Mixmag  1993-11

By Dom Phillips

Photography by Mark McNulty


"Björk"


   She's undoubtedly the year's sensation, first on vinyl and now live.
   And it's taken its toll. Making the year's most original dance(ish) 
   album with 'Debut' has forced her into an endless charade of pop 
   trivia. When it all got too much, she cancelled all her interviews 
   but still spoke exclusively to Mixmag. Dom Phillips pours the 
   champagne. Photographer Mark McNulty says: "Go gozzy."


IKE the bass player is doing his Björk impression. Singing the bit from 
'There's More To Life Than This' and miming a highly staged, Groucho 
Marx, sneaky walk. "l'm sneaking out the back door," he sings in a mock-
Björk guttural pastiche, "with my ghet-to blaster" Then he collapses 
into genial laughter; he's got Björk to a T.

"I can just see you" he howls at her, doing the walk again, tucking the 
imaginary ghetto blaster under his arm. Outside on the stage, here at 
Arhus in Denmark, arch indie/house exponents Underworld are bewildering 
the Danes with a blinding set. In the dressing room Ike shouts "Acieed!" 
Björk giggles. "He's a jazz musician at a rave," she says.

When Björk and her band played London's The Forum in August, 
impressively staging the inspired genre mix ot her 'Debut' album under a 
sombre pool of psychedelic lights, a more serious appreciation was the 
order of the day. Intelligent looking women everywhere mouthed the 
words, Björkettes - girls with Björk bunches and, incongruously, teddy 
bears - stood spellbound. Celebrities lingered, everything was green.

A small Icelandic girl in a long white dress kicked off her shoes, put 
the wildest voice through a few thousand spines and magic descended. So 
backstage here in cold Denmark, I wasn't expecting impressions.

But now Tansay the percussionist is opening and shutting the dressing 
room door, which is raising and lowering the volume in time to 
Underworld's music. "Remix! Remix!" everyone shouts. Leila, Björk's 
ebullient keyboard player, rushes in raving about Underworld. "It's 
harsh orchestrated techno," she enthuses. Björk cracks open another 
bottle of Champagne and there's every reason to celebrate.

In Arhus, as in London, both gigs were long sold out, both suddenly the 
hot ticket of the week. Here and in England, despite no major chart hits 
and little radio play, people know enough about Björk to get excited.

They know that Björk's 'Debut' album 15 out there on its own - way, way 
ahead of anything else this year. An eclectic collection ot fiery songs 
that chucked everything from bhangra and techno to jazz and indie dub 
into the cooking pot and pulled it together, pulled it ott with a voice 
that's part torch singer on acid, part Billie Holliday in space. An 
album that's everything you never heard before but always wanted to. 
Then let bose the coolest collection of remixers on every single: 
Underworld, Speedy J, Bassheads, David Morales, even - whoops! - Mick 
Hucknall. Avantgarde music heaven with good tunes; totally out there.

HERE in Arhus, the show is the highlight of the annual Festival Week, or 
Festuge, a week of arts, culture and Pop. The venue is a gym hall, 
converted for the week with trees, airships, tinfoil DJ tower and a 
robot that dispenses tequila slammers for two quid. The queue outside 
stretches 300 yards. The Danes can spot quality; they know they're in 
for a treat.

And live, those that know 'Debut' find the smooth undercoat of studio 
bass and drum that album producer Nellee Hooper so beautifully layered 
is cleverly reconstructed for the stage. Not with DATs and miming, but 
with living people. Ike might be a jazz musician, but he can handle the 
rolling house bassline on 'Violently Happy' like the most effident of 
Computers.

The set trips through 20 minutes of moodier songs. Then enough already 
of the slow stuff! There's a strobe and a big bass drum and suddenly 
Björk's band are careering through live house music while that spine 
tingling voice lets lose. This is the part the Danes, less familiar with 
the album, really go tor. Two encores later, Björk leaves the stage to 
uproar.

SO It's party time after the gig and the band proceed to get pissed, 
though Björk, inbetween chatting to some old Icelandic friends, seems to 
take it a bit easier than the rest. It's a band of diverse 
personalities, as befits the music: London jazzman Ian on sax and flute, 
Talvin, a noted bhangra producer on drums, Guy, studious, with glasses 
and girlfriend in town, on keyboards and, of course, Leila, who DJed hip 
hop in Stoke and hangs out with DJ/remixers Sure is Pure.

