Women, Sex & Rock'n'Roll 1994 By Liz Evans Sent to BEP by Dom Crivello domc@INTEX.NET "Björk - In Her Own Words" Introduction Defying all known forms of convenient categorisation, Björk Gudmundsdottir has forged herself a highly individual style both visually and musically. Crashing through the indie rock ceiling which sheltered her previous band, the Sugarcubes, Björk has come to celebrate female sensuality with an unfettered passion for all kinds of music. Her peculiar voice possesses a sense of freedom, racing through a range of emotion with songs which draw on universal symbols for meaning and space. She has a truly inspiring belief in individual expression and an irrepressible spirit, and has attracted the music and fashion media who have leapt on her unique originality with enthusiasm, although too often their treatment has been disturbingly patronising. Coming from Iceland, where she grew up in a hippy community with her unorthodox mother, Björk put her faith in individuality right from the start. In such an under-populated land, people who refuse to conform stand out remarkably, and from an early age Björk was aware of her difference from other children, so she immersed herself in her own activities, singing songs. From the age of 6 until she was 14, Björk learnt to play the flute and the piano at a local music school, and impressed her teachers so much with her singing that they introduced her to Iceland's only national radio station. In turn this led to a recording contract, and in 1977, when she was just 11, Björk released her debut album, Björk. When punk arrived, Björk immersed herself in the new energy, and began forming bands from the age of 13. Exodus and Jam 80 were relatively short lived, Tappi Tikarrass (roughly translated as 'Cork the Bitch's Ass'!) released two albums as did Kukl, (meaning 'Sorcery') who also caused a national scandal when they appeared on Icelandic television with a scantily-clad, eight-months pregnant Björk. In 1986, Kukl's anarcho-punk activism gave way to the mischief of the Sugarcubes, when Björk, together with Einar Orn and Siggi Baldursson, left to start a new band with Thor Eldon (Björk's one-time husband and father of her son Sindri), Magga Ornolfsdottir and Bragi Olafsson. None of them had ambition, they were fun-seekers looking to subvert with a sense of naughtiness, but instead they achieved international success. Their distinctive style and in particular Björk's strange and haunting vocal caught the imagination of the music press in 1987 when they released the first of three albums, Life's Too Good, and over the next six years The Sugarcubes evolved into a much more serious concern. Eventually Björk decided she had to do something for herself and split to embark on a solo career, leaving the other Sugarcubes to follow suit, although not quite so successfully. Having been involved with a wide variety of musical collaborations, including big band, dance, free-form rock jazz and death metal projects, as well as Tappi Tikarrass, Kukl and the Sugarcubes, Björk had more than earned the record deal which gave her absolute artistic control, and launched herself into the making of Debut, the album which was to introduce her to a much wider and more varied audience. Since the release of Debut in 1993, Björk has become an icon of visual as well as musical style. Her penchant for second-hand clothing has been transformed into eco-friendly fashion spreads for magazines and Sunday supplements, and her witty hair-knots have been widely copied. She has also been condescendingly described as a 'pixie woman' with 'elfin' charm, a 'child woman' and an 'exotic' beauty, all of which have understandably annoyed her. Fully aware of the imperialistic attitudes which greeted the Sugarcubes, especially in Britain, Björk believes that the media's ethereal imaginings of her are simply an extension of this. She puts it down to a kind of ignorant fantasy people entertain about Iceland's relatively unexplored culture, which, though rich in mythology, is hardly a land of trolls and polar bears. More than anything though, Björk is angry about the lack of freedom for women to develop as characters rather than physically desirable beings. While men are judged in terms of their intellect, imagination and wit, women tend to be looked at as little more than bodies, particularly when they're involved in entertainment. Björk has clung fiercely to her own convictions, irrespectve of conservative standards, using the opportunities afforded to her by the likes of Italian Vogue to play with ideas of female imagery, and has proved that women do not need to cramp their style in order to be successful. She has refused to compromise herself artistically or personally, implicitly trusting in her passions, sensual understanding and playful sense of humour to show that female individuality owes as much to attitude as it does to looks. And while most of the world is still some way off from ingesting this invaluable lesson, Björk's infectious confidence in her convictions makes her example impossible to ignore. Björk - In Her Own Words I lived by the sea in Iceland, and it does affect you a lot. I went there for Christmas last year and got drunk with my friends, and we were discussing the affect the place