NME 1998 By Stuart Bailie Photos by Kevin Westenberg Sent to BEP by musid musid@HELLASNET.GR "New Bjork stories" The last two years have been pretty hellish for Bjork, what with that break-up, that bomb nutter and that punch-up. But now she's slowing things down, trying to get back in control. New Bjork stories: Stuart Bailie(words) Kevin Westenberg(photos) She totters out of the elevator in New York's Soho Grand. Bjork's sandals click-clack across on the marble floor, heading our way. You notice her unhappy face and then follow her gaze down to her left hand, which is wraped from knuckle to wrist in a sodden cloth, dripping everywhere. "I'm having trouble with my tattoo," she bleats. There's a flash of crimson on the underside of the flannel. It could be blood, or maybe just the laundry tag. You expect the worst, as Bjork unpeels the layers of cloth and looks supremely gutted. "Look, there's something wrong with it." She points with her good hand to a sheet of gauze, with an unclear animal image underneath. Is it a lamb? "No it's not. Look again." Well, it's a young, furry creature. With sharp teeth. The better to eat you with. And sharp ears. The better to hear you with. "It's a baby wolf," she explains. "But there's something wrong with the tattoo. It's not working." She peels back the gauze and the entire tattoo comes away with the sheet. Bummer. So much for your cheesy American transfers. "Half-an- hour I've had this on," she gasps indignantly. "And it just won't stick. What a waste of money." Welcome, once again, to the ever slippery world of the daughter of Gudmund. She worries us, she fools us and she charms us before revealing the duff tattoo. And presently we'll meet her arnamental penguin as well. "I got this in a lady shop in New York," she chirrups, giving us the bird. It's about five inches tall, totally chi-chi with its sequins and gold tooling and decorative chain. Give the sides a sqeeze and-hey-the penguin opens up like a purse. Positively handy! "And I got this from the lady shop as well," she blurts, modelling a bracelet that's virtually alive with soft, grey feathers. More stylistic fun that links thematically with other bits of the retro ensemble. Bjork's hair, you see, is feathered and flicked back in a '70s hind of a way. Even though the supermodels on the Givenchy catwalks have been rocking the Charlies Angels throwback look, they lack the presence of this singer, as well as the unruly tufts that are caused by the Icelanders habit of tweaking and plucking at the tastefully coiffed barnet. So, shes mussing up her hair, squeezing at the crap tattoo and occasionally allowing her pinkies to disappear into her nostrils, in search of bogeys that never materialise. Simultaneously, she's explaining the origins fo her party dress, a symphony in fuchia with the glitterball bust that she found in a street market. Her friend added some sleeves in a colour that almost matches and the effect is very grand, like something that graced a ritzy New York dancefloor two decades ago. You remind Bjork that she made her first public appearance, aged eight, at a scool talent show. She sang "I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)", a lyric about the love-rending power of the boogie that charted for Tina Charles in 1976. "Yea - I'm back to disco. ain't I?" she laughs. "Back to disco. Full circle!" THE SINGER APPEARS TO HAVE put the awful events of September 1996 behind her, when Ricardo Lopez, a demented fan from Miami, sent her a letter bomb before shooting himself - recording the entire experience on a video camera. Bjork immediately left for southern Spain, mourned her damaged relationship with Goldie and made some of her best ever music- passionate and intellectually acute. When she reappered, Bjork had changed her homebase from west London to Iceland. She seemed to have broken the pattern of stress and illness that had caused her to lose her voice onstage at San Diego in late 1995 and also resulted in a dust-up at Bangkok airport with a television journalist in February 1996. The recent touring has been limited but personally satisfying. These days, she affirms, she wants to play three shows a week maximum, so she can give her utmost onstage. The Icelandic string section she's befreinded has been evolving at a starling rate. Mark Bell from LFO has been throwing in spontaneous beats, caising every night to be unique. For the first time, Bjork recently returned home after a tour and felt the she's completed something. "I can't remember feeling like this since I was a kid," she says." It's like, 'Whhhffft! You did it, you fucker!" Bjork's media scedule has also lessened considerably. Her last-minute cancellation of TFL Friday six months ago caused plenty of grumbling from Chris Evans and Ginger Productions, but the singer's recorg company say that her voice was failing and she wanted to cut out a planned interview on the show prior to her live performance. Whatever, there are cynics out there who will claim that she's started to act like a prima donna. But Bjork has anarchy in the scheme also. She became famous ten years agoas the singer with The Sugarcubes, who formed to subvert the business with musical pranks. She still likes uncharted areas of art. How, then, will she reconcile these urges with the physical and psyschological need to slow the pace down? That's the crux in 1998. "I'm trying to make a new patter," she figures. "Before, I drank 900 coffees and did everything at 9,000 mph. And then I just swapped modes." "My biggest battle is trying to find a different pace. I've become a harder judge. I used to run around like a punk going 'Waaaaargh! One take! See ya later! 