Melody Maker 1996-12-14 By ??? "Björk in not bonkers shock" For BJORK, with that Bangkok incident, and that 'special package', it's been one hell of a year. And yet, with the remix project 'Telegram' coming nearly 10 years after The Sugarcubes first dazzled our ears, she's still fresh, still excited, still searching for the perfect thrill So Björk got a bomb through the post, sent by one Ricardo Lopez, a 21- year-old Pest Control Officer from Miami, a man obsessed by Björk and distressed by her mixed-race relationship with Goldie. Lopez videotaped himself as he placed the explosives inside a paperback, as he slid the business-end of a .38 revolver into his mouth, and as he pulled the trigger. It's supposed that he wanted her and that, once he realised he neverwould, wanted nothing at all. But, classically, no one else would have her, either. Not in the way they wished to, anyway. Because, even if she survived the blast, the sulphuric acid he'd so carefully packaged would destroy herface, burn her tongue and run down her throat. She would know him finally, and it's unlikely the world would ever hear from her again. Thankfully, Lopez failed. Neighbours, drawn by the smell of his body, alerted the police who viewed the video and alerted the FBI. The packet was intercepted in England and Björk, who'd been on holiday with Goldie in Miami and may well have crossed the Atlantic at the same time as the bomb, never received it. Nevertheless, and with good reason, it shook her badly, particularly the thought that it might've been opened by her son, Sindri. She lay awake at night thinking of what might've happened, what did happen to Ricardo Lopez. Coming on top of the Bangkok incident, where she lost it completely and repeatedly slammed a reporter's head against the ground, and a year of festival appearances and relentless world-touring, as well as the, split with Goldie, she says, it made her feel like an astronaut cut adrift. She had to get back to basics. Somewhere else. SOMEWHERE else is Marbella, southern Spain, within sight of Gibraltar. Björk has a house on the beach and a residential studio in the hills and has thrown herself into a series of projects, including a new album, that should take herthrough until next April. She's also surrounded herself with workmates and friends. When it comes to getting far from the madding crowd, Björk certainly knows her beans. In this company, Björk seemed utterly at home, buzzing about with bottles of Amaretto, dancing with her buddies, playing CDs of shit pop and tapes of Country Pop made for her by someone who knew she'd hate them. She went to town, bopping from bar to bar, quaffing peach cocktails and, having discovered it was MM photographer Sweet's birthday, coughed up for copious champoo, too... She even started breakdancing in the middle of someone's pool game. In this place, with these people, she seemed ridiculously (and on occasion violently) happy. TODAY, though, is business as usual and Björk is perched on a sofa, looking out overt he Mediterranean, and fielding questions about her latest offering, "Telegram". This is an album of tracks, mostly from her 1995 LP "Post", remixed by a succession of luminaries. Not the new album, then. Just more remixes. Björk, having read The Maker review wherein the death-knell ofThe Remix was sounded and the album heartily slagged, has her defence well-prepared. "A lot of people still think the word Remix means Recycle," she says, "as in Trash, like it's just a way for a record company to make a song more radio-friendly. But I think they're just being snobs. In music there's always been a tradition of having many versions of a song. Like when Bach did his organ fugues..." She pauses, immediately revealing herself (as if we didn't already know) to be a consummate player of the media game. "And I'd like to point out here that I'm not comparing myself to Bach. I may be mad, but I'm not that mad... When Bach did that he didn't write all the notes down and, every time an organ player played it, it was different. Same with jazz standards like 'Round Midnight' or 'My Funny Valentine'. There's 500 versions of those tunes and none ofthem is correct." She's right, of course, even if the argument sounds old. She did actually write a song on the way to the beach yesterday - or rather, it rushed her during the three-minute stroll across the patio, around the pool and over the ankle-threatening trampoline of a lawn. She breaks off conversations (though not interviews) to sing it to herself, first like a child idly recalling some half-learnt nursery rhyme, then becoming more confident, until she's finally belting it out like the alien pop diva we all recognise. But it could still be anything. "That one's got a military feel to it," she explains. "I can