Times  1998-09-26

By Charlie Porter


"The Big Interview: Björk, 1998"


   As pop's most mischievous pixie, Bjork has elevated peculiarity to an
   art form and delivered spectacular blows, musical and otherwise. Now 
   she's having a go at being normal


This is the second time I have interviewed Bjork in the space of a year. 
Back in April, when we met in London, she was putting the finishing 
touches to the video and artwork for her forthcoming single, Alarm 
Track. She chatted, I listened, we said goodbye, and I went back to my 
office to await a release date.

Except the release date never came and Alarm Track never saw the light 
of day. Bjork went off on a world tour and, she says, was just too busy 
to get round to it. But, I venture, other people manage to release 
records while on tour. The Spice Girls got so much coverage for their 
last single, Viva Forever, you'd never have known the band were actually 
in America.

"I think people like the Spice Girls are sacrificing their lives for the 
entertainment of the planet," she says. "If you're playing by the rules, 
there's more self-sacrifice than Mother Teresa, but people are so 
ungrateful of this. I've had a lot of offers to do that sort of thing, 
but you wouldn't believe the amount of work involved. I'm doing the 
things I enjoy doing. Being a selfish bitch."

Now that the tour is over, and Bjork is safely back in Iceland, she is 
finally releasing a track, but not the ill-fated Alarm Track. This one 
is called Hunter, and it's the third single from last year's Homogenic 
album. In industry terms the album has not been a roaring success. Sales 
have reached a relatively low 100,000 and the album is hovering close to 
the foot of the Top 200, a year after its release last September.

But Bjork doesn't give a fig about the industry. The bottom line is she 
likes to be in control and she couldn't be while she was on tour. No 
Bjork, no single. "I don't think in those industry terms," she says from 
her home, overlooking the harbour in Reykjavik. "Every time we put out a 
single, we hear, 'Oh my God, that's never been done before'."

Bjork Gudmundsdottir's career began 20 years ago in her native Iceland 
with the release of Bjork, an album of folk songs. "I got a taste of 
fame when I was 11," she says. By the age of 13 she was playing in punk 
bands with her friends, living in a commune with her divorced mother and 
another seven adults.

Her breakthrough band, the anarchistic Sugarcubes, found crossover 
success in 1987 with their single Birthday. On splitting the band in 
1992, she adopted London as her home, recorded parts of her first solo 
album, Debut, in the toilet of a London club, began dating pioneering 
drum'n'bass DJ Goldie and, despite an indefinable and distinctly 
unconventional style, began selling millions of records.

But after 1996 (the year she attacked journalist Julie Kaufman in a 
Bangkok airport and nearly became the victim of suicidal parcel-bomber 
Ricardo Lopez), she left London and returned to Iceland. Now her most 
unconventional act is not wanting to be a celebrity.

When we met in April, she talked about how she was happy being calm. "A 
lot of people look at me as a sort of fast, mad chick, but I'm really 
old-fashioned and conservative," she said. "I'm really, really into 
knowing yourself well enough to know where you flourish.

"I'm surprising myself," she added. "I'm sitting on my own for hours on 
end and I'm giggling, 'cos I'm just going into funny places that I've 
never been, ever. I'm taking myself there, going, 'C'mon, don't be 
scared'. It's fun."

At the time, I half expected her homeliness to be just another Bjork 
experiment, just another incarnation of her relentless clubbing years in 
London, a flirtation with a different lifestyle and a way of renewing 
her musical inspiration. But six months on she is sticking to her guns. 
She is still feeling homely and secure. Before I spoke to her, she had 
just popped out on some errands. Hardly temperamental behaviour. In 
fact, she displays definite shades of Stepford Wifeliness as she talks 
of her current fulfillment.

"I've got this feeling of completion," she says. "The last time I got it 
was when I was seven and caught a salmon. Now, I'm not going to tour for 
a while. I'm getting people over very domestic stylee." The tour ban 
still stands, although she recently broke her own rules by announcing a 
handful of UK dates.

Actually, there is a sensible explanation for why Bjork is being such a 
stay-at-home. Her only son, Sindri, is reaching adolescence, when 
parents, no matter how hip and cool, become an embarrassment. She became 
pregnant with Sindri by former Sugarcubes member Thor Eldon when she was 
19. The pair married, but divorced in the late Eighties.

Since then Sindri has divided his time between parents, staying in 
Iceland with his father or travelling the world with his mother. But 
now, Sindri just wants to live like a normal kid.

"My son is starting to become a teenager. He wants to be part of a 
gang," she says (meaning with friends rather than as a hoodlum). "He 
says to me, 'Listen, Mum, this is a priority now. This is more 
important'."

Bjork has always been fiercely protective of her son. She attacked 
Kaufman because the journalist tried to question Sindri live on air, 
even though the pair had just landed after a long-haul flight. And while 
in London she lived in genteel Little Venice rather than her preferred 
Brixton because, she says, "it's really safe for a kid. My kid is not 
'street' at all."

Even though she has taken Sindri into some extreme situations, there is 
no animosity between her and his father. Iceland, she explains, is too 
small a country to bear grudges. "If two people start going out," she 
says, "and it doesn't work, you're still going to meet that person every 
other day in the supermarket because it is so small. That seems to be a 
big taboo in Britain. If you split with someone, you never see them 
again."

