For Women  1994-12

By Stuart Dade

Typed by Voo (aka Oleg Voutsen)  unclevoo@mailbox.riga.lv


"Ice Ice Baby"


   Bjork Gottmundsdottir has a sensual voice, a child-like allure and a
   style that's all her own. Stuart Dade profiles the enchanting singer
   who is providing to be more than just a weird one-hit wonder.


If there's a script somewhere of Bjork's life, now in its 28th year, she 
hasn't bothered reading it. The Icelandic singer, whose musical career 
only began in earnest as the vocalist for a small-time independent band, 
The Sugarcubes, has this year found herself on a nations coffee tables. 
Her first solo album, the fittingly titled Debut, is the most staple 
background music for middle class CD owners since Brothers In Arms. Not 
only that, but earlier this year her transition from cult status to 
mainstream, 'serious' artist was completed when she was awarded the 1994 
Brit Award for Best International Female Solo Artist.

Yet Bjork grew up in Iceland in what can fairly accurately be described 
as a hippy household, "a big house painted purple." Here, living with 
about eight adults - as well as her mother and stepfather - the seeds 
for her unique sound were sown. "At home they were all really into that 
hippy music, like Cream and Jimi Hendrix, and it was going non-stop, 24 
hours a day," she recalls. "From the minute people would wake up, there 
was music on. There was always a racket."

Bjork quickly bored of the kinds of music her parents preferred. "By the 
age of seven I was completely bored with guitars and drums, which are 
still not my favourite instruments. They were too available." Her 
musical tastebuds were given a gresh tang when her grandparents 
introduced her to jazz. At such an early age she was already displaying 
an extraordinary maturity of beliefs: "I grew up with a lot of people 
who thought that their music was the only right one, and that the others 
were not so good... I realised that a good song is a good song if it's 
got the right intention, if it has true emotion and originality. It 
doesn't matter if it's by Abba or Stockhausen."

By the age of eleven, Bjork had already undertaken two ventures that 
would greatly influence her musical advancement. In 1976 she made her 
first album with a collection of thirtysomething musicians. The record, 
entitled Bjork Gottmundsdottir, is now a collector's item. Icelandic-
wide fame ensued, and her love affair with the endless possibilities 
offered by recording studios began: "I was so excited by all the things 
you could do. That's always been my angle." Perhaps more importantly - 
although insignificant at the time - she learned to play the flute. As a 
side effect of this new talent, she subsequently acquired a breath 
control to which her unique vocal style can be attributed. In 1986, 
Bjork formed the Sugarcubes, with whom she achieved, in her words, "a 
little taste of stardom." Among the highlights of the band's three 
albums were the shocking, distinctive Birthday, which remains as 
striking a debut single as any band have ever released, and the band's 
biggest hit, cornily called Hit. As with the rest of her career, The 
Sugarcubes were no ordinary rock band:

"We would go on holiday and be The Sugarcubes. The rest of the time we'd 
be at home doing other things, because there were three three poets in 
the group, and as you know the guitars and drums are not my favourite 
instruments, so I was off making jazz and film music," she remembers. 
"Our point of view was that we were a group of friends getting an 
opportunity to travel all over the world. Waiting around in Alabama for 
four hours for a soundcheck, taking guitar solos, doing that whole 
rock'n'roll thing - it was always just a question of how long will this 
joke be funny?"

Inevitably, in 1992 the band dispersed. The split came as a shock to 
many, precisely because Bjork and her fellow musicians had carried off 
the pretence of being a normal band so successfully. In reality, Bjork 
felt stifled by years of hiding her light under a bushel. "A lot of what 
I was doing before was to please other people. It had been my biggest 
fear since I was eleven to be in the spotlight. In the bands I was in in 
Iceland I even tried to look as ugly as possible so that people would 
listen to the music but not look at me. With The Sugarcubes I was always 
going to stand at the back of the stage."

Now she felt ready to emerge from the shadows: "Finally I knew that I 
had to do an album which had my face on the front and where I wrote all 
the songs. Something I could sit down with at 70 and be proud of... I 
realised that at least once in your life you have to go out of your way 
to do what you're best at." The songs, which formed Debut, had been kept 
hidden for years. "I had to share the songs and take the risks that come 
with that," she bravely asserts. Bjork describes them as "pieces from my 
diary, or from my photograph album, sort of like greatest hits that are 
not too revealing," and this is what gives Debut its intimate, personal 
feel.