hear the vocals and tomorrow I'm gonna try to do the chords with a brass section. Usually they come like that, but I'm very disciplined about the lyric, especially the mood. You can use a lot of different tools to get that mood." She makes it sound so easy. First a tune kind of lands on you, then mixes and remixes just pop out in the studio. Some good, some bad, all of them valid. "Sometimes it's quick, but it's not always easy. Take 'Isobel', for instance. That's about moving to a city for a person who comes from nature, and I've lived 27 years in hardcore nature. I'd been reading a lot of South American literaturel. I like Allende but especially Marquez, his books are very popular in Iceland. To me they are like Frida Kahlo's paintings where there's two of her - one is oldtime Mexican, the other a modern 20th centurywoman. It's magic realism, asking how 20th century civilisation clashes with nature and, in places like Iceland and Thailand, people really believe they can have a TV remote control in one hand and a ghost sitting beside them. "The question is how these things marry and, when I wrote the lyrics, I ended up with a f***ing book so I had to go to a friend I've had since I was 15 and get help pulling out what was really important. We did the final version of the song in the Bahamas, with a Brazilian sound, but when I got back I thought it wasn't all there and ended up getting Deodato, who did some fantastic arrangements 30 years ago, and he did the strings. So where should you stop? When you feel like something's been dealt with, and that's not always obvious." She pauses once again. "But one thing that's obvious when you listen to my remix album is that it's not my way of making my songs radio friendly." THAT'S certainly true. "Post", like "Debut", was friendly verging on familiar. "Telegram" is far from that. Here, with "Possibly Maybe", LFO warp Björk almost out of recognition, lay her over herself until she reaches a spacey hysteria beyond the wildest Kate Bush, burying her beneath lush blasts of twisted keyboard direct from the mothership. Outcast's "Enjoy" is a scraping, crashing, wholly disorientating industrial dub, "My Spine" a hypnotic clatter of discordant exhaust pipes courtesy of Evelyn Glennie, with Björk grunting, gagging and testing her range, the pair coming on like survivalist tramps partying in a post-Apocalypse landfill. And Graham Massey's latest shot at "Army Of Me" has you feeling like you're in Sabbath's bass-bins as they grind out "Sweet Leaf". Well, sort of. This has clearly not been done for the big bucks and, given the remorseless hipness ofthe dance community, not for cred points, either. "Yeah," says Björk. "I was making the kind of record I'd listen to in my own house. Like, 'Enjoy' has had its roughness taken all the way and the lyrics are gone so there's nothing to communicate in that way. At the end of the day that's how we all lead our lives, innit - we have our privacy and we read a book and then we go out and communicate, right?" This last sentence is delivered in the pertest of Sarf Landan speak and she visibly brightens. Björk has often seemed to use this chirpy, charming accent as a means of avoidance, a defensive weapon almost. It sounds so ingenuous that interviewers simply move on, tolerant because she's so obviously not from round these parts. There is also the possibitity that, half the time, she really doesn't know what the hell they're banging on about. Translation problems or not, the question needs to be answered: if "Telegram" really is the kind of record Björk would listen to at home, where does that leave "Post"? You'd have to be up Post-Modern Creek without a paddle to buy an LP even the writer thought was doo-doo. "Yeeeah," she says quietly, "After The Sugarcubes, I thought, 'Great, I've pleased everybody, now I can lock myself away and do something for me.' You know, 'Debut'. And then everything went mad, which was such a surprise. I toured, met all these really exciting people. But, because of all that, I didn't lock myself away, I didn't seem to communicate with myself for about 5,000 years. And that's the state I was in when I did 'Post'. And when that was done, SLAM!" So what's the idea - "Post' is entertainment, "Telegram" is more the real deal? "In a way, yeah. With 'Post' there's definitely an idea of presenting it for other people. There's a lot of explaining where on 'Telegram' I can't be bothered. But I must say most of the music on 'Telegram' I didn't do. I sent it off to be done, but I didn't do it." You did rework the tracks when you got them back, though. "A lot of them, I did re-sing most of them. It's like doing a video. When I say, 'This song needs this director' I'm introducing the two to each other and I've done everything I have