Björk, Talvin tells me, is a "good band leader", having subtly solved an 
extra loud bass problem from the soundcheck without upsetting anyone. 
Leila recalls her own call to arms, an answering machine message in 
Stoke in Björk's bizarre cockney-lost-in-lceland accent. "Wembley 
Stadium [supporting U2] was the second ever gig I played," she tells me 
proudly. "I wouldn't play for anyone else."

Björk smiles through it all. Everything is "tops." She goes outside to 
watch Underworld and clenches her fist; she loves them. At 2am the 
minibus heads back to the hotel in good spirits.

"When I wrote the album I didn't think of doing it live," Björk later 
confesses. "But the two ways of doing it were just having tapes and DATs 
and sequencers and just me, or doing it live and consciously trying to 
create a new sound. I kind of went for that."

And not surprisingly succeeded. I'd watched the soundcheck, six 
musicians on a big black stage and Björk in the middle, a small figure 
never seeming to tell anyone what to do but somehow completely in 
control, completely self assured.

At one point she walked out into the empty hall where one sad Danish 
hippy was tying flowers to everything that didn't move. Björk faced the 
stage and sang in the middle of the echoing, empty venue while an 
automatic lighting truck buzzed its way around her. Festival volunteers 
glanced quizzically as they walked past with their dinners on paper 
plates. The hippy wiggled and smiled. No one looked, but everyone, out 
the corner of their eyes, was very aware she was there.

NEXT morning, myself and the cause of all this excitement sit down to 
breakfast. Björk pours the coffee and in a jerky, bizarre accent that's 
half lcelandic and half London wide-girl, comes out with stuff like 
this:

"I kind of look at myself as a David Attenborough kind of figure, he 
used to be my idol when I was a kid. He's like the narrator. That's what 
I do with the music, l'm such a fan of all the sounds and notes and 
everything, I could step out of my singing. That's probably what David 
Attenborough would like to do, just get people there and watch the 
snails have sexual intercourse, or whatever they do on nature 
programmes. Introduce the two together, the audience and the animals, or 
what I do, the audience and the music."

This interview with the David Attenborough of modern music nearly didn't 
happen. Björk, over-exposed in a thin eight months, has gone from 
producing the most exciting music this year to being a full blown 
personality and phenomenon. Gamely gone through a media feeding frenzy 
of photos, Interviews, six thousand questions about her childhood and 
worse - everyone wants a bite of Björk and we're down to the core 
already. TV and teen mags are involved, and Björk being "a bit 
different," has become "you are a bit strange, really, aren't you?" It 
had to end in tears and it did.

A Danish TV Interview has been cancelled as has a trip to Italy tomorrow 
to do fashion photos. They tried to cancel me but I was already on the 
plane. Björk's record Company, One Little indian, know they've got a hot 
property on their hands, she's in tears and suddenly they are scared. 
"The other day my record company got a bit protective," understates 
Björk, "you probably felt it."

So here we are, me and Björk, having breakfast in a plush, green and 
leather bar, at Arhus's regal Hotel Royal. She has wet hair, a long 
black skirt this morning, a small, neat suitcase on a trolley and she 
asks the waiter, very politely, if it is possible to have toast.

"I would be very happy if I could make my music in the same sense as," 
she says with her mouth full, "a biologist doing research. Scientists, 
whatever, or inventors. Something. Probably my favourite people. Not 
having to explain it because it's like ridiculous, really."

Björk drinks her coffee. "Because in a way, there's nothing more to it 
than the music. That's where all the magic is and the messages, and all 
the creation." Plus, in Björk's case, the Björk. lt doesn't matter how 
much she tries to paint herself as the passive presenter, what hangs 
this breathtakingly eclectic collection of sound together is the highly 
personal voice that brought the whole thing together.

Maybe, Björk argues, steering it back to the music, the music, the 
music, people just wanted something a bit different. "I liked a little 
bit of pop, a little bit ot jazz, a little bit ot electronic, a little 
bit of techno, and that's what I was picking from," she reasons. "It 
just really, really surprised me that so many people were looking for 
the same thing. That's the only way I can picture it."

That's why, say, she brought in Black Dog to join her Underground Techno 
Roll Of Remix Honour, and remix the brass-and-voice-only 'Anchor Song'. 
Brilliant! "I'm obsessed. I think they're tops. A lot ot my friends 
don't get what I'm on about," she says. "I just think it's got character 
and a sense ot in-div-id-ual-ity which a lot ot music in general hasn't 
got."

