Times  2001-08-18

By Paul Connolly


"The Björk interview: full transcript"


   Paul Connolly interviewed Björk at the Regent Marriott hotel in West
   London on August 2. This is a full transcript of their conversation.


Paul Connolly: How long have you been away from England?

Björk: Three years.

PC: Where did you go?

B: Sort of a collection of things really. I think I went to Iceland for 
a year, and also Spain and New York.

PC: Are you just accepted in Iceland as you?

B: The people who live there don't give a st and it's something they 
would rather make sure that I'm OK. They're very down to earth there: 
salt-of-the-earth people. But there are a lot of tourists.

PC: It's one of the hottest places to go now, isn't it?

B: Yeah, it's like my son rode his bike off all the main streets, and 
for like, ten minutes on a bicycle he said he only saw foreigners.

PC: Why do you think that is?

B: I can't work it out; it's kind of weird. There are 260,000 people in 
Iceland and 300,000 visiting a year. One of my main triumphs when I 
started making music was that Iceland was too puritan, and their 
relationship with the rest of the world was fd because of the 
meglomania, and the minority-complex going on and it wasn't balanced, so 
they were kind of "let's never mingle with foreigners ever and be pure, 
because we are the purest" and then the next sentence was "let's not buy 
our kind of music because it's crap, so only music from London and 
America is great, or if it's sung in English." So it's kind of like the 
gap between the two opinions was too big. So I always thought you could 
be very, very Icelandic but still communicate, and you could still 
travel the world but you wouldn't have compromised your identity in any 
way. I fought quite hard for that. And then now when I walk down the 
main street in Iceland and it's full of foreigners, I'm kind of 
questioning that.

PC: You're not sure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing?

B: [laughs] It's a good test. But I think maybe it's because it's just 
beginning, that's why it's kind of funny and it seems a bit like an 
invasion, but maybe give it ten years and it'll settle.

PC: So tell me about your upbringing.

B: Wow, I feel I could talk so much about it. I'm just flabbergasted 
that people are actually still interested. A lot's been written about 
it. I guess I was brought up in a, well, compared to London anyway, it 
was a village, but 80,000 people lived there, so it was a big village.

PC: Rekyjavik?

B: Yes.

PC: What did your parents do?

B: My father was an electrician, and my mother was sort of meant to be a 
proper housewife. I think it was a very generational thing, because two 
years down the line she couldn't handle it and had a divorce, which I 
think was quite common in that generation of women: to kind of have a 
divorce more from the actual lifestyle, rather than the man she loved. 
And she became very independent and moved into a place where a lot of 
people who felt a similar way lived together.

PC: Sort of communal...

B: I wouldn't call it a hippy commune. I think that's to exaggerate. It 
was just a place where eight people rented rooms in the same flat. I was 
the only child there, and they all had long hair, which doesn't make it 
into a commune. But they all ate healthy food and listened to Jimi 
Hendrix. The pleasures of that generation, I guess. I could also stay up 
as long as I wanted.

PC: As the only child there, were you spoilt rotten?

B: I think you could put it that way. If I thought I had something to 
say, people would listen to me. And people would play me records that 
they were listening to, and explain them to me. It was very good for a 
kid to be brought up in that sort of atmosphere.

PC: Well, and to be taken seriously.

B: Yeah, for sure. And it was also like: "let's go down the park and 
play with the kites for many hours with the grown-ups."

PC: What was the first bit of music that really sticks in your mind?

B: Sort of a mixture of stuff. I guess I don't remember stuff until 
about three or four, and I remember Hendrix - that was a favourite in my
house.

PC: Can you remember the first record you bought?

B: I was obsessed with Sparks, which threw everyone. I think for them 
that was too "pop". My stepfather (Saevar Arnason), who I lived with 
from the age of four to fourteen, he was a guitarist; he was quite 
grand, and played in bands in Iceland, and was really good. So I was 
brought up listening to a lot of guitar music, like, such as Eric 
Clapton, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, all that stuff. That was the 
norm in my house. So the fact that he and my mother hated Sparks made me 
like them more.