to. Sometimes I have to explain the song to the director, protect it like a hardcore mother, but then I stay out of it." "Telegram" could easily be seen as an unsurprising continuation. Before we'd ever heard of The Sugarcubes Björk had been through punk, folk, metal, goth, contemporary classical and pretty much everything else you could imagine. She's never been known for not giving things a go. "Yeah, I've been spoiled rotten, really. Back in Iceland with The Bad Taste Family, or The Sugarcubes as the outside world knows us, we did so many things and I could've spent a lifetime doing that. But to move to London and meet so many people was fantastic. They're not just famous people I want to be photographed with for Hello! magazine, I don't try to meet that kind of person, but people who think the same way as me." Some people believe you do almost exactly that, that you went out with first Tricky then Goldie purely to place yourself at the forefront of music. You might not get into Hello! but you stay more or less on the cutting edge while still selling millions. "Yeah, I agree it probably looks like that from the outside. But for four years I've been hanging around with people in music, I couldn't hang about with my classmates because they're back in Iceland. And it's kind of obvious that, when I walk into a room and, say, Tricky is there, at that time I might fall for him. I think almost everybody would have fallen for him. "With me and Goldie it was just a question of..." She stops, looking down as if in search of something, then shakes her head at the sheer bloody obviousness of it all. "We were bound to meet, you know? And then it's a question of what kind of relationship it will be - whether you're gonna be lovers, or make music together, or you're just gonna talk about music and share ideas. People who are obsessed by such similar things as me and him are bound to be attracted to each other sooner or later. These people are charismatic too, you know, everybody sees that." She chuckles victoriously. THIS leaping from style to style was, to a degree, forced on Björk from an early age. It was Iceland, what choice did she have? "Yeah, when I was 14, I was meeting all these people. One was a singer, one poet, one sculptress, one painter, one ran a record store. It was a small town, 100,000, so you only have one copy of each. So you're almost bound to do poetry with the poet and work in the record store and set up a label. Next year you're in a heavy metal band, then the next doing contemporary string arrangements. "You do get slagged off but only for who you are, not for jumping categories. I've found very much in England that if you're one flavour you will always be that flavour or you are a betrayer. If someone went from drum'n'bass to a Mike Flowers Pops - type record no one would be able to work them out at all." Björk, though, has got away with it here. Partly because she's a one-off foreign phenomenon, partly perhaps because she's so relentless, so shameless/carefree about it all. And, unlike so many others these days, she's conspicuously never leapt aboard a single bandwagon to fame and fortune. "I think it's because of two things. I never ever did it consciously, jump between styles. It was more to do with, 'Where are my roots?'" She collapses into laughter, rolling back on the sofa like a small weeble-Buddha. "That's a f***ing pretentious question. Erm, let's face it, there's no such thing as Icelandic music. So I was brought up with a" sorts of music from everywhere." It's said you need to specialise to really mean it, man. Like, you can't talk it if you don't walk it. And all that. "Yeah, but what is it that you do? At the end of the day I'm a singer and I write songs and, for me, jumping styles is like changing clothes and I don't mean that like it's easy and I don't care. "You know, people who make beats, create styles, like Wu Tang Clan, will always have that style. They'll change things by getting in different singers, and that's not being fickle. Tricky gets in different singers but behind it there's always Tricky music and Tricky's not betraying his roots. But people look at it differently if it's a singer. If a singer gets in different people to do the beats, that's not seen in the same way, she's seen as fickle. But, to me, it's all the samething. "You know, I could do it like Madonna did it and say, 'Oh, that's a trendy beat' and get some programmer to rip it off. But if I like LFO I'd rather call up Mark Bell and say, 'Maybe we could work together.' Mark Bell gets to be Mark Bell, I get to be me and that's more honest, more how life is, I think." PERHAPS the idea here is that Björk, coming from a place no one here knows a damn thing about (it's where they eat puffins and get so pissed they go