http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~marty01/bigiss/bi.html

Big Issue  1998-12-06

By Vaughan Allen


"Restless struggle to build a better Bjork"


   Change and experimentation are the mark of the ice maiden, and 
   they're not to be confused with weirdness writes Vaughan Allen


"I love music so much I could be arrested for it...I'm ill for life."

Björk's voice is clear as glass down the line from Reykjavík, her accent
caught somewhere between East London and mid-Atlantic, a strange mix 
lumbering "Innit?" and "Y'know what I mean?" with Scandinavian weird-
speak.

It's this mix, this strange struggle between insider and outsider, that
leads to the cliché's about her kookiness. But everything she says makes
perfect sense. It's just that it's a struggle to produce meaning from 
the clash of languages.

Her most used phrase is "How can I explain?" as she launches into an 
extended metaphor, a nomadic journey through cultures, that finally 
makes sense 10 minutes later.

It's this strange mix that makes her and her music so fascinating. 
There's a sense of never sitting still, of constantly re-engaging with
herself and with the listener.

Her recent work has pummelled styles, blended genres. The last album, 
Homogenic was anything but, a series of stories, songs and diatribes 
covered in chattering beats and lush strings, where her vocals found 
lines of flight out of melody, reconstructing strata of sound.

This sense of struggle, of experimentation, informs all of her work. The
Homogenic tour finally reached England last month. The gigs, she says, 
"are a mix of something planned and something allowed to be free.

"It's very important not to try and rehearse or prepare too much, 
because you have to allow for growth. The first times are a struggle, 
then it gets better and better until every gig is unique. Maybe you can
only really succeed one time in 10, but that's when you get freedom and
destiny mixed precisely. That's when you get that ecstatic feeling all 
around your body".

It's an ecstatic feeling that her fans know well. The eight musicians 
and one beatmaster who now form her band allow room to expand upon the 
recorded music to channel and develop new sounds and new methods of 
performance. And at the centre, Björk peels off her ear-shattering 
vocals, stretching listeners between whispers and screams, pulling them 
into her world.

The personal nature of her lyrics has been fairly obvious for years. 
Both Homogenic and Post dealt with senses of cultural confusion, as well 
as the nature and progress of her private relationships. The new 
material that she's working on in Iceland is taking things in a 
different direction. Not that it's less personal, it's just an approach 
from a different angle. It's in talking about her new songs that her 
struggles to explain through metaphor becomes obvious.

"My new material is more like another point of view," she says. "You can 
always do those songs where it's all like 'me, me, me', but it's like 
being round a friend's house and he's talking about himself for five 
hours, and you don't feel close to him at all. But then he starts 
talking about his favourite football team, and you're with him again. So 
it's not so obvious what's close and what's not. I've got to the point 
when I don't have to think in the terms of the 'I's' and the 'Me's', 
where I can sing about other people and about more transparent things."

Not that she's rejecting the personal stance she has taken in songs of 
the last few years.

"I'd been in bands from the time I was just a kid until I was 27, and I 
had all these songs bottled up inside of me, all the private songs 
that'll never be played for anyone," she said. And so I did three albums 
with my heart out there all on them, but now I want to think about the 
same thoughts, but dealing in different ways."

This is a natural process for any artist as they grow and mature. They 
take on new styles, new sources of information, new experiences. Now 32, 
Björk has the freedom to experiment, granted by massive commercial 
success and an identity as a very strong individual. In a sense, it 
would be a commercial mistake for her to repeat herself. It would come 
as the greatest shock of all. "I have to move on all the time," she 
says, "it's like all the cells in your body die and you get new ones..."

Within these changing styles, these changing faces, Björk remains 
obsessive about her own individuality. Her relationship with her fans is 
notoriously sensitive. It's got even more so since one of them tried to 
send her a letter bomb because of her relationship with Goldie, and 
another stalked her.

Which can make it a problem sharing her most personal material with 
hundreds of thousands of people. "It's not my first nature trying to 
communicate with people," she admits, "so I decided almost consciously 
when I grew up that I wanted to try to communicate - it's so easy to 
live on your own and not have to worry about people. But it can be 
really tiresome when you have to share everything you do, when you play 
a song for the world and you come back and it's not yours anymore."

