http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/hottx/review.html?in_review_id=442191 This Is London 2001-08-15 By Andrew Billen "The weird, weird life of Bjork" The problem with interviews, Bjork explains five minutes into ours, is that there's an assumption that somewhere there is a manual knocking about that explains everything. But as the talking goes on, the explanations get convoluted. "When you try and work out how it all fits together, the manual looks pretty thick. It's a lot easier when you throw away the manual." I say I have a new mobile phone and I've found exactly the same thing. "Except in my case maybe there wasn't one in the first place." I wish, like Furby, Bjork did come with a manual. It would explain how this child of a humdrum Icelandic commune grew into one of the most original forces in pop music, how her inscrutable lyrics and weird music - her new album, Vespertine, features a solo track performed on an ice- cube tray - inspire, each time she releases an album, some three million people to buy it. Diagrams would enable one to work out how this child-woman can also be the mother of a 15-year-old boy. There would be a section on her dippy hair and wacky clothes, with a warning (largely ignored) not to copy either in real life. And in the index we could thumb through all the accessories this model accepts: professional collaborators from Radiohead's Thom Yorke to John Taverner, and boyfriends from Tricky, the "maverick" trip-hopper, to Goldie, the gold-toothed drum-and-bass madman. But, of course, there is no Bjork manual - and don't be fooled into thinking that an imminent book, an oddity which includes an interview between her and David Attenborough, is one either. The last time we talked, back in 1995 at her then home in Maida Vale, I left liking her, but foxed. Risking complaint from the National Autistic Society, I wrote I'd "trespassed on an enchanted autism". Since 1995 enough has happened to give her every reason to want to retreat farther into - or, as her detractors might say, up - herself. A suicidal fan sent her a letter bomb. A stalker broke into her mother's home. She floored a reporter at Bangkok airport who thrust a microphone in front of her son. In 1997 she left London first for Spain, then Iceland and finally Denmark, where she began work on Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark, which would win her the Best Actress Award at Cannes but at the time made her very unhappy. She now lives in Manhattan, but we meet to talk about Vespertine in a hotel near her old home on the Regent's Canal - whose glacial wildness, geysers and distant polar bear howls must, in the early Nineties, have done so much to stave off homesickness. She is wearing a gingham kimono and a pair of red slippers with big black pom-poms on their toes, which she claims to be part of the Greek national costume. She is 35 but looks nowhere near that. The only noticeable change in her since '95 is that the cockney accent that was bizarrely mixed into her eldritch Nordic has faded. She says there was an accumulation of reasons for leaving London but her falling apart under the pressure of fame was not one of them. The stalker, the airport bust-up, the mercifully intercepted letter bomb took up only a few hours in a 15-year career. But Ricardo Lopez! This demented Miami fan, distressed by reports that she was to marry Goldie, posted her a bomb and then videoed himself shooting himself in the head. That would certainly have freaked me. "Of course it did me too, but you look at most people in my sort of job and they have had loads of things happen like that and they get over it. So many amazing things have happened to me. I think I have been pretty lucky. But the media like drama, so it's 'She's in Hell'. And I'm, like, no, I had a bad day in February and a bad day in September, but a brilliant summer." People, I say, are fascinated by her and want there to be a good story attached. "And I like a good story too and I don't think it is necessary for everything to be true. I know there are myths about me and I quite like it." The ultimate source of these myths is her elfin beauty. It is quite distracting and utterly misleading, having nothing to do with either the dark, soulful music of her last album, Homogenic (whose volcanic rhythms, she thinks, proved too Icelandic for British tastes), or, for instance, the aggression of her earlier hit, Army of Me, the video of which, ironically enough, showed her placing a bomb under a friend's bed. Placing no premium on her appearance herself, she finds it hard to judge its impact on others, although even growing up she knew that her dark, miniaturist features, probably Eskimo in origin, were unusual, not least in Iceland. It turns out that the Bjork clones she inspired - those British girls with their hair so randomly bunched and braided that in comparison Princess Leia looked as if she was having a good hair day - alarmed her more than they flattered her. "I always felt strongly about authority. I don't like to be told what to do and I don't like telling other people what to do. I think we work fine without bossing people about." And fashion is a kind of bossing? "For sure. If you don't wear these labels and spend that amount of money you are committing the worst crime possible, which is to be distasteful. If you are not fashionable you are criminal. That is outrageous. It is like slavery." What, then, about that extraordinary, fashion-victim costume she wore for the Oscars: half-dress, half-swan? "But, if anything, that was meant to say people should wear whatever they want to wear." Her mobile rings and a deep, male Icelandic voice rumbles away. It turns out to be her boy, Sindri, who I recall was once into Thunderbirds and Subbuteo. He is now 15 and living in Reykjavik with his father, Thor Eldon, to whom Bjork was very briefly married. The reason I believe