PC: [Now she goes on to talk about the first record she was given as a 
present]

B: I must have been like 7 or something; I can't remember precisely. 
When my aunt lived in London she sent me a 7" of Pinky and Perky, and my 
brother put it on the stove and it got bent. I listened to it - it was 
called The Holly and the Ivy.

PC: When did you begin performing?

B: I guess I was just always singing. It wasn't really forced; it was 
like, if the school would go on a trip somewhere on a bus, and some 
people would tell jokes, and some people would go on about sports or 
something, on long journeys I remember the rest of the trip asking me to 
sing and they'd fall asleep to it or something. I'd sing in taxis or on 
buses, or on family trips.

PC: I couldn't imagine you getting away with that over here...

B: There's pros and cons of the English. It's like you go into an 
Icelandic school, a children's school, and my friend sometimes walks 
with me to pick up my boy and they just look at it and think it's 
mental, because everybody speaks as loud as they want and the teacher 
isn't the leader, but is just there for guidance, and everybody speaks 
to everybody. All the schools are the same, it doesn't matter whether 
you're poor or rich, and no-one's afraid because you're part of the 
social. Iceland is probably one of the best-educated places on earth, 
funnily enough. It's world-class. Everybody can speak out and there's 
room for everyone. But it's not because of hippies or anything; it's 
because we never really had an army, or discipline, or a class 
structure; they've never existed in Iceland.

PC: You made an album before you were even a teenager - how old were
you?

B: I did that record when I was 11, which came out when I was about 12 
and they wanted me to do another one because it went really well and I 
was like no way, so I joined up with some kids from school. I guess I 
was about 13.

PC: When did you leave home?

B: I left at 14 - nobody thought it strange. I was ready. It was a very 
crossroads time for Iceland, because of what I was talking about before. 
There wasn't a lot of Icelandic music around, and when punk hit Iceland, 
the statement was loud music, because there was no loud music, just 
discotheque and foreign music. So it was like "let's write about our 
lives, walking downtown in the street, as real an Icelandic experience 
as possible." So suddenly there were 5,000 bands, everybody was in a 
band, and there was this whole punk thing, like, come on, it doesn't 
matter if you don't know how to play. It became an Icelandic statement. 

So basically out of all that came this band called K.U.K.L. When that 
was over, there were six people picked for a radio show with the kind of 
John Peel of Iceland, and he picked six people from six different bands 
and asked them to play together for a radio show. We liked it so much 
that we continued to work together. This guy started a record shop when 
I was 14, which was the only indie record shop in Iceland, or the only 
record shop to sell anything apart Top 40, so anything apart than say 
Abba and Beethoven. So he would sell, like, opera, board-music, reggae, 
and dub, and later hip-hop and all the other stuff. You couldn't get it, 
you had to go abroad before that time, and buy your records and bring 
them back. There wasn't anything that wasn't Tom Jones or something - 
Top 40. So he started the first record shop which had all the other 
stuff.

PC: Left-field stuff?

B: Yeah, but also just like opera because you couldn't get that in 
Iceland, or film-soundtracks - just anything that wasn't in Woolworths, 
really. And we all as young kids, some were into punk bands, some poets 
and sculptures or whatever, and just wanted an alternative, and couldn't 
handle the small-town mentality. There's more to life than fishing, you 
know?

So we all worked the one till in the shop, and then this happened, and 
so all the people that weren't as passionate about the scene as we were. 
You know how it is when you're 14, and then when you're 18 you get 
married or get a normal job or something. But out of all the bands I've 
been in until today, K.U.K.L was the most like a blueprint for my music-
making. And for the six of us, we all quit the bands we were in and it 
was almost like a cult - talking about polarising. Birthday [the first 
Sugarcubes single] was like a cute little candy-bar compared to what we 
were. I still meet people that saw us and say "that is the best concert 
I've ever heard in my whole life", or "that was the worst pile of 
rubbish". It was like five times more extreme than the Sugarcubes. So, 
that for me was my first love if you want in collaboration.

PC: Because the Sugarcubes were a bit more traditional, weren't they?