It's her taste, after all, her own very harsh sense of individuality 
that the whole Björk shaboodle hangs on and that evervone who likes it 
responds to. One slightly extreme, totally original personality pouring 
out her heart, her obsessions - that's what evervone is hearing and when 
they hear it, Björk is who they see. A total package. That's why the 
media have gone mad and also why the interviews get a little intense. 
"It's very hard for me to do it superficially," she says, "I tend to 
take it a bit personally."

It's not that Björk isn't very much her own very strong woman and it's 
not that she's a child. It's just that she retains the complete lack of 
self consciousness that makes children so powerful - they feel like it, 
they do lt, they say lt. Like Björk; she sits, gestures and moves in 
sudden, often childlike impulses, like she's just thought of it.

It's not a stage show to her, it's not singing, it's not showing off - 
it's just part of the flow. It's what you do. It's just her. "If someone 
would consider what I do a performance I would feel I didn't do a good 
show," she says, crucially. "it's just the way I look at things."

SO who is this Björk? Where did she, and all this music come from? Well 
we know she was singer with respected lcelandic art-indle outfit The 
Sugarcubes, who released two albums, toured America with U2, and were 
respected even outside shoe-gazing, student circles.

We knew Björk was something more, something quite special when The 
Sugarcubes released 'It's - It', a remix album with people like Justin 
Robertson and Tony Humphries dramatically reinventing their finer 
moments like 'Birthday' and 'Leash Called Love'. And we realised just 
how good that voice sounded with a house beat. Björk liked the resulting 
album, the rest ot the band apparently didn't.

But The Sugarcubes split up and Björk ended up in Los Angeles where she 
met and fell in love with a Bristol DJ called Dom T (it stands for 
Thrup), who was living out there. A longtime friend ot Massive Attack 
and Smith & Mighty, Dom had left Bristol in a blaze of glory to take up 
residency at London's The Wag, then moved on to DJ in LA around the same 
time as his friend Nellee Hooper. lt was Hooper who contributed largely 
to the early sound of Soul II Soul, and Hooper who co-wrote and produced 
'Debut'.

When Dom met Björk he knew nothing about The Sugarcubes. "I just 
thought, who's this wild and wonderful lcelandic girl," he recalls. 
"She's like she is. She doesn't put on a show for anybody." And as he 
was DJing regularly in Los Angeles, "we went out and partied and got 
into the tunes everyone else was into," he says. "She's always been into 
dance music, her taste in music is very, very wide, she's into a lot of 
different styles."

Björk herself says she could have made her album ten years ago, but she 
knew, she'd had warnings from The Sugarcubes days, that there'd be a 
hype, that it would become "about her" not "about the music".

Recording started in secret and five songs were at the demo stage before 
her manager Derek Beckett, who also owns her record company One Little 
Indian, even knew work was in progress. "She has always wanted to do her 
own album," Dom explains. "Be in control and make her own music. I kind 
of realised that pretty quickly."

Dom, who describes him self as a "Nellee Hooper protege", now has his 
own blossoming remix career, working with Nellee Hooper programmer 
Marius De Vries. Already behind him are funky recreations on Lena Fiagbe 
and De La Soul, and he contributed to 'Debut'. "I knew it was going to 
be a great album," he grins. One reason they've moved to London with 
Björk's seven year old son Sindri is to help develop that. He DJs at 
celebrity hang-out Browns and varius one-offs and hopes he and Björk 
will be working together on their new home studio.

BACK to Björk and her past with The Sugarcubes, who as part of an art 
collective called Bad Taste, promoted avantgarde poets, singers and all 
in lceland. Iceland. Who knows anything about Iceland anyway? Well, I 
can tell you the rooves are all different colours, the people drink 
hard, and there are 12 Father Christmases. At Christmas, children put a 
shoe on their window sill, and next morning if the child's been good 
there's a gift inside or, if they haven't, a raw potato.

Iceland, an old school friend of Björk's tells me, is an "extreme" 
place. Björk grew up a solitary and, until her teens, imaginative child, 
"running around in a tiny little crooked forest, going between my 
parents [her father heads Iceland's electricians union], everything very 
sort of hippy-ish, playing Jimi Hendrix and everything painted purple, 
then running towards my grandparents, very sort ot conservative jazz 
lovers," she says.

And she remembers that she "liked paper a lot and different cardboards 
and I would tear them to pieces and whatever came out would be pictures 
and I would make little worlds."