Bjork's personal life has not been without upheaval. She married at the 
age of 20 and fell pregnant around the time The Sugarcubes released 
Birthday. An abortion was out of the question: "with things like that 
you don't use logic, you follow your intuition." She is now divorced and 
Sindri, her son, is eight. She's had a string of boyfriends and has the 
dubious pleasure of boasting a legion of adoring male fans.

She refuses to recognise the possession of any such sex appeal, however. 
"Being a woman gets in the way," she complains. "I always think if 
people see me as a sex object, it's their problem." Her look, she says, 
is as "Icelandic as could be. I can trace my family tree back hundreds 
of years. I've inherited all the greatest bits of my ancestors' looks."

One of the most courageous - and essential - moves of Bjork's career was 
from Iceland to London, a move she refused to make while with The 
Sugarcubes. "I had to swallow a lot of pride to move here from Iceland," 
she admits, but at the time, while Debut was in the making, it was 
vital. "I was prepared to fight for it. With my album it's like with my 
child, you don't just give birth to it and tell it I'll see you later."

Since the move, and the somewhat unexpected success of Debut, Bjork's 
music has occasionally been overshadowed by her reputation as an 
eccentric. Hardly surprising, bearing in mind her unusual upbringing, 
that this wild, diminutive figure with a voice that has all the force of 
an articulated lorry, has caught on. Record buyers have always been 
attracted to the bizarre. Far from insisting that she's just an ordinary 
Joanne, Bjork feels at home with this image. "I like the weirdo tag I've 
got. It's quite flattering because it makes me more interesting than I 
think I am. I look at myself as a down-to-earth person who happens to be 
obsessed with music." Watch her recently released live video, Vessel, 
and witness the funny-peculiar links between songs, in which Bjork hops, 
skips and jumps around the streets of London talking animated gibberish 
about herself, and you'll understand that she is at ease with acting 
strangely.

This does not mean she takes kindly to another, less charitable 
perception of her image. When described as an 'elf-child woman' by a 
fellow musician, she denied that she deliberately portrays such an 
image. Rather, she has said, with all the kooky style we've come to 
expect, "I insist to be happy, mad, sad, stupid, brilliant, genius, 
imbecile, horrible, mean, happy. I'm going to be all. I make an effort 
not to forget all these different colours - to get hilariously drunk 
sometimes, and to pay all my electricity bills, and to forget what time 
it is, and miss aeroplanes and run a band without a fault..."

Similarly she claims to have in no way sought to encourage the explosion 
of interest in Bjork, the commodity. "I don't want to sound ungrateful 
but it wasn't my intention to create this press hullabaloo," she points 
out. "I was being quite introverted. I had made a conscious decision to 
take a step backwards and do my own private little things." Conversely, 
Debut became "the most extroverted thing that I've done."

Anyone who might accuse Bjork of putting on her Icelandic voice to 
promote her appeal as an oddity can also consider themselves misguided. 
At a recent press conference to publicite Vessel, she was asked why her 
accent seemed to veer between Icelandic and South London. Her honest 
reply was that she picks up local dialects all too easily. Comically, 
she went on to explain how she had recently visited Scotland and had 
managed to pick up a Scot accent. As she told her captive audience this, 
her voice, with impressive timing, lapsed into subconscious 
Glaswegian...

Another subject touched upon at the Vessel press conference was Bjork's 
distinctive look. She has been described, not inaccurately, as looking 
like "an overgrown child in fancy dress," but does she cultivate her 
style intentionally? "I've always been very stubborn about the way I 
look," she says. It seems that her dress sense, like her musical tastes, 
have always been somewhat deviant.

"As a kid in school I was wearing sheets I nicked from my mum, and 
orange hair. The more no-one could look like me the better I felt. I'm 
much more relaxed about that nowadays." She firmly believes that looks 
mean a great deal: "It's no use pretending you aren't expressing 
yourself with clothes, because you are," she says. "The visual side 
really matters. If I look the way I sound, that helps me, because people 
are much more trained visually than they are audio-wise." That Bjork 
look - in particular the hair, is currently being copied by young women 
all over Britain. When asked whether she minds this copy-catting, she 
says no. In fact, she admits, she actually stole that particular knotted 
hairstyle from a friend.

Fame has not and will not faze Bjork Gottmundsdottir, who is currently 
recording the follow up to Debut. "In the Sugarcubes, we thought fame 
was very boring. No one's a star in Iceland because it's too local. You 
see stars buying toilet roll in the supermarket." As she astutely 
recognises, "anyone can be famous - just walk down the street naked 
once."

Or make remarkable, uncompromising records with the voice of an angel 
and an imagination that's busier than an Icelandic fishing expedition...