Despite Bjork's grown-up attitude to her son, she looks as ageless and 
childishly sweet as ever, and she still speaks as if telling you a 
warped nursery rhyme. But we mustn't forget that she has been fending 
for herself quite nicely since she was almost as young as Sindri. As a 
teenager in the various punk bands that eventually became the 
Sugarcubes, she learned to look after business, steering an even course 
through the minefield of exploitative record companies.

"It wasn't that we were control freaks, it was just because we were used 
to running our own affairs," she says. "This is very much an Icelandic 
thing. In Iceland, if your car breaks down you fix it, and if you need a 
house you build it. I'm not saying if you're hungry you go hunt, but 
it's not far from that. My family still hunts half their food. If you 
need good music, you make it."

Anyway, she says, the business side wasn't actually that taxing. "We 
learnt that running a label isn't that big a deal." She now works hand 
in hand with One Little Indian, the small independent to which she is 
signed in Britain. "I think I like to be responsible for my doings. If 
things go really bad, I'm the one to blame. If things go well, I'm self-
sufficient."

Which brings us back to the little matter of Homogenic failing to set 
the charts alight in the way that Debut, or its 1995 follow-up, Post, 
did. Bjork is not overly upset about its lacklustre performance: "Before 
I made it I wasn't sure if I had the guts," she says. "When I made 
Debut, I kept saying to people, 'Please don't get overexcited. I can do 
a lot better'. People thought I was being like a pretentious uncle, but 
I wasn't at all, I really meant it.

"Homogenic is five times better than Debut. It's just that it was a very
serious album, but it was recorded at a very serious time. I'm getting 
really serious now as well," she adds, and bursts into fits of giggles.

But things did get very serious for Bjork. In September 1996, Ricardo 
Lopez, an obsessed fan from Miami, videoed himself making an acid parcel 
bomb, posted the package to her in London and then kept the tape rolling 
as he committed suicide, a Bjork record playing on his stereo. The 
police intercepted the bomb before it reached her home, but bizarrely, 
Bjork had been in the same neighbourhood as the bomber when he sent the 
package. It was her cue to draw an end to her life in London.

"It was the tip of the iceberg, really," she says. "For a while before 
it I knew I was on my way. I already knew I'd been there too long. My 
work had become just so outrageous, I think I only ever took one day 
off. I really enjoyed it, but I went to Spain the day after the letter-
bomb arrived. I guess that became an excuse." In Spain, she wrote and 
recorded Homogenic, with Mark Bell from the band LFO and an eight-piece 
string orchestra from Iceland.

The problem with Homogenic is not the quality of the songs, just that, 
after the riots of tracks such as Big Time Sensuality, I Miss You and 
Violently Happy, it is hard to take in a Bjork album that was so 
melancholic. On release, the reviews were lukewarm, but by the end of 
last year, Homogenic was one of the most recommended albums in Metro's 
critics' choices for 1997.

"I think the album is more about fighting your way out than saying 'poor 
old me'," she explains. "It's so natural not to want to be there, so you 
lose your patience, you go, 'fking hell, I'm not going to take this'. 
When people say it's really dark I don't mind that. It's more about not 
giving up than going, 'mmmmmm, I'm miserable'. I'm writing really 
different stuff now, thank God."

This new material is now being put into production, heralding a new era 
for Bjork. She had always planned to release three solo albums that 
formed a loose series, which she feels she has done. On her recent tour 
she was satisfied with her performance for the first time in her career. 
Now she feels able to start again.

"It's like mission complete," she says, "and it gives you permission to 
drop everything and start from zero." She looks coy, not wanting to give 
too much away. "But I'm definitely not saying it's free-jazz," she adds 
vehemently. "Definitely not that crap. I grew up with all that st."

Whatever her change of direction, she will always be protective of her 
output. Earlier in the year she gave the green light for a video 
compilation to be released for Christmas, showcasing the stunning, 
idiosyncratic short films that are the trademark of her work (remember 
the dancing post box in It's Oh, So Quiet?). Without her knowing, the 
record company thought this would tie in perfectly with a Best Of... 
compilation, which was put on the schedule for this autumn. But when she 
found out about the plan Bjork trashed the idea, thinking she hadn't 
done enough work to justify a greatest hits album.

Both musically and personally, she is maturing. Age is not something she 
obsesses about. "I've always felt I was either five or 90," she says 
pragmatically, "so between 25 and 45 is just not me. I remember watching 
my mum and thinking that this period is just haywire time. It's just a 
lot of hysteria about nothing, running around worrying about the rest of 
your life."

In fact, she is looking forward to being old. "When I see my nan, I 
think she's got it sussed," she says. "Everybody goes to her, because 
she's really generous, but she's really good at being selfish as well. 
She's an amateur painter, and she goes out on her own with a bottle of 
red wine. In my family people get more and more active as they get 
older. They get into their prime about 60 or 70, and they just seem to 
live forever."

Returning to Iceland is just the first step towards this independence. 
Although she loves chatting about her music, she sounds even happier 
when we talk about food or her friends. In the background her house is 
buzzing with noise, ready for the night's meal of saltfish. And so she 
leaves me to get on with the cooking, the most adventurous singer in 
music turning out to be also the most conservative.