And once, says Björk, she spent a whole day making one of these paper 
worlds, a huge, special paper world. "I'd fallen in love with this girl 
in school, I was six, and I took it to her. And I'd never talked to her 
before. She kind ot rolled it apart and it was just a lot ot torn pieces 
of paper with nothing written on them. I just suddeniy realised it 
wasn't that brilliant, just rubbish really. She just laughed really hard 
and threw it in the dustbin." Björk laughs. "It's a sad story."

Of course there was music everywhere, with ten different hippies 
queueing up for the record player and everything played full volume, 
"on, like, ten." With no hint of irony, Björk reveals she didn't rebel 
until the grand old age of seven, when she stormed the home stereo with 
a copy of Sparks' seminal 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of 
Us'.

"The hippies didn't really like it, they thought it was too Pop, it 
didn't have cred, they thought it was too comical, and that was the 
first time I was like 'I've got a record and I'm going to play it and 
now you've all got to listen to what I like.'"

Since then Björk's been music mad, her voice is properly trained. lt is 
her obsession and she verges on trainspotter status. She's happiest 
talking about Black Dog or the italian soundtrack music of Nino Rosa, or 
Darren Emerson, her favourite DJ, "he's hard but always organic." Even 
though Dom is the DJ with ten year's experience behind him, at home in 
London's Little Venice it's Björk who dominates the record player.

"I guess I'm addicted to music and it's hard to me not to have music 
around," Björk decides. "When I was touring with The Sugarcubes I had a 
little ghetto blaster, a very little one, and all my pockets full of 
tapes. For every occasion there's a song. Just if underneath what we're 
doing now -" she gestures round the room full of heavy wood and green 
leather, "- would be some Richard Clayderman."

Björk would sit on the band bus and listen. "People would be talking, a 
certain atmosphere, and I would put that tape on and see what happened." 
What a wind-up. Imagine sharing a 16 hour bus ride with someone who kept 
subtly steering the conversation with her background music. "It's a 
shame elevator music has got that title," she muses, "It's lost 
evervone's respect. You should have music for Interviews, music for 
train rides. Music doesn't have to want all your attention, not at all. 
I think music is even stronger when it's unconscious."

BJÖRK'S lyrics though are not something that sit in the background. You 
seem to have a different take on life, I tell her. You seem to be able 
to take a mundane situation and turn it on its head, into something much 
more dramatic, whether it's the journey around the City and her own head 
on 'Crying', or the intense emotion of something like 'Aeroplane' (yes, 
a love song).

"I think there's a picture in everybody's head of what is ordinary - 
It's just like a model," she argues. "You've got standards for so many 
things, for your typical business meeting, your typical rock concert, 
your typical meal, your typical love affair, your typlcal marriage, your 
typical wife. But it doesn't exist really. It's all very personal and 
all very up to you really."

Everyone sees things differentiy, in other words. But with Björk's 
lyrics, you can almost feel you're getting inside her head. You can 
nearly feel the textures of her thoughts. She puts them there for you. 
She elaborates, starts talking about an imaginary day, where everything 
typical isn't quite and the weather affects your mood and the DJ plays a 
record which makes another part of your mood - and how it's all totally 
untypical really. I can almost understand. "Things aren't ordinary," 
Björk concludes. "They aren't. They're supposed to be. But they aren't."

It's time to go. "Just say, Underworld were tops," she says as I snap 
pictures of her finishing breakfast. Björk goes off to join the band on 
the tour bus; tomorrow they're playing a festival in Belgium. It's a 12 
hour bus ride. With Björk. And, no doubt, her ghetto blaster.


   Björk
   Her Remixes

Released:
'Human Behaviour' - mixes by Underworld, Speedy J, Dom T and Bassheads. 
Limited edition 10" mixes by Underworld were also available.

'One Day' - mixes by Sabres of Paradise were released on a limited 
edition 12".

'Venus As A Boy' - mixes by Mick Hucknall and Mykaell Riley.

'PIay Dead' - an orchestral track from the soundtrack of Young Americans 
(starring Harvey Keitel), with mixes by Tim Simenon (just released).

To Be Released: 'Big Time Sensuality' (out November 15th) - mixes by 
David Morales, Justin Robertson, Dom T and Fluke.

'Violently Happy' - limited edition 10" with mixes by Masters At Work 
(due before Christmas).

'Come To Me'/'The Anchor Song' - limited edition 10" with mixes by Black 
Dog (due before Christmas).