has on you. Several of them were forced to move abroad, like myself. I've lived in England for a year now and I thought I would never, ever have to do that. It's strange because it's too small to be able to work there and it's too big to be able to carry the world around with you. So my friends and I were laughing because there's this endless 'can't live with, can't live without' situation for people like me. One of my friends is a sculptor and another is a painter and if you're doing something like that, Iceland is no place for you. It feeds you 100 per cent when it comes to inspiration and when it comes to self-identity, and when I go there my batteries just completely fill up in one day. It's not a coincidence. But when it comes to actually getting it out of your system, that's when there are problems, because people there are lovely, but it's just too small a population to make them get what you're on about. I'm doing fine there now, but the only reason is because I've got recognition abroad. They fall for that, the people. I haven't really adapted to England. I'm a visitor here and I always will be, and that's another thing I have a laugh about with my friends when we're drinking together - that we will always be visitors. It's a joke! All of them who go abroad to study, they always come back, and it doesn't matter if they get hilarious, outrageous job offers. They'd rather go back home and work in a shop! It's such a different energy there. In Iceland you're either normal, and you do a normal job and you do everything in a normal way, or you're a weirdo, the town freak. It's as big as England, but it's only got the same population as London's Edgware Road, and it's very beautiful, but it's a small society, so everybody is watching each other. If the dentist's wife starts going out with the shoemaker, everybody knows, and either you get completely obsessed with all that, or you don't give a shit. There's no, what do you call it, in between. So when my mother, who was single, had me, it was a scandal because she didn't want to be a housewife. She didn't want to wear make up, she wanted to let her hair hang down and wear her eccentric clothes and she was just an outcast. My parents had me when they were very young. My mother was 19 and my father was 20. They had been together since they were 14 and 15. They split up when I was one year old. My dad's family were very, very conservative. The men were men and the women were women, and if you fell in love with someone else while you were married, you just forgot about it. You did your duty, loved your husband and your kids and shut up. And it was the same for men, just work, love your wife and shut up. My mother was completely the opposite. She'd listen to her heart and forget her duties, which got a bit mad sometimes, because she'd forget to bring me up. But I could see both ways, and pick from each. There was the organisation and the discipline, and the going to work, even if you didn't feel like it, but at the end of the day what mattered was your heart - and all that hippy freedom shit! A lot of people, including my relatives, would say my mum was mad, because she didn't bring me up properly, but I was fine. From the age of four or five, I had to manage myself, and it wasn't a problem. I would wake myself up, get dressed, get the bus and go to school. I think it was very healthy because I couldn't rely on anyone else. I remember deciding when I was about five that I'd either do things my way and have a lot of fun or I'd do things other people's way and be a doormat. Once I decided I wanted to do something - I can't remember what - and the rest of the kids in the street didn't. I could sense a certain 'Well, you just don't do that!' So I made a decision that I wouldn't give a shit about them. People have always found me strange and it just makes me laugh you know. I guess it's a kind of handicap, for people not to be able to understand you, but I'm not really bothered because I have a good group of friends and to them I'm the most down-to-earth, common sense person you could ever find. And I think I am a very no-bull-shit, straightforward kind of person. I guess it s a compliment to be considered complicated! Where I grew up, there was 24-hour music and there was always a queue of hippies waiting for the record player. The first time I made an independent decision to play a record, it was Sparks' 'Kimono My House', and I was seven or eight. When it was my turn they fucking had to listen to it, and I would play it all the time! They didn't like it, they thought it was too poppy, but Sparks were really comical. I was really into them for two years until the singer said there were two things in the world that he didn't like, animals and children, and that really hurt me. The first record I learnt by heart was The Sound of Music when I was three or four. And then there were all the records my mother played - The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix. But the music that fascinated me was usually instrumental. I've never been that mad about singers. I never really considered myself a singer until lately. My heart has always been in the music, the instruments. I tried to learn the flute but I didn't have the patience and that's probably the