'Now I listen to that music and think: 'C'mon! 'Now, I want to have the patience to do all the details." "The best judge for me is the things I'm reading and listening to and the films that I'm watching. Once in a while there's too big a gap between how I'm nourishing and what I'm being nourished with. In order to be truthful, you've gotta lessen that gap." Interestingly, the last time she felt herself severely split between her own art and the sources of inspiration was during the final days of The Sugarcubes in 1992. Then, she nixed the whole programme and started again. "That's one of the reasons I went and did my own album," she recalls. "Because what they were doing had become so different to what I was listening to and reading and watching. So now, if I'd bought the 'Homegenic' album and I wasn't me, it whould only satisfy me just a little bit. Not fully. If I'd bought 'Homogenic' ten years ago, it might have." THE MOST REMARCABLE PIECE of music that was scheduled for the 'Homogenic album was actually pulled off at a late stage. "So Broken" was instead set away as a bonus track on the second "Joga" cd. Recorded less than a week after Bjork's hurried departure from Miami (spookily, she had been staying three blocks away from the scene of Ricardo Lopez's suiside), the song is heartbreakingly simple. Just a voice, a Flamenco guitar and some artless lines about looming depression, feelings of impotence and a relationship that's gone into a tailspin. The most poignant part of the song occurs near the end, when Bjork moans, "I'm trying to land this aeroplane of ours gracefully/But it seems destined to crush." When you raise the subject of "So Broken", Bjork smiles as if to say: you don't know the half of it. "That was quite a week," she murmurs. So why leave the song off the album? "For me, it isn't ready yet. I'm sort of working on it. It might need beats. It's a funny thing: you know when things are ready or when they're not. I guess I wasn't proud to complain, especially in a song. But I realised that I had to learn it, to come out the other side. And the only way I could go even close to the state I was in was to take the piss. At first I was gonna do it with a little Casio drum machine. Or else do a housewife version with kids screaming in the background and me washing the dishes." Wouldn't that have been dishonest? "I don't know, because the lyric says it all. And those traumatic things come across better if they're made funny. But when I'd done the tune it had a life of its own. It was a scary beast. I couldn't dress it up in clown clothes." The other half of this relationship has his own story to tell. Goldie summarised his thoughts on the Miami experience in an interview with NME last November. Heres a part of his account: "Something in me said, "you are not supposed to be in love, and until you're happy with yourself, this is as far as you can go". I felt myself being tortured and Bjork was there with her hands tied behind her back. No-one could help me but me. She got a broken heart over it." Yet he says that he still asked Bjork to sing on his "Saturnz Return" album, on the track called "Letter Of Fate". True or false? "Yeah, he asked me to sing on it," she quietly admits. "I'm very instinct run and that just didn't feel right for me - not at that point. But I really hope we can work sometime again in the future. Last time we met, we talked about it. But it's important that you don't bulldoze over your feelings just to get a song." How did that make you feel? "I didn't talk about it at all in the press, because it's just too delicate. All the things I've got to say to Goldie, I've said it to himself. Because it's sacred. It's all we've got. And I guess because I've got more years of being in the press, I can talk about Goldie without saying personal things. With him, it's like when you meet a person (to whom) you've got too much to say and you can't say it. But maybe you use the media as an outlet. Knowing that I would read it. I forgive him. Goldie's said a lot of crap, cruel things, but I forgive him." There was the famous moment when Keith from the Prodigy remarked on yourself and Goldie being a rock'n'roll couple and Goldie took umbrage. He appeared onstage with a T-shirt that bore the image of Keith, with the slogan "C--face". What did you make of that? "I thought it was quite cute. I was coming from Iceland where we definitely deal with things our way. We're pretty fierse, but I was seeing how the English ghetto deal with things. Like, I was in Asia and I whould get a bad review and Goldie whould send dog shit in the post to the people who'd written a bad review about me. I was away, I didn't even know. When I read a bad review, I just say, y'know, they've got a right to think what they think." Are you romantically happy at the moment? "This is where I get all shy now. I'm actually quite pleased with myself. I've been in love since I was 16. Always, like every fucking minute. But nowdays, that's not my priority, for some reason. I keep thinking, 'Oh, there's something wrong with me. 