver above my

head, changing form and oscillating in, then out of focus.

  When I tell this, with some excitement, to Björk the following morning,

she is disarmingly blasé. Natural phenomena are a way of life in Iceland, a

volcanic island where hot springs, fjords, summer snow flurries and mid-

night sunshine are all commonplace. Indeed, almost to prove the point,

Björk, Sindri and I take off on a tour of the jagged, windswept terrain out-

side Reykjavik. Her friend Hubert, a painter of dark, brooding still lifes,

drives us in a heavy-duty army personnel carrier that has somehow found

its way into private hands. Hubert tells me that Icelanders have a "natural

immunity" to their long winter of almost perpetual darkness: instead of

sinking into depression, they turn to art, with the result that almost every-

one on the island is a painter, a poet or a musician. Iceland, says Hubert

gravely, has nine chess grand masters to Britain's two. It has produced

three Nobel prize winners from a population of only 250,000.



BJöRK MADE HER FIRST RECORD at the age of 11: an album of adolescent

pop songs, called, she admits, embarrassment flickering in her eyes,

"Björk". The record sold 7,000 copies - enough to go platinum in Iceland.

But she was too impatient, too anxious to do something real, to play the

child star. "When you're 11, you're not listening to Sesame Street any

more. I wanted to write music about walking down the street, having

visits, laughing, having a swim, the things you do every day." Her band

consisted of "losers in their thirties, past the hottest moment in their life".

Unwilling to provide them with a renewed lease of life at the expense of

her youth, she resisted their entreaties for a follow-up.

  Björk grew up an only child in an extended family of doting hippies.

"When I was one, my mother became a feminist, a rebel, and left her

husband to become a hippy and lead a very free lifestyle. It was the

Sixties," she says with a sigh of apology, "and everyone was doing it. She

started hanging out with the wildest lot in Reykjavik and they all rented a

flat together. They were always singing and drawing, going wild and bare-

foot - you know what hippies are like. There were ten of them, and I was

the only kid. Being hippies, their favourite people were children, so it was

like a 'let me read you a four-hour-long story' kinda thing."

  But at the music school Björk, the child prodigy, attended, she was

bored and restless; fed up with the strict curriculum of classical music and

maddened by the disposability of the pop songs she heard outside classes.

Much of the time, she didn't bother to turn up.

  "They kept telling me I had a lot of talent and all I needed was disci-

pline, so they wouldn't throw me out. Which turned out to be a privilege

'cause it meant I could do whatever I wanted."

  She'd probably have wandered away for good if a new, young teacher

hadn't "completely opened my mind", by introducing her to Schoenberg,

Stockhausen and the whole canon of contemporary modernism. It was

only through their challenging structure that she came to understand, and

finally love, the clarity and simplicity of pop. "I think it's important that

there's pop music," she says earnestly. "Because people need songs that

are fresh, spontaneous, just about everyday life and having a laugh."



WE RIDE OUT OF REYKJAVIK INTO a scene from prehistory. A volcanic

hinterland of dark, porous laval rock, that's bubbled out of the earth and

set hard on contact with the air. There are no trees, no shrubs, only

mountains in the distance and a harsh north wind. But flourishing

doggedly, even in such barren conditions, is a carpet of thick, spongy,

mint-green moss that covers the rocks; softening their contours until the

moors are as soft and comforting as a mattress. As a teenager, Björk would

go camping here during the summer. She'd thumb the first convenient lift

and pitch her tent wherever it left her.

  "There's nothing better than waking up in the morning in the middle of

nowhere. You can do whatever you want, just shout at the top of your

voice and be absolutely free."

  What's so important to you about having freedom, I ask "I dunno,"

she shrugs. "I guess it's just being able to do what you want to do. It

doesn't really take explaining, does it? It's like looking at a menu. Why

do you want a piece of cake and not an apple? Who knows? But the point

is you want it."

  She'd ask herself questions about what she wanted, what she could do,

how to be herself, all the way through adolescence. Eventually, she

realised that all she wanted was to live a little.

  "There were so many things I wanted. To be a singer, a skateboard

champion, to experience meditating in a Buddhist temple," she remem-

bers, gazing out of the window. "I've always been very aware that you

only have one life, and you have to try as many things as possible."

  One summer, she worked at Iceland's Coca-Cola bottling plant. "I had

pink hair at the time, and I was supposed to sit in a chair, watching the

bottles as they passed to see if they were clean. Mostly, I just used to fall

asleep. I never made the employees' hall of fame."

  Last year, Coca-Cola held a party, which the Sugarcubes were invited

to. Among the employees were contemporaries of Björk who'd intended

to leave after three months, like her. "They were still saying, `I'll be gone

by September,'" she shudders.