reason why I ended up a singer because I didn't have the patience to tackle any instrument. What I really like to do is write songs with other people my age and get really involved together and mix personalities. It's like a musical love affair, over-emotional madness! That's what turns me on and I happen to sing because that's my tool. When I tell people I've been writing songs since I was very little, they look at me as if I was Mozart, but it's not at all like that. It wasn't like they were masterpieces. It was just very natural for me as a kid to write songs. I don't know, things like, 'I have to go to the shop, I have to go to the shop, I hope I won't forget what I'm supposed to buy' You know, those kind of songs. And I would spend a lot of time on my own, being an only child, and have great fun just making little songs. It wasn't exactly 'Bohemian Rhapsody', they were very simple. I think for every situation there's a song. I used to terrify my friends because I always had a little ghetto blaster and pockets full of tapes, and I'd sit in the background, because we would always be together, and I'd play a song. And then we'd change the subject and I'd play another song, and then we'd walk down the street and it would start raining and I'd put on another song. I'd try to change the song to fit what people were talking about. It would get really sentimental or really hardcore or whatever. That's what music is really all about. I don't think music is so much about what it's become, because it's kind of like, become a monument. Truly, music is just feelings and I'm not trying to be philosophical or anything. That is the beauty of music, that it's just down to earth and about really boring things like driving your car or taking the tube or doing an interview or anything. All those things, that's what music should be. It's gone wrong because of a combination of things. I've been taking part in it with my record, Debut, and I'm trying to fight it. Although I'm not bitter about it, because you can't really point out what it is that's going wrong, if it's the interviews or the photo shoots or the videos or the record companies or whatever. At the end of the day the only thing that can be right or wrong is the attitude. People can be on the biggest record label in the world and do 97 videos and you can still sense what they actually are like and if they're writing songs that matter. Obviously you can make music for so many different reasons. One of my favourite artists is Madonna and she's not doing it for musical reasons, she wants to change the world! And fair enough. I think if music existed as a person, music would be proud that Madonna actually uses music to do that. When I write tunes, they're more about the foreplay than the intercourse, because as a true female, I guess that's what I'm more interested in! I'd rather play with my imagination and flirt more with my head. If I meet a person who's wearing clothes that hide their body, but they have a mad, corrupted mind and really tease me, I find that much more exciting than someone with the most perfect body in the world, who says nothing to turn me on. It's also a question of foreplay - to what? It could be foreplay to taking an aeroplane to Thailand, or a build-up to meeting a friend or buying your first car. All those things are a real turn-on. I find it very difficult to draw a line between what's sex and what isn't. It can be very, very sexy to drive a car, and completely unsexy to flirt with someone at a bar. At the end of the day, it's all about foreplay and climax. As humans that's how we do everything, whether it's writing a book or running a country. It's all done with that kind of energy. I was 11 when I made my first album. My stepfather was in a band and he played Jimi Hendrix kind of stuff. I was brought up with him from the age of four. I can't remember how it developed, but I was one of those kids who'd be singing all the time. Not showing off, just singing to myself, and my dad knew people who were in the music business and they knew I could sing. I guess it was also the right time in Iceland for a child star. They asked my mum if I'd be into it and my mum was right into it, and convinced me to do it. I got to pick the songs myself, I wrote one of the songs, and it was a brilliant opportunity for me to see a studio and how it works and the magic things that are done there. And it became really big in Iceland, it went platinum. And my mum wanted me to do another one but I didn't want to. There was a lot of pressure on me but by that time I'd been introduced to the goods, because I'd been in a classical music school since I was five and I was really frustrated because I had passion for music, but playing Bach and Beethoven just bored me to death. To realise that you could go and pick up any instrument you wanted and write a tune was just brilliant! When I was a teenager I'd go to this little sailor bar with several of my girlfriends and one of us would seduce the DJ and get him really drunk so we could get in the booth with our own records! Even now I'm awful when I get drunk, especially when I get really drunk. I'm right up there wanting to hear my favourite tunes all in a row, forever! I would always be the one who would hang out in