B: Well, that exploded because two people in a band couldn't work 
together - it was just too explosive, the whole idea. I'd just had my 
son. There were three groups in a way - there was a group of 
surrealists. Their punk statement was that they were formed in 1979, 
which was absolutely ridiculous, and that was the whole point - 
Icelandic surrealism. It sort of was ridiculous, but completely 
appropriate at the same time, because they'd been bred with Scandinavian 
culture because they were a colony of Denmark for 600 years and we are 
so different to them. They're very sort of, "everything's proper". Don't 
get me wrong, but they're very different to Icelandic people, like the 
Irish and the English. Always talking about problems and all that self-
pity and no sense of humour.

So we wanted like, a new language, especially in literature, because 
literature's always been a strong thing in Iceland, so we wanted to 
connect with a first, sort of a primitive surrealism, which sort of had 
nature in it, and intuition, and a sense of a sort of ecstatic thing, 
that I think people tend to have that wasn't surrealism. It's sort of 
revolutionary, but it's happy. Usually those things don't go together. 
So if you go there and get drunk or something you will find that energy
 - people get drunk and will be jumping from the rooftops and just be 
ecstatic, and it's quite physical, it's quite violent.

PC: Why the happy thing rather than an angry thing?

B: Because there's nothing to feel angry about. We've got nature, we've 
got culture if we want, we've got schools, we've got hospitals, there's 
not a lot of repression. So it's more like a celebration to nature, to 
live with nature so much; dark nights, eruptions and snowstorms and 
people dying. And obviously I'm generalising. Anyway, that summer, 
K.U.K.L had come to a certain end, the group of poets and things, and 
we'd just bought a flat, which was the only sensible thing that all of 
us had done ever because we had a child. It was supposed to be a cafe 
and people would hang out there. We first started Bad Taste [an arts 
collective] which was us continuing the war against cultural 
imperialism. We couldn't handle the good-taste thing that was coming 
from Scandinavia all the time. It was terrible. We were basically being 
force-fed that we were Scandinavians, which we're not, you know? Nothing 
against them, we're just not Scandinavians.

So we decided that we were Bad Taste. We started it first as a company 
to put out poetry books, and basically everybody had normal jobs, like 
one would do the cover, they'd do it by hand, distribute the posters, 
whatever. So it was like one said OK, this is what we're doing, and 
everyone would become their workers. It became like, there was a lot of 
energy involved and a lot of joy and we decided to have this party and 
there was no band to play at the party so we started the Sugarcubes. The 
four of us were poets, we'd never played instruments and we just decided 
to make really stupid happy pop tunes to play at this event.

So from the beginning, the Sugarcubes were never serious. It was like a 
joke - a good joke, and a necessary joke. But it was very much an in-
between situation for us. Our main concern for all of us was Bad Taste, 
which it still is. It still works as a group in Iceland with the same 
people. It's worked also for Sigur Ros. We supported them for five years
before they got big. All my record sales in Iceland, of all my albums, 
it goes, all of my royalties, into Bad Taste. And everyone works for 
free in Bad Taste; that's always been the idea, without compromising one
bit. We should have focused on books, but it sort of almost ended up 
being music. But we must have put out, like, a hundred records now. I 
mean it's like 15 years.

PC: Worldwide or in Iceland?

B: It's mostly Iceland. Especially the Sugarcubes - we were Bad Taste 
and the Sugarcubes was like a hobby. So, our concern was to change 
Iceland, and to do exhibitions or films; and we asked a lot of people, a 
lot of groups, to play, and had film festivals and poetry readings... 
and not very many of us got into music. The Sugarcubes were sort of two 
people really, out of us. The other ones obviously were into music but 
their first love was literature, so the others are kind of working on 
literature really.

PC: Bad Taste must be taken very seriously in Iceland.

B: I think it's just starting now. I think maybe now, for the first 
time, maybe because of Sigur Ros or something. But Gus-Gus [an Icelandic 
band] have nothing to do with Bad Taste though they're all friends of 
ours, so we have supported them. The lead singer's putting out a solo 
record now, and he's probably going to put it out on Bad Taste. We've 
worked a lot with them, on DJ evenings, me and Gus-Gus, for a year or 
two, in Iceland. They're best mates of ours, basically. We shared a 
place with them for a while, where they had a rehearsal place and we had 
an office, Bad Taste and Gus-Gus. So it's sort of hard to draw the line.