She is saved, of course, by the strange forms she builds out of her 
life, the music crystallising out of experience. She is saved as well by 
her dual nature, her presence within both the Icelandic and the English 
worlds.

The language that she sings in, English, is not her first. And she 
approaches English with an experimental air, constructing a free-flowing 
minor language that disrupts the laws and gravitational constructions of 
English grammar, English meaning.

Her private language remains Icelandic. This is the language of her 
culture and of her 'self', as she explains, "I do interviews in English 
and I chatter away in English. I can pretend, I can do interviews and 
it's like a party game. It's not like I'm lying, but it's like I can 
play at a different version of me. But in Icelandic, I could never say 
those things, that's my own private sound. And so I've never done an 
interview in Icelandic".

Her adventures within the English language are typical of immigrant 
experience of finding ways of dominating and controlling a language to 
which you remain an outsider, a foreigner. She keeps her life balanced 
between Iceland and London. In Iceland, she has a harbour-front home 
where she can work and do music. In London, she lives in Little Venice, 
and takes the opportunity to go, as she puts it, "bonkers". Her friends 
in London are her friends, she believes, because "they are immigrants as 
well. Even if they've lived there all their lives. Most of my friends 
are Asian or black or Turkish or whatever It's like we're immigrants 
united..."

This sense of simultaneous outsider and insider-ship and of playing with 
notions of the two, seems to dominate her life. Talking about her 
teenage son, Sindri, she doesn't think he'll have as much of a struggle 
to deal with all the different cultures he is exposed to. "I've only 
been touring for about a third of my life, so it's still sometimes 
strange for me. But he's been touring since he was one. He's so pro it's 
scary It's like he was brought up like that and he doesn't find anything 
strange. Added to which, he's so good at packing. I haven't sussed that 
one out yet."

For all the roles she has played within her music, she hasn't yet 
succumbed to the time honoured leap into acting. She had a bit part in 
Pret A Porter and was the lead in an Icelandic film, The Juniper Tree, 
in her early 20s, but apart from that she's done nothing.

The reason she hasn't, she says, comes back to her own sense of 
individuality, her own need for control, for the desire to have a choice 
over the roles she plays with, the games she plays. "I can't be anyone 
else but me. It's like, the violinist in my band can breathe life into 
any piece of music.

"However much you give her, just three notes, she can take it anywhere, 
can really bring it to life. So she's really good at putting on 
different things, at wearing different clothes. But for me, if someone 
asked me to wear a garment I didn't like, I'd probably just tell them to 
fuck off..."

Which means that any acting she does involve herself with has to be the 
right part, something that will fit her properly. Her first major role 
will probably be as the lead in Lars Von Trier's new film, Dancer In The 
Dark, which goes into production next year.

She hasn't decided for certain yet, but the fact that it's an old-style 
musical full of strings and dance numbers might help persuade her. 
Especially as she's going to be doing the music as well. Mostly, 
however, she thinks she'll do it because of Von Trier himself "The world 
of Lars is not full of schedules and plans. It's gorgeous and very 
impulse-driven. You have to drop the plot to enter that world, which is 
very exciting. He's a very good director, and I could just jump off a 
plane without a parachute and I'd trust him to catch me."

Von Trier's films are full of character, like Björk - playing with 
identities, fractured by cultural miscegenation. His characters are 
always searching. Searching for something just beyond their reach, some 
form of peace. It may have been a similar search that led Björk and her 
boyfriend Howie B, to toy with the ideal of buying a Scottish island 
last year. The time, however, was not right.

"Since I was a kid, I've had the dream of wanting to buy an island. But 
when I got there, I got really claustrophobic - so I have this fantasy 
still where I'll live alone on an island in a lighthouse with a pipe 
organ in the top. And I'll play the organ at night, and take care of my 
grandchildren who will think I'm a little mad. But I think I'll give 
that fantasy another 20 years. Or so..."


Björk plays with the Brodsky Quartet at Bristol's St George's, Brandon 
Hill, Friday December 4. Bookings: 0117 923 0359