outwith mattresses tied to their backs), is eventually impossible to understand. The surreal pop of The Sugarcubes, arriving at a time when music was exploding outward toward every extremity, gave us no formal introduction. And nothing much has happened since to change that. The Kookie Chicktheory is as blase as it sounds. In truth, we know f*** all about Björk; consequently, she's at liberty to butterfly about, be anything. She's not keen on this at all. "I don't look at myself as butterflyish. I think I'm quite consistent and I had to fight very hard to be what I am. I think I am a truthful person. A lot of it has to do with... and I'll admit this... I started doing interviews when I was 11 and I think, unconsciously, I learned to be quite open without ever revealing what's important to me. And that's not because I'm cold or because I'm a liar, it's just human. "Doing interviews I was hurt many times. Not so much me, more the people I love. So I can talk about Tricky and Goldie but I will never reveal what are our little secrets, because it's nobody else's business. And also, if I don't protect my private life and my relationships with the people I love, eventually I won't be able to write songs. "My friend and I could never work out that thing on the aeroplane where you put the oxygen mask on yourself, then the kid, but it's right. You have to sort yourself out before you can sort other people out." So is that what all this is about, the opportunity to give, give, give to your dear, dear public? Björk, self- proclaimed veteran of nigh-on two decades of interviews, sees this one coming from way over the horizon. "If I'd been doing this job for 20 years thinking I was Mother Theresa, I'd be in the lunatic asylum by now. The only reason I've stuck it so long is that I'm pretty commonsensical about it all. I come from a family of electricians and bricklayers, and I talk about my songs like that. "You've got to be realistic and feed yourself. For me the thing that drives me on is writing songs and singing and I'd do that for myself or 10,000 people. To last for a long time in this job that has to be as important to you as making love or going to the toilet. If it's not, you won't last two years." AND so we came to Björk 1997. A Björk glad to be out of firing line, glad to be finally locked in. And a Björk noticeably unaccompanied by longtime producer and co-writer, Soul II Soul's Nellie Hooper. A Björk out on her own. "It took me 10 years of reasoning with myself to be that selfish," she says, "and then it took two albums to learn to do it myself. And this is gonna be the first album I'll have produced myself. 'Debut' and 'Post' were called that because they were the Before and After of Björk coming to London, like Tin Tin in America, all the different flavours. They're like collections of duets, the longest being me and Nellie, plus me and Tricky, me and Graham, me and Howie [B]. "But I don't need a producer now because I've learned so much I think we would clash, like me and Nellie did at the end. So Markus Dravs will engineer and mixing it with me will be The Rza from Wu Tang Clan, and Mark Bell is able to give me sounds I ask for. But the working title is 'Björk: Homogeneous' because there's gonna be one flavour - me. "Having said that, I also need that element of accident. When Howie comes we're not gonna prepare anything, just see what happens. This is not for my album, I say what I want for that. I'm doing this because I also need to be like a tool. Funny as it may sound, I'm not a control freak." Do you think you're a selfish person? "Most of my life I've been quite generous, I think. To get something for myself I've always had to go somewhere on my own - hitchhike, go for a walk, whatever. But I'm learning, as I get older, to be selfish in the company of other people. I've kind of found that the more selfish I am, the more generous I am. "If I'm onstage and I'm trying to make everybody happy, leaping about, egging them on, everybody will just walk away, go to the bar or something. But if I shut the whole world out and sing what ever turns me on, the whole room will go silent and get sucked into what I'm doing. I'm not saying I can do that all the time, very rarely. But that is definitely the way it works." Well, it's definitely worked with "Telegram", probably Björk's first true act of artistic self-indulgence since The Sugarcubes split. If you love to witness beautiful things hacked, scratched and battered into ever-more fascinating shapes, it's well worth your time. Where "Post" was second-class, this is the e-mail. Plug in. 