PC: How did you come up with the name Sugarcubes? Was it deliberately
cute?

B: We could have called us The Lollipops or something, like a joke, you 
know? We were kind of working for the establishment abroad that we were 
fighting in Iceland, so it was really weird.

Obviously we said no to 90 per cent of all the offers we had, just 
because we can. And then five years later it was taking up all our time; 
all we were doing was, like we had an empty office and piles of unsold 
books. And what was supposed to be the most promising poet of his 
generation hadn't written a book for four or five years because he was 
doing soundchecks in Texas.

When we formed it we thought OK, we'll do it just for one night, and 
then it was "let's do it for a few months" and then "let's do an album," 
and the fact it lasted for five years was really surprising. But the 
good thing about it was that I know a lot of bands who have as many 
dressing-rooms as there are members and this kind of thing, and we never 
had we never had that problem. The few times we had two or three 
dressing-rooms, we were all in the same one. It was a laugh all the way 
to the end.

PC: So it was never supposed to last in the first place?

B: It's kind of weird when you get all these offers, and you don't know 
if you're being ungrateful in not accepting them, but I know we had a 
laugh.

PC: So why did you come to the UK?

B: Obviously I wanted to move on. It was a combination of things. I'd 
always written songs in my house, but I'd never sung to anybody, and I'd 
never intended to sing them to anybody; it was sort of like my own 
diary, my own little safety net if you want. I'd got that bit older and 
travelled a lot and kind of already worked with everybody in Iceland. 
It's very open in Iceland, you know, just like Gus-Gus.

You know, you're in a heavy-metal band one day, and it's not that big a 
deal, because it's all the same people there, and everybody knows each 
other, and you're brothers and sisters with everyone. It's not like the 
catagories here, like style. People don't care so much about style. You 
can be in a heavy metal band and five minutes later be in a jazz-band; 
it's just like wearing a T-shirt and then getting yourself a jumper; 
it's not that big a deal.

PC: Did you miss K.U.K.L?

B: For me personally I was missing them. But it wasn't like a joke - 
jokes are great, right? But it was from the heart, it was serious. I was 
living the best life you could possibly imagine. I had a tiny little 
flat, doing a normal job in the daytime, going to gigs, touring the 
world once a year, you see everything and don't pay for anything, come 
back, you've got family, you've got friends to get pissed. Just 
realising the things that really get me going, just once in a while when 
I really have this sort of craze that I don't understand, like watching 
the right film, reading the right book or listening to the right CD. And 
you realise when you're 25, 26, that these people actually make 
sacrifices to get to that place or thing and you can't just sit on your 
comfy chair for the rest of your life; you have to do something as well. 
So basically it was sort of about a risk to take my kid. I had to come 
to England, otherwise I'd have sat dreaming in my comfortable armchair.

PC: How did you meet Graham Massey (from 808 State)?

B: I'd got the their album in 1990. I hadn't heard that much foreign 
bands so when the Sugarcubes started travelling in '88, I was like 
dying, and I'd go to concerts in Camden and walk in there and my first 
shock was like, it's crap, there's nothing creative here, because I'd 
built it up in my head.

And then I ended up going to a club, and saw that energy at that time,
'88, there. If you went to clubs enough and waited 'til five or six in
the morning, there would eventually come up a live DJ, and you would 
hear music you'd never heard before, ever. And obviously, 808 State, 
because they just had that sort of that intellectual rhythm. I've always 
been really into rhythms. It wasn't just like a "doof-doof-doof"; it was 
very vibrant and they were physical, probably one of the few very 
physical English bands at that time. So I went to visit him and found 
we'd got a very similar record collection.

The person that was definitely something so creative was Graham, and we 
were making each other tapes, back and forth, and we wrote two songs 
together, and we were talking about a lot of stuff. And I guess the 
people I met, and I just met on the club scene, Nellee Hooper, who had 
done Soul II Soul, which I didn't know anything about, because it was 
too fashionable to get over to Iceland. It was sort of the era of Public 
Enemy and the Beastie Boys.

