http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/lifestyle/review.html?in_review_id=314720

This Is London  2000-09-08

By Ben Thompson


"Dressing the Ice Maiden"


The view from the roof garden of Björk's penthouse suite at New York's 
elegant Soho Grand hotel is almost too much to take in at one go. The 
Empire State Building looms grandly to one side, the Hudson river 
glitters in the distance. In between, the city stretches up to catch the 
dazzling late-summer sunlight like a field of sunflowers. There is an 
architectural element to the Icelandic star's appearance, too. Her dress
 - an elaborate green velvet needlecord creation - swoops up and down 
around her shoulders with the fluid grandeur of a meringue mix which has 
just reached the correct consistency.

As she speaks, her tongue flicks across her mouth in the manner of a 
chameleon snaffling a fly. Her accent exhibits a further chameleon-like 
propensity. In the early stages of the interview, it's shot through with 
newly acquired Americanisms - strange New Jersey rhythms, sentences 
ending with 'huh?' - as if she's experimenting with the speech patterns 
of the place which is currently her home. But talking to someone from 
London seems to push it across the Atlantic, and by the end she's 
rolling her Rs with Nordic impunity.

Currently turning her back on what she refers to smilingly as 'three 
years of Apocalypse Now mood', Björk seems to be in extremely high 
spirits. The overwhelming sense of space on the sun-drenched balcony is 
certainly a far cry from the claustrophobic interiors she inhabits in 
Dancer in the Dark; her Cannes Palme D'Or-winning cinematic debut, made 
by controversial Danish director Lars von Trier.

In the film, a musical which she cheerfully dubs 'a Sound of Music snuff 
movie', Björk plays Selma: a Czech immigrant and single mother. Dowdily 
dressed and peering through milk-bottle glasses, Selma lives a life of 
heroic selflessness, making increasingly desperate sacrifices to raise 
money for an operation to cure her son of the hereditary eye condition 
which is dragging her ever closer to blindness.

Audience responses have been, to put it mildly, mixed. Some love it, 
some hate it. Rumours of bust-ups between the star and director have 
implied that opinions were as sharply divided on set as off.

'I stayed away from the media for nine months,' Björk explains dryly, 
'and the Danish publicity department got very creative.' So there was 
never a cross word between her and von Trier? She laughs: 'I once walked 
off the set [in an argument over the editing of her music] but there was 
no clothes-eating [in the midst of one particularly strong exchange of 
views, Björk was said to have bitten chunks out of her costume]... I 
wish there had been!'

Ever since she first embarked on her solo career in London in the early 
Nineties, Björk has prided herself on unexpected collaborations. From 
her smash-hit first album Debut - made with Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper
 - through subsequent recordings (and romantic dalliances) with Tricky 
and Goldie, to her work with video makers Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry,
and fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, she has plotted her 
artistic path via a series of intense personal relationships.

'I am very flattered if people think I'm always wearing his clothes,' 
she says of McQueen, the mercurial London-based designer who helped 
create the striking visual images which accompanied her last album 
Homogenic. 'But it's not really like that.' She has also been a fan of 
avant-garde Turkish-Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan - it's not 
difficult to see why. In one recent show he converted coffee tables into 
skirts, and his first collection after graduation included paper dresses 
that folded into envelopes - perfect Björk territory. 'He raises daily 
life to a level of something magical,' she has said. 

One of the things that has made Björk such an enduring style icon is 
that her fashion choices have always been tied to a broader creative 
agenda. At the Cannes film festival, a Versace number would have been 
far too predictable - instead she showed up in a pink creation by Marjan 
Djodjov Pejoski, a graduate from Saint Martins. 'It shouldn't just be 
about looking good for the MTV awards,' she insists brightly, 'because 
that's boring, isn't it?'

Björk is something of a reluctant fashion icon; she claims to have 'no 
memory' of the glossy new look she sported for our photo session, 
preferring to sing the praises of Cannibal Corpse, the death-metal band 
she went to see the night before the interview.