her when she says there was no emotional crash in 1996 is that she clearly did crash-land filming Dancer in the Dark. This extraordinary film divided audiences between those who felt it reinvented the musical and those who found the plot - myopic immigrant factory worker is executed in return for saving her son's eyesight - the purest emotional exploitation. There was certainly something very worrying about Bjork's performance as the martyr, Selma. As von Trier said, she was not acting, but feeling. The shoot ended up in open warfare between director and star. "Lars became cruel and manipulative and that was unnecessary because we had something really, really gorgeous that had taken off and taken its own life. All we had to do was protect it and make sure no one disturbed it. I think he got scared and he got quite cruel in the last month, and that was what I did not agree with." Did he shout and scream? "I do not think you have to scream to be cruel. I think you can watch that film and you can see. If you had never heard the rumours about what happened on set and just saw the film, I think it is very obvious that I was suffering." As far as the story goes, Bjork believes there was a way to redeem Selma's suffering, by raising her sacrifice to a beatific level. It should have seemed, by the end, that the world could no longer hurt her. And this, at least, would have made the film truer to the dreamy genre of musical. "Instead everyone walked out of that movie feeling miserable and they felt miserable for one or two days. I don't think that is necessary. I think if Selma reached that saint-like elevation you would have walked out of that cinema feeling miraculous. She still died but you would have felt 'up'. It is that tiny little detail where we disagreed. When this plant we planted became too big he began to chop it down. I think it was fear, if you ask me. I think it is some sort of minority complex. You are an artist and you should believe in your work and let it stand for what it is. You don't need to put extra pain and suffering in there just so that the critics will say, 'This is art.' I think it is rubbish." But the details of the film's denouement are less important than the damage it did to Bjork's sense of herself as a private talent who has nevertheless thrived within artistic collaborations. The even tinier Bjork Gudmundsdottir was, after all, brought up in a communal household in Reykjavik and as a teenager joined an art collective. Her first successful band was the Sugarcubes, in which every member had an equal role. Since going solo in 1992, she has collaborated with powerful personalities such as the religious composer John Taverner, Tricky, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the Brodsky Quartet. "It is important to me to defend myself that I am collaborative. My father is a union leader. He fights for the lowest paid. I am very anti- authority. I am anti-control and I think people should work together. When I get into projects I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I have been doing it for 20 years. I am very collaborative in my work. I celebrate creative, idiosyncratic people, and I go out of my way to work with them. But if they offend my sense of justice then I will speak. I will not shut my mouth up. I do not think it is necessary to abuse people, to manipulate people to get art. I think it is a myth. I don't think to be a good director you have to be cruel." The question that occurs to me is whether her belief in productive artistic collaboration - often expressed by her in terms of creative forces meeting to create a "child" - extends into her private life. The shaded area in the Venn diagram of romantic partnerships is an issue repeatedly addressed in Vespertine. The first single from it (number 21 in the charts and declared by The Mirror to be proof that she's back to her "mad best") is called Hidden Place. This hidden place is her home, her art and, implicitly, her vaginal cavity. Will she invite someone in? She has had many boyfriends and, although in no rush to talk about it, for a year has been going out with the noted American artist Matthew Barney, who left his wife for her. I put to her something that the interviewer Lynn Barber once wrote, that falling in love is not her problem: staying in love is. She can't settle down. "But I have my home. I have my songs. I have always had that. I think it depends what people want. If people want boyfriends or relationships for the habit thing, the routine thing, and the security, that is OK." But what about her? What does she want? In Poetry, another song on Vespertine, she repeats "I love him" seven times and then promises: "I am going to keep him this time." "What I really like when you fall in love," she replies after a moment, "is that it is completely out of your hands. It is like the weather, and every time it happens you just go with it. I have been with boys for many, many years and I have been with boys for a few weeks. I like it because it is out of my hands." So the question of whether a brilliant creative person such as herself can live permanently with someone else remains unanswered? "It is not black and white. You cannot say one thing is good and another is bad. It is like a formula and I don't like formulas." Any more, that is, than she likes manuals. For me, the strongest song on Vespertine is the last track, Unison, and this is mainly because it contains traces of the self-mockery that Bjork is so not noted for. "I thrive best," she sings, "hermit-style, with a beard and a pipe and a parrot on the side." Then she warns: "Before you count one, two, three, I will grow my own private branch of a tree." Bjork insists Unison is about the difficulties of artistic co-operation and it'll surely bring back many happy memories for von Trier. If I were Matthew Barney, however, I'd want to listen very closely, too.