I think in Iceland people go more for rough stuff. And also the whole 
black thing is something we don't really understand in Iceland. It was 
very interesting; we'd talk a lot. In a certain way, me and Graham were 
too similar, we kind of agreed on everything. It's kind of hard to 
explain, but it just kind of happened that I would be bored and grab 
something, and try to find something amazing and I would get a very 
interesting comment from Nellee.

And at first I thought he wanted everything to be stylish and 
sophisticated, which was sort of like "urgh", you know? And we had lot 
of interesting not arguments, but debates. And then we ended up doing 
one song. This went on for a year or something, or half a year at least, 
because he was in the same group of friends that I'd made, people from 
Bristol. And then we ended up doing another song, and it wasn't until me 
and Nellee had done like six or seven songs that I actually went to him 
and said let's do the whole album together, and I'll wait with the 
Graham songs, because they're too different. They ended up on Post, and 
Army of Me.

So it was very interesting, because afterwards, I could say things like 
that many years afterwards, because I definitely didn't think like that 
at the time, but with Nellee ... just standing for a lot of things that 
were here.

It was sort of more truthful, because I'm not envious. Do you understand 
what I'm trying to say? Also, he's more of a producer, I guess, so I 
needed someone at that point to see from the outside. I think also I was 
very insecure; it was my first record. What Nellee's really good at, it 
wasn't only musical, I think it was also that he's very good at creating 
a nest for someone. He'll protect, and provide everything; everything's 
there, so I could just come in and be creative. Very paternal, and also 
kind of seeing my potential, and convincing me that I could do it and 
that sort of stuff.

PC: Were you surprised at your success?

B: Yeah, completely. When Derek Birkett (head of One Little Indian) 
first heard Debut he told me that it was going to be very much a niche 
album. I told him that I was aware of that but I didn't mind because 
it's music I can stand behind, I feel it's mine. For the Sugarcubes I 
only wrote the lyrics. I was ready to go out and fight and defend 
something that I thought was mine.

PC: Why do you think it connected with millions of people?

B: I don't know, it's really hard for me to see myself from the outside 
like that. I'm probably the only person who can't answer that question. 
I'm not sure. I'm the worst person to ask. I have no idea. But I suppose
there was something about... I mean, maybe I'm wrong, because I'm not 
really a musicologist or historian or anything like that, but there's 
something about at that time, I think it was not only with me, but also
with drum 'n bass, in a way it was one of the first times for the black 
influence, two or three generations down, the first voice that wasn't 
English, it was something new, and it was the first time the Indian 
community was having a cultural impact on me and other people I was 
meeting, at that point.

I think there was one English person in my seven-piece band, and that 
wasn't planned at all. It was sort of about a period of London being a 
cosmopolitan city and the only place for all of us to influence this 
other half, because it was open enough, and also feeling needed in 
England. I think there was something going on at that time, not only 
with me, but with London in general. I think Debut and Post for me are 
definitely my London albums, with collaborating with English people, 
Debut only with Nellee, and with my marriage broken, of course, and Post 
with the other ones, I got the greatest hits of all the people I wrote 
music with.

PC: Where did Hyperballad come from?

B: It was just like an emotional thing. About being in love.

PC: Was success disturbing?

B: I didn't expect it. I always imagined that it was, I've done the 
touring in a rock-band bit, so now let's get down to being eccentric, 
and making my little eccentric music, and that was sort of where my head 
was. But it was a very happy period for me, it was very liberating, 
because I'd been a housewife for a while, and very suspicious about 
foreigners, especially being a colony for 600 years, so anything 
American or English or British is like the "evil empire".

So it was like it was liberating to throw all that up in the air, just 
kind of f-it, and just communicate. And I just communicated as much as 
one can, and it was really fun. For the first three years it was 
excellent, and it just sort of happened, like we didn't know anything 
about what would happen next.

I think I worked 1993, I had two days off including Christmas, 
everything; I worked 362 days, and most of the days were like 18 hours 
or something. In 1994 I had one day off. And I loved it; it was like you 
bottle something up, and then it just kind of [exploding noise], and it 
was very enjoyable.