It's one thing to try on new collaborators as you might try on new 
outfits, but working with the notoriously confrontational Lars von Trier 
(his other films include the gruelling Breaking the Waves and the 
wilfully offensive The Idiots, where a gang of middle-class Danes get 
their kicks from impersonating the mentally disabled) was always going 
to be a challenge for her. And it's the tension between the two of them 
that ultimately makes Dancer in the Dark so fascinating. While Björk is 
hell-bent on lighting up his bleak world view, the director seems - at 
points - to be trying to unravel her entire creative persona. 'One thing 
I think I learnt from the film,' she says, 'is that suffering for an 
artistic cause can sometimes just be vanity and self-indulgence. I came 
out of this film thinking, "Maybe there's enough suffering in the world 
as it is: why should we want to add to it?"

Björk selects a strawberry from the fruit bowl on the table in front of 
her. 'The funny thing is, Lars loves suffering. I remember when he 
called me up and told me [assumes gleeful voice], "Let's make her 
blind"! He thought it was funny. He would say, "Come on, confess it, you 
enjoy the pain," and I would reply, "Actually, I don't: call me a 
pervert, but I prefer a cocktail".

Aside from the battle of wits between the film's star and its director, 
perhaps the most intriguing thing about Dancer in the Dark is the way 
Selma's relationship with her child echoes Björk's with hers. The singer 
has a 14-year-old son, Sindri, conceived in her teens with the guitarist 
in her then band The Sugarcubes. Has her son seen the film? Presumably 
it would be strange for him to see his mother acting out such an intense 
relationship with an imaginary counterpart of himself.

'I don't think he would be interested,' Björk insists. 'It's funny,' she 
continues, though her expression suggests not funny ha-ha, 'he's never 
gone to one of my concerts, and I've never asked him to... I guess I'm 
lucky to have had his company.'

Why does she use the past tense? 'There's a bit of a change going on,' 
she says sombrely. 'We had a good talk last summer and his dad was sort 
of saying, "It's my turn now", which I felt funny about at first, then I 
stayed in Iceland for nine months - a whole winter - I was just going to 
stay there and be a very good computer person on this beautiful island 
of Iceland, but by spring I was restless.'

So Björk moved to New York, and her son brings friends from Iceland to 
stay in her swanky loft - he's been over three times already this 
summer. 'It's been so gorgeous these 14 years, but,' her voice catches 
slightly, 'he's become a grown-up, and I guess he wants to concentrate 
on his own life. It's very important not only knowing when to start 
things but also when to not cling to them.

'When you have a child, you tend to create a bubble,' she continues. 'I 
guess you do that when you're in love, too. You come home from work and 
close the door, and it's a very sacred universe. And I don't think 
that's escapism, I think it's truth, because it's fuelled by love, and 
if you don't believe in that, you haven't got much... There's a scene in 
the film where Selma is in jail and she won't let her son come to see 
her, and a lot of people have asked me why she would do that, and I 
completely understand it. I don't think it's cruel, I think it's 
protection.'

What does she mean by that exactly? 'When I've taken Sindri on tour, he 
stays on the tour bus with a book, I go on stage and go through nine 
heaven and hells and then come back to him.' She pauses. 'But that's not 
so special when you think about it. I think it was a hippie generation 
thing - that you have to somehow try to be the same person in bed as you 
are with your grandmother. But I'm the next generation down from that. I 
like the walls between things: one day you go to the cinema with your 
best mate, buy some popcorn and have a laugh - the next you go to a 
funeral and cry, and that's how life should be. If you break down all 
the walls through therapy or whatever, it all becomes very bland. I 
think Christmas should be Christmas and Monday should be Monday.'

Whatever else Björk plans to get up to in New York, she doesn't have to 
worry about bumping into Lars von Trier. He's afraid of flying and has 
never been to America.


Dancer in the Dark (15) is out today. Björk's soundtrack album Selma 
Songs (One Little Indian) follows on Monday.