THE LAST THING ON HER MIND was growing up or even pausing for

breath lest the world turned without her. "And then," she says with a wry

smile, "I got pregnant. I was 20 and the most obvious thing was to have an

abortion, but it was just against all my instincts. It just felt wrong." Seven

years on, her son Sindri shares many of his mother's features, including

bottomlessly inquisitive eyes that are a mirror of her own. Bright,

garrulous and obsessed with dinosaurs, he plays with a Jurassic Park toy

brontosaurus and makes up jokes as we roll across the moors.

  When Sindri was born, Björk and the baby's father, Thor, moved into a

tiny flat together. "All our friends started to hang out there beause it was

clean and organised and there were no parents around." They were

painters, poets, musicians, "surrealists" - Reykjavik's alternative artists.

As a joke, Björk, Thor and four others formed a band.

  They called themselves the Sugarcubes and refused to take things

seriously, even when they suddenly became Iceland's first viable pop

group. Instead, they rolled round the world, getting shamefully drunk,

recording intermittently brilliant songs and turning into a family. Björk

split from Thor, he married keyboardist Magga, male group members

Einar and Braggi announced a brief Platonic marriage of their own, and

Björk took Sindri on tour from the age of six months. With the result that

his early vocabulary included phrases like, "Gimme five", "Rock'n'roll"

and, perhaps inevitably, "Fuck off".

  Wouldn't it have been easier to leave him at home? I suggest.

  "No, not at all," she insists. "When you have a baby it's like the purest

love there is, so you don't ever, ever think about things like that. It's in-

stinctive and reassuring to have him with you. And it means you're always

trying to do something brilliant, for his sake almost more than yours."



LATER, WE HAVE DINNER AT Björk's house in Reykjavik, which over-

looks a harbour crammed with fishing boats. There are wooden floors,

primary coloured walls, and disparate items of furniture and objets

clamouring for attention; like the heavy stone table with inlaid marble

surface, a stuffed iguana, the framed photos of Boney M on a sideboard

and the room's centrepiece, an enormous star-like chandelier that holds

perhaps two dozen candles. We eat a traditional Icelandic meal of smoked

lamb and potatoes in cream, cooked by Björk and her friend Joga. Playing

in the background is the record that's beaten "Debut" to number one in

Iceland - an album of mambo songs by Siggi, the Sugarcubes' drummer,

who's recreated himself as a latin percussionist and singer, a sort of Kid

Creole of the Arctic Circle. But Björk is tired. Nine months ago, she

moved to London and recorded "Debut" with Nellee Hooper. It was the

last time she can remember enjoying herself. Consciously self-indulgent

and experimental, the record was intended as a brief yell of freedom, after

years in the creative scrum of the Sugarcubes. She imagined it would slip

unobtrusively into record store bargain baskets while she got down to

some serious work.

  But "Debut" turned out to be the private party everyone wanted an

invitation to, and in the eight months after its release, almost half a million

copies have been sold worldwide. Much to Björk's embarrassment.

  "It's as if you started cooking at this restaurant and everybody heard

about it and started coming," she says, shifting in her seat. "But you'd still

only learned how to fry eggs. You're doing your best and everyone's

happy, but it's not exactly what you wanted to do with your life."

  Promoting an album she doesn't wholeheartedly believe in for most of

the year has brought her to the edge of exhaustion. "It was all right the

first six months; seven months was a bit tricky; eight months was when I

started hitting people. I've been telling this hideously pathetic, stupid joke

that the Bible in England is different. God created the world in one day

and then he talked about it for eight days."

  Despite her reservations, "Debut" is one of the boldest and most strik-

ing releases of the year. Discordant minor chords, rumbling bass notes,

Björk's idiosyncratic, sometimes heart-stopping voice - the joy of the

album is listening to its disparate elements swim together and finally

merge into a fragile harmony. Like droplets of water slowly freezing until

they flash and sparkle like ice crystals.

  "It's very hard to say just what it's about," muses Björk, tossing her head

from side to side. "I'd like it to be a statement of individuality. But I've still

got a long way to go, so I'm a bit confused, because I just know I can do so

much better than this record." She pauses for thought... "If you went out

somewhere and had a really good time, you don't wake up the next morn-

ing and try to figure out why you did. It's not because of anything. It's just

the atmosphere, the people, the chemistry of friends, your mood, what

happened before, what will happen after. And you can't explain it, and I

don't understand why you should. And it's the same with songs."



BJöRK WAS LOST FOR WORDS when she fell "hopelessly, hilariously in

love" for the first time. "Literally. I kept asking my friends, `What is it?

What is it? What is it?', because it'd never happened before. "Having

watched her mother fall in and out of relationships, and seen her friends

"forget all their plans and sort of drift off into a black hole because of it",

she was wary of love. "So when it got me there was no mercy."