So I did the two London albums, and once I'd done those, I felt it was 
time to go back again and collect more material, because some songs I'd 
written when I was 15. So I had to get back, and build up again with 
something new. So it was a little tricky, but '96 probably was when I 
was trying to withdraw, and I ended up going in September to Spain and 
was there for six months and did Homogenic. But I was getting a lot of 
bad vibes from people who bought my records or liked my work... it was 
sort of a bit negative in a way. It's bound to be complicated if you 
open yourself up and work with everyone and it's completely sincere, 
don't get me wrong, like really truthful, and suddenly, you're done, but 
the others are maybe not done.

It's a handshake, it isn't just up to you. Now I can see it, but at the 
time I couldn't understand it. All the people I was working with ... I'm 
exaggerating. It's been written about, it's a bit boring, I was getting 
that sort of signal, like being with my son in Thailand and after a long 
flight, coming off the plane and those two reporters wanting a live 
interview with me, just with a camera in my face.

I was very patient for 35 minutes and I didn't say anything, I just 
said: "There's a press conference tomorrow," but then they started 
interviewing him live on air and being really rude to him and that's 
when I flipped. So I was just ready to go back inside my cocoon and make 
music, because that's why I wanted to. There's a lot of reasons why 
people make music; some do it to communicate, some people do it because 
they want to make music, or whatever, and I wanted to make music. I'm 
not very good with attention. I don't enjoy it, it's not my thing.

PC: Is that because you're very secure in what you're doing? Because 
people who seem to like attention seem to have low self-esteem, and be 
quite insecure.

B: I don't agree with that. I think there's people born to write books, 
and people born to make music, and people born to be communicators, and 
there are people who are very good at it and do it very gracefully, like 
Gandhi. That's what they do full-time; they communicate. I think it's a 
very important role. I've talked about this a lot. I don't think it's a 
low role; that I look down on being a celebrity; it's just not for me.

So I moved to Iceland. I was going to be in Iceland forever. I'd had it 
with travelling. But once I had been there for nearly a year I was 
going..[whistles in a bored, eyes-flitting-around way]. Because at the 
end of the day I was born there, and it's sort of a village which is the 
best thing about it, but also the not-so-best.

PC: Why did you move to New York? Was it for love?

B: I moved to New York because I can walk around unrecognised.

PC: Do you miss your son?

B: Well, he's with me here now. I see him every month but it is 
different when it's full time. I try not to talk about him.

PC: Are your parents still alive?

B: Yeah, my grandparents too.

PC: There's a quote saying that you, your mother and your grandmother 
drink a bottle of vodka and go out for the night together - is that 
true?

B: That's quite exaggerated. In Iceland people drink quite a lot, I 
mean, we do that here too, but just in people's houses. So we drink a 
lot together in each other's houses and get drunk, and sing tunes 
together and stuff.

PC: Are your parents proud of what you've done?

B: I think so. They don't talk a lot about it; I'm quite appreciative of 
that. My father's a union leader, so he keeps fighting the evil 
politicians to get the lowest pay properly. His job is very dramatic, 
and he, for example, spends a lot of time at work, so people have never 
treated me in my family like my job is real. They're pretty passionate 
people in my family for what they do. Like my grandfather does 
fireplaces and he'll shows me Polaroids of his latest fireplace, and 
he's as proud as I am of my latest tunes, so it's not a big deal, you 
know?

PC: What would you say are your vices as a person?

B: Being focused is something very good, of course, because if you start 
something, you'll still stick at it two years later when a lot of people 
have wandered off and maybe wandered back, too, so it tends to be a very 
good thing that someone has focus. But obviously it can be annoying too, 
for people who want to be more flexible, or fickle, or I don't know what 
word you want to use.

PC: You have a lot of control over what you do...

B: I don't think it's control. I think people use that word about me 
because I'm a woman.

PC: No, I didn't mean it that way; I meant that there aren't many bands 
or artists around who have such tight artistic control. Like R.E.M for 
instance.

B: Would you ask Michael Stipe that question about control?

PC: I have. I interviewed REM a couple of years ago.

