Dagens Nyheter 1998-11-09 By ??? Sent to BEP by Anna Kaijser coldsweat81@YAHOO.COM "Björk" Björk - successfully hides her real personality behind the image of a created fairy-tale character Stubborn rumours say that the Icelandic singer Björk will do the principal part in Lars von Triers new movie "Dancer in the dark". The Danish director wants her to play a young dancer that goes to USA in the 40's to reach the stars. But so far that's just rumours. It's not even clear that Björk will make the music for the movie. - We'll see if we'll come to an agreement. I write a song each month which is like a soundtrack to what's happened that time. As it's about one year since the last disc came, I've got about 12 songs. I'll see if they will go to Lars' movie or to a disc of my own. I have to see where they belong, my little children. 32-year-old Björk has a finger in everything that has with her discs to do, from production and mixing to videomaking and cover design. But she doesn't want to call it conrol. - It's more about protecting. If you love something very much, you see that it gets what it deserves. It's a mean world out there. To make a song is just like making a child, and you hardly leave a child after the birth and say "goodbye, see you later". Björk's songs are her children, the discs are her family. She tends to talk about the songs as if they had their own lifes. - As the mother to a song, I know by instinct how to make it feel best. Some songs go to bed at nine o'clock, others go to a club the whole night. It's not about my own ego but rather my un-selfishness, it's me who gives up something for my songs. - I think I've over-developed the parental instinct. If someone makes a bad remix of my song, that person gets me to deal with, and that will not be funny, haha. She laughs until it blares in the telephone receiver. Björk is in her little summer house in the mountains on Iceland. The mobile phone communication is crackling and it's hard to hear what she says. In charming Iceland-English she explains that her private life has become more important the last years. She successfully hides her real personality behind the mythologic character she's created for herself. - It creates a mysteriousness around me and makes me even more interesting than I am. I'm happy to be people's fairy-tale character. then nobodu knows who I am, she says. Two years ago the TV-companies cabled out pictures of a furious Björk attacking a female TV-reporter on the Bangkok airport, who asked her newly awakened son Sindri personal questions. After knocking out the reporter, Björk throwed herself at her and banged her head on the floor. "Something just broke inside me" says Björk, who has only got obscure memories of the event. When she later got a letter-bomb with corrosive acid, Björk had enough. When her last disc "Homogenic" was finished in Spain, she and Sindri moved home to Iceland again. - I've been a known person for 20 years as I became a star on Iceland when I was a child. It's time to tone that down a bit now. Furthermore, Sindri is becoming a teenager and wants to stay at one place and be with his friends, she says. Björk grew up in an extended family with seven adults in Breidholt outside Reykjavik. Her mother Hildur earned her living as a fight-sport instructor and her stepfather played the guitar in a hendrix-influated band. She made her debut when she was 11 with a disc with covers of old folk-songs. As a teenager she had enough of her family's hippielife and moved when she was 14. Her own free adolescence has made it hard for her to accept people that look up to her. "Get a life. Don't take nourishment from mine!" she's hissed to many autograph-hunting fans. As a teenager, Björk started to play in different punkbands. Together with Sindri's father thor Eldon she started the popgroup The Sugarcubes 1986. They became very successful, especially in Great Britain. After five albums Björksplit up the band in 1992. Iceland began to feel klaustrofobic, so she and Sindri moved to London. the next year the solo-debut "Debut" came out. It has sold more than 2 and a half million copies so far. Björk is the woman who does what she wants to. her irritation over the music production is well-known in England. - If you want a drum-beat on a song, just make a drum-beat. But to have a whole apartement on a record company, 42 paid people, who has meetings about it in two weeks, is just madness. I can sit on the countryside in my little house and decide it myself. It's not more complicated than making a soup, she states simply. In Björk's world, nothing is harder than you make it. She doesn't tolerate any rubbish. Like it would be harder to come forward if you are a woman, for example. - I think that's bullshit. That's for people who are interested in feeling sorry for themselves. "Oh, it's so hard for me because my toes are so big." If you want it to be hard, it becomes hard, but if you want to do something, just do it."