'Telegram' is out now on One Little Indian 'SHHHHHH!' --------------------- Björk's 1996: from chaos to nirvana --------------------- "THERE was a point when it was really scary. It was a combination of many things - the touring, and I found out that I can't move back to Iceland because I can't lead a normal life there, and I can't live in London, either. It's been outrageous really, like the Bangkok incident, and there was the man who sent me a bomb. It could've been my son, you know, it was a question of life and death. "I am quite happy with this year, but not about the things people think I am. I think people, because they don't know me, think, 'Oh, she's really happy because she's sold this many units in that country' or whatever. What really makes me happy is that all these mad things happened and my friends went through them all with me, because this year it wasn't easy to be Björk's friend. I know I'm sounding sentimental but, talking about this last year, the people around me have been the key. "It did all get very big, but that was some thing that was offered to me, I never asked for it. I just tried to do it as well as I could, you know, deal with it gracefully without moaning or committing suicide which I think is stupid. You can walk away and be a Buddhist monk if you want to. I just decided to try to deal with it and, if I made mistakes, I'd just have to live with them and try to do my best. "Coming here is good because I can finally get completely serious about my music and stop doing all the crap that comes with it. I can get on with my life again for six months at least. Hopefully." LIFE'S TOO GOOD! For Björk, maybe. But whatever happened to he other Sugarcubes? Bjork SHE recorded her first album when she was only 11 years old (called "Björk") in 1977. Then there were spells in Toppie Tikarras and Theyr, the first band she was to gain recognition in the UK with, thanks to the efforts of Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman and Youth, before she fronted Kukl, who signed to the Crass label. The Sugarcubes were formed in 1987 and were immediately adored for their dazzling debut single, "Birthday", and "Life's Too Good" LP. The second album, "Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week", however, was not. In its aftermath Björk could be found working in an antiques shop in Reykjavik. She also guested with 808 State on their album, "Ex:El", and recorded an album of jazz songs called "Gling Glo". After the band's third album, "Stick Around For Joy", Björk embarked on a solo career which appears to have paid some dividends. Einar THE trumpet-playing chap who shouted a lot on Sugarcubes records and frightened people was also in Kukl. While in The Sugarcubes he tried to hold down a job as a night-club bouncer but, according to legend, was too small. Instead, he earned a crust hosting a talk show on an Icelandic radio station. "I don't play records," he would shout at people who called him a DJ. "I talk to people." He became quite the media celeb, at one point appearing on TV making a speech demanding the return of the Icelandic Parliament to its original location. Since the split, he released an album called "Frostbite", a collaboration with Icelandic composer Hilna Hilmarson and Daisy Chainsaw's Katie Jane Garside. He is now Iceland's top concert promoter, luring the likes of Blur to the island for enormous festivals. He also had a hand in launching an Internet cafe in Reykjavik. His company is called Icelandic Nuclear Industries. Thor Eldon PLAYED guitar in The Sugarcubes and was Björk's husband for a while, at least long enough to father their son, Sindri. For bringing a new Icelander in the world, Thor was rewarded with enough money to buy some contact lenses by the Icelandic government. He is now in a band called Unun, a band not unlike The Sugarcubes by all accounts, who remain unsigned. Siggi DRUMMER Siggi initially put his extra-curricular energies into his cabaret duo, Caviare. Together with Magga, the Cubes' keyboard player, Siggi entertained hotel customers with overwrought versions of the hits of Frank Sinatra and other easy listening gems while dressed in tuxedo. Siggi then metamorphosed into Bogomil Font, a salsa-style crooner whose popularity in Iceland saw his album knock Björk's "Debut" off the Number One spot. He now lives in Wisconsin, where he does some session drumming and his wife is studying for a PhD. Magga BECAME Thor's second wife and was drafted in to tinkle the ivories on the disastrous second album. She now teaches piano, is writing a children's book and looks after her two children. Bragi SIGGl's brother-in-law (they married twin sisters) and former bass player. Bragi is now a full-time poet. Although virtuallv half the population of Iceland has published a book of poetry, Bragi's work has found an audience outside the island and he regularly tours Europe on poetry readings. He has expressed no interest in taking up music again.