B: OK, sorry. I didn't realise. I thought you were being sexist. You see 
the way I perceive it is that I'm quite proud of the fact that, like, 
when we fit together a video treatment, I'll come up with ideas, the 
director will come up with ideas, and we'll find a magical place where 
we both agree. Or sometimes you'll have an intuition for that before you 
meet a person and that's why you ask in the first place, because you 
have this area and then once you've found the area and I've described 
the song to them, like every little detail, what the character of the 
song is, I usually leave them to it.

And there'll be a communication. We'll call each other back and forth, 
we'll meet and drink a bottle of wine, and I'll see the shots, and I'll 
comment on it. Obviously it's different with every person I work with, 
because I go really out of my way to form a different relationship with 
each person, becoming their other half; depending, like, if the person 
is really disciplined and organised, I'll be the wild one, or if the 
person's really all over the place, I'll provide something to organise 
it with, or be the sensible one.

So I really like collaboration. I find the word control a little bit 
funny. I don't like it very much; I guess it's because I'm an old punk, 
and anarchy and all that stuff. But I would look at protection, I like 
the word protection, and also a choice, I like the word choice very much 
too. I ask: "Do you wanna do this, or don't you?", and they go either 
"no" or "yes", and if I suggest something and they say "no, I don't 
think so", then I'm OK.

That was one of the reasons why I had some friction with Lars, [Von 
Trier, director of Dancer in the Dark] because if he asked me try 
something I'd say: "OK, let me think about it," fair enough, that's what 
collaboration's about, but if I suggested something he'd just say: "no 
way". I think the true magic about collaboration is that people really 
add to each other, and the only reason why most of the stuff I write is 
just solitary, my songwriting and stuff. The only reason I would want to 
communicate with someone, or co-write, or do a video with someone is 
because I really want to become 50 per cent of the thing.

PC: Your work with Chris Cunningham was fantastic.

B: Thank you very much. That's a very good example. That video [All Is 
Full of Love] is very, very, Chris Cunningham, and I don't think my part 
in it was controlling at all. I came up with some beginnings of things 
just to describe the songs. I gave him some little Chinese statues, the 
erotic ones of ivory, so it was sort of white material that would melt 
together because of lovemaking, and he took that, and thought about it 
and called me later with: "how about robots?" So that video was 
completely his idea; it's not controlled.

PC: And it's trust as well.

B: It's trust, and in that particular relationship I would say each role 
was different. My job was to protect him and provide him with a good 
working environment, and that he didn't have to worry about business and 
money and all this rubbish and the marketing. And also most people have 
like: "the single comes out in three months," or whatever, blah blah 
blah, and we never had that.

So when he said: "My video's not ready," I'm like: "we'll wait" and it 
came out a lot later, because it was more important for me to provide 
him with what he needed, and at the end of the day he got. So, you could 
call it control, but I don't think so. I think it's protection.

PC: Control's a real old punk ethic, so I don't think you should be too
scared of that word.

B: I mean, maybe it's like, you write a song, and for me it's like say 
you have a kid and then go: "see ya" and don't do anything about it. You 
cannot just give birth to something, and then just... I mean, that's 
also very punk, right? Because if you don't look after it, somebody else 
will. Somebody will take over. So you make sure you provide it with a 
doctor that you think is good, or school, and you can help it until it's 
14 or something, but then it has to do its own stuff.

With my songs and videos, and business stuff, I mean I came from forming 
Bad Taste and that sort of stuff, where instead of signing to an 
Icelandic company, we would just say: "Wait a minute, I can do posters, 
and I can go to meetings".

Sugarcubes never had a manager, we always went, six of us, to the 
business meetings, and we didn't speak English properly, and we just 
kept saying: "What, what did they say?" And we were our own manager 
first, to begin with, so it was that belief that we don't have to give 
in to the system; you don't need it. I still work that way, completely. 
The way I described how I did the video with Chris, that's very 
supportive, because Chris is like that, like completely the most fertile 
talent I think in England right now, and he just needed protection, 
whereas with another talent you maybe have to sit down and provide them 
with a load of crazy ideas or something.