  She lives with Sindri and her boyfriend, a London DJ called Dom

Thrupp, in a converted dancing school in Little Venice. They met two

years ago in LA, just after the Sugarcubes, exhausted by "six different

ideas of how to make a record", had recorded their third and probably

final album, "Stick Around For Joy".

  "There's something very delicate and tender about him," she says. And

then as if catching herself sounding like those love-struck friends she used

to despise, she hurriedly adds: "But not in a sickly sort of woofty way."

Still, it's Thrupp who provides the inspiration for one of the most

poignant moments of "Debut". The sigh of desire called "Venus As A

Boy", whose lyrics, "He's exploring the taste of her, arousal so accurate",

seem all the more sensual, for being made public as a single.



"EXTREMES ARE THE PURE JOYS of life," Björk says, watching the candles

glow in her chandelier. "Like, you can spend one day being entirely

healthy and spiritual, and the next going to a hardcore club, getting out of

it and jumping on car boots. Both of those are highs, 'cause they're about

being free." The last time she was "totally decadent", was a couple of

years ago. She'd been drinking, dancing and taking "unhealthy things" for

48 hours straight. "On the third night I ended up taking all my clothes off

outside although there was a blizzard and threatening to jump off the roof.

I had a great time."

  "Extremes of anything" make her cry. But particularly when she hears

music that's so abstracted from the ordinary it has taken on a singular,

transcendent beauty of its own - "Like pure, pure, pure singing or pure,

pure, pure hardcore noise."

  Touring in Belgium one time, she happened across a cavernous indus-

trial music club, playing new beat. "The sound was so simple and in a way,

totally boring. But just seeing everybody tranced up and getting into it was

a revelation. I realised how modern it was, but at the same time, how it

was about going back centuries, thousands of years even, back to basics,

back to the original trance dances."

  The club opened her ears to dance music, leading her to the Chicago

house sound of Larry House and the Detroit techno of Derrick May - "I

still haven't heard anything better than that."

  Then towards collaborations with 808 State on their "Ex:El" album, and

eventually, with Nellee Hooper on "Debut".

  "Like going treasure hunting," she'd search out the clubs in every city

the Sugarcubes would visit, looking for the perfect beat. "You'd go to 50

clubs, and maybe at the 51st, if you waited for four and a half hours, the DJ

would play one song and it would be brilliant."

  "I look at myself very much as a David Attenborough when it comes to

music," Björk tells me. For a moment, it crosses my mind that she's jok-

ing. But only fleetingly. David Attenborough is her idol. Like him, Björk

believes herself to be an anthropologist; albeit one who explores emotional

landscapes and attempts to capture them in music. "I walk around saying,

`Listen, there's love in the air, the lights are dim, look...'" she whispers,

mimicking his hushed tones. "And I try to make music from that which

excites people, which inspires them and gives them joy."



HOW FRUSTRATING THEN, to end up in a country where she herself is

often treated like a strange, exotic creature. Because while the plaudits for

"Debut" have been generous, the British media has largely subsumed her

identity under a welter of cultural clichés. Terms like "ethereal", "elfin",

"exotic" follow her with an awful, lumbering insistence. This despite the

fact that, in reality, she is no more of an otherworldly "Ice Princess" than

Siggi is actually the mambo king of Iceland. "If I'd delivered exactly the

same album and I came from Nottingham, I'd have got completely differ-

ent reviews, normal, down-to-earth ones." She shakes her head.

  "If you know me, you realise I'm pretty much a common-sense, no-

bullshit kind of person. Very simple, very direct." At heart, insists the

singer, she is "a bore".

  "I'm not an artist or a poet. A poet is someone who can create something

with words that can stand on their own on paper, that become a world of

their own you can enter. My words are very dependent on their music. I

try to make the music into a world in its own right. But really, beyond

that, I haven't got a lot to say."

  I think about this for a while, as clear night falls over the harbour.

Perhaps Björk really is as mundane as she suggests. A dexterous weaver

of mood music that sounds good, but signifies little. In which case,

"Debut" may have cast a spell over her current audience in the same way

"Gling Glong" enraptured an older one.

  But pop is about making music that chimes with a particular moment.

And if she has captured a mood, it's not simply the appropriate tone for

a dinner party. The eagerness with which many have seized "Debut" may

puzzle her. Yet its success has occurred within a broader shift of cultural

values, that's also been played out in other fields such as fashion and

photography. A move away from gloss and sheen, towards aesthetic

honesty. Under such circumstances, Björk's music may well be "ordi-

nary". But that will do just fine





Björk's new single, "Big Time Sensuality", is out on November 15. "Gling Glong" is

available on import and will be given a proper UK release sometime soon