'It's so out of character for me. But I'm flirting quite a lot and I never used to. I was loyal, and one person at a time, full-on. I think I'm gonna try and make this not-fall-in-love period as long as possible. It's just a nice change to have other priorities." BJORK HAS RECENTLY BEEN confronted by her American record company. They've been trying to stimulate sales, to move her beyond her very considerable cult appeal. They were asking about her 'power drive', wanting to know how to bring her energies into making more commercial records. The singer told them that she wasn't bothered about that particular issue. They also told her she was preaching to the converted- presumably meaning that the hip people already understood the debate. But the Fleetwood Mac fans probably did not. "I'm just ecstatic where I am already", she insists, rather defensively. "I don't have any need to preach and go every door with a booklet and try to convince people to buy my record. If people truly need it, they will eventually bump into it." Of course, the record company people are noting the success of Madonna's 'Ray Of Light' album and have made the connections. Bjork was working with producer Nellee Hooper before the American singer got in there. Likewise with the progammer and keyboard player Marius De Vries, who featured on 'Debut' and 'Post' before joining the Ciccone team. Madonna and Bjork have already collaborated on the title track of the former's 'Bedtime Stories' LP, but the Icelandic references seem even more marked on 'Ray Of Light'. In the poetic abstractions of the lyrics and the way that Madonna sings like she's dealing with English as a foreign language. So is Bjork aware of this rather embarrasing homage? "I want to listen it to myself, in my space, and everybody's telling me this. You're not the first. Apparently in interviews Madonna has said that she's influenced by my work." Does that feel strange? "I can only tell you it's good feeling. It's not a bad feeling like, 'Get your fingers off me. 'It's more an honor. It is funny and my record company here are going, 'Well, well, now she's getting all the credit for your groundwork.' And I'm going, 'Pwwwfffhhh! 'It's not about that. Nobody owns music and I've been influenced by all the people I've worked with and listened to. I'm quite a sponge myself, you know." You say that you're not part of the music industry, but does it ever cross your mind that the health of your record label, One Little Indian, might depend on your success? "It's a very tough question. (Pause) I don't usually talk about these things, but let me try to make it quick. I could care very, very much. And I don't do anybody any favours when I'm in that state. I don't even write tunes in that state. And I've been there. I've cancelled tours because I was exhausted and didn't treat body right. And maybe 40 people got out of work because of that. Basically, I don't do anybody a favour by worrying. And if I enjoy what I'm doing, I can be a provider. I accidently go into a role when I'm a bit of a hunter. In a way the song (and new single) 'Hunter' is written for all those people I feel responsible for. Sometimes I don't do things that people I work with do - like spend time with families and lead a normal life. I have to isolate myself and put myself in a state so I will write a song. I will come back-like it says in the song - 'I will bring back the goods, but I don't know when.' I do feel a very big responsibility. It's almost like a family, you know? But at the same time, if I worry too much, it will paralyse me." Bjork's film career starts properly next year, when she takes up the starring role in Dancer In The Dark, a sentimental, song-and-dance affair, instigated by the Danish director, Lars Von Trier. It tells of an Estern European mother who arrives in Washington with her son ("The film is me, in a funny way. At least one side of me"). She wants life to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but the reality is cold and prissy, maybe like Sweden. That's when imagination takes over. And, er, the she goes blind. Hankies at the ready, then. Chart-stormig isn't a big priority, though. You can see this singer taking a more oblique tangent in the future, making music to please herself and to indulge her artistic hunger. That's where the likes of Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart have gone before. She'll doubtless have a good time there. "You could find me in ten years time," she guesses, "and I'll be teaching elderly people how to play recorders in a home in Peru, and I would still be doing the same thing from mu point of view." And still a big communicator, happily lost in music. As if to illustrate this compulsion, she talks about the photo session that prodused the 'Homogenic' album cover. The original plan was to portray Bjork as a girl who had been found at the bottom of the sea, all messed up. "That's how it started. But what I ended up sauing, after talking to Alexander McQueen, was that the songs are from a woman who was put in an impossible situation with as many restrictions as possible. She becomes a warrior because of it. But she decides to fight back, not with weapons but with love. So look at me ; I've got bars on my throat, I've got contact lenses, kilos of hair on my head, long fingernails and massive shoes. My waist is bound. And I have to keep posing. I can hardly see anything because of my black lenses. I can't eat because I can't pick up food. I can't walk because of the shoes. I have wounds on my neck because of the rings. I can't move my head. And I still have to give love back. That was probably the biggest challenge I ever had. I wanted it to be brutal, but I still wanted contact. The sentence that came out of that day was, the less space you give me, the more room I've got." Bjork is smiling. She unwraps the flannel on her arm and tosses the now-mushy tattoo away. "So you just can't beat me... I'm sorry."