That's maybe my pride in how I started, like if you'd said: "OK, you 
want to do a book, you want me to type?" It's like nobody is too grand 
to do the dirty work too. I've been a press-publicist for one Icelandic 
band, and also we swap roles all the time, so nobody would get too 
certain in their position. So I kind of come from that school too, so I 
like to see myself like that too. To be honest, right now, I don't do 
everything, like I don't carry my own equipment around, but it's good to 
have done it in the beginning, because it makes me do it different now. 
I want you to put that in, so that it doesn't say in the interview "I do 
everything", when I don't, you know. I've got a cleaner. I'm not that 
purist. But I've cleaned houses, so I know what it takes.

PC: The new album sounds like home.

B: Yeah, I really wanted to create that sort of paradise in the home. In
the beginning I thought it was ridiculous, and that's why it was 
exciting, sort of impossible. The most exciting place on the planet is 
actually your kitchen; you can sit there and you don't feel you're 
missing out. It became sort of a joke with myself. But at the same time 
I was sincere about it; I really do think that at that stage with the 
album, that was the most difficult thing I could have done, to create 
that sort of paradise in the home. I did try; I kind of went to the full 
extreme at every level to carry that message, both lyrically, and also 
how I recorded the album, like 90 per cent of it was done wherever I was 
living on a system was set up and laptops.

PC: Where were you when you made it?

B: Several places. I was Iceland to begin with, and I did some in Spain, 
and I did some in Denmark, when I was doing the album for the film, and 
I did most of the post-production in New York. The mixing was in here in 
London. That was the sort of fancy section.

PC: How do you feel about it now? How long has it been since you 
recorded?

B: It's been a while. I feel it's exactly what I want it to be.

PC: What next?

B: I'm going to tour, and I'm sort of starting to write my next album. 
I'm very excited to be back doing music.

PC: What music are you listening to now?

B: Right now maybe because there's a choir on the album, I'm listening a 
lot to choir records from all over the world. Like the religious choirs 
and Chinese children, old ladies from South America, like any choir 
stuff.

It's a little different now obviously because my relationship with the 
Brodsky Quartet [a string quartet] has taken its own life, which is 
quite serious, I guess. I quite like that; quite visceral; it's where me 
and them meet, in a way. This has got electronic beats, this tour, and 
also the whole album is very peaceful and kind of happy; it's not so 
visceral. It's kind of more players and more sweet, for me anyway. And 
also I'm going to play a load of my old songs. And orchestras are very 
different from string quartets. String quartets are obviously very dry, 
and very sort of angular, and orchestras are a lot more lush. And string 
quartets, that's what I love about them, they're sort of very triangle, 
whereas orchestras are very curvaceous.

PC: Any plans with Richard James (Aphex Twin)? You two would seem to be 
an obvious pairing.

B: Yeah, he toured with me 1995. We did an American tour together so 
we've sort of known each other since then. I don't know, we talk 
sometimes about it, but sometimes collaborations don't literally have to 
happen, it's just more a mutual support thing. And his music is so 
complete like it is, it doesn't seem to me like it needs vocals in a 
funny kind of way. But I dunno, never say never.

PC: Do you get bored with people going on about how "mad" you are?

B: I've been labelled as this mad eccentric and it doesn't mean anything 
to me. I don't understand it, everyone's a little bit mad in their own 
way, but some people fixate on this with me as if it's the only way they 
can explain me away.

PC: Bjork, at 80 years old - what are you going to be doing?

B: I don't think it's going to change much, to be honest. I'm too 
obsessed with my work. I think I'll be out there, listening to what 
other people are doing and making songs. I'm very, very happy with the 
position I'm in today. It couldn't be better; I live a very private 
life, with my best mates and the people I love most, and I can write 
music when I want to. And if I want to communicate, and play concerts, 
or do interviews, I can, you know?

I mean, that's something that obviously could change tomorrow, but I 
think it's proven many, many times in the past that there's moments 
where people don't get what I'm on about, and I'm still writing music at 
the same speed.

It doesn't really affect my working if people get it or not. And 
obviously I get very happy if people get it, don't get me wrong, but I 
just have that sort of passion for work. I compare myself sometimes to 
Icelandic novelists... because for a lot of artists it's pretty solitary 
before you get the bulk of the work done, and then when you've done it, 
you think, wait a minute, there's collaboration - maybe I should ask 
this one to help me out with this, or do this with this one, and that's 
when it sort of changes a little.

Interview ends.