the record shops and kind of know what was going on. If it was somebody's wedding or someone was putting on a fashion show, they'd ask me to play records because I had a big collection. I've been in bands ever since I was 12 and I've always been in two or three at a time, because I wanted to play with all the mad people in Iceland, to experience everything. When I was about 14, I was in an all- girl punk band, and a punk band that played poppy tunes called Tappi Tikarrass. Well, let's call it happy punk, that probably sorts it out. Tappi Tikarrass actually did quite well in Iceland and then I got bored with it and I started Kukl, a jazz-punk band. When we played abroad we were always compared to Rip Rig and Panic although we didn't know about them. They were supposed to be some sort of jazz punk. There were thousands of others but I won't even go into it, it'll just complicate things. I guess Kukl were kind of in the punk intelligentsia, although I shouldn't say that myself. It's like blowing my own trumpet, but I guess it's the truth. We formed a little company and put out records and had a lot of poetry readings and exhibitions and made films, and we were very productive and the band was almost like a secondary thing for us. All the people in lceland who were getting bored to death who wanted to put things out, decided to just do it, and sell 100 copies of whatever it was, because there were so few people in Iceland and there wasn't any money to do anything. I went on the telly with Kukl when I was pregnant, and at the time Madonna was really big with 'Like A Virgin'. We kind of took the piss because we got a lot of pressure on us as we weren't commercial enough. All the media hated us from day one, and it wasn't until the Sugarcubes got recognition abroad that they swallowed everything they'd said before. There was a lot of hypocrisy. But anyway I decided to wear just a bra and a skirt underneath my pregnant belly to take the piss out of Madonna, who at that point was the stereotype of all the crap music that was around. We just thought it was very funny that a very pregnant woman would do that. And basically it was a scandal in Iceland and I got almost sued by a 60-year-old woman. Her mother, who was 90, watched the programme and had heart attack! She actually survived, but for people who don't know the scene in Iceland it's hard to explain that that's how self-contained it is. When I was in the Sugarcubes we were just obsessed with that society, and changing it, and shocking it and provoking it and teasing it and we were having a great time. We didn't want to go abroad at all, and we said no for two years. When we did go it was strange, because of course the Sugarcubes were misunderstood from day one. And we wanted to be in a way, but in a different way to the way we were. In Iceland we'd stuck together through thick and thin as a gang of people for eight years and had quite a colourful past, and then some bigheaded journalist from Melody Maker decided that we were his pet of the month. The arrogance in the British press, that kind of 'We discovered you so shut up and behave', just didn't go down very well with us because we had a past in a country which they thought was full of Eskimos and polar bears. I mean, there's not one polar bear or Eskimo in Iceland! They were so full of ignorance. They weren't really interested in trying to find out anything about us. They thought we were ethereal puffin eaters even though we would say very down-to-earth, solid things. All this 'Elfin woman, Pixie woman' stuff I get now is some kind of leftover from that. Because they decided beforehand, with this iperialistic view of theirs, that we were some sort of exotic property from another galaxy. And they couldn't deal with the fact that we were six different individuals who ran our own record company and radio station in Iceland, who managed ourselves all the way through, and who put out a magazine. I'm not bitter about it because in a way that's what I've always thrived on. In Iceland I survived because I was looked on as someone who was different. Going abroad and being looked on as different again kept me surviving. When I broke away from the Sugarcubes, I didn't feel scared because in Iceland I was always doing lots of projects and working with other bands as an individual. To work on my own was not scary. What was scary was to allow myself to be selfish, because all the things that I've done in the past have always been for other people or purposes, whether it was writing a lyric or doing a video that suited the Sugarcubes, or writing a backing vocal to suit another artist or the music to suit a film. What is difficult for me now, is suddenly to suit myself. It's not really in my character. Well it is, I mean everybody's got it I guess, but I kind of have to look for it really hard and tend to forget about it and I rather ignore it. I'm not worried about actually doing it, because I'm a housewife and I'm quite used to getting everybody together and sorting them out, but to focus it all on me is weird, because I get scared of being boring. And all the media attention I've had with Debut has complicated things. I'm just repeating myself and I'd love it if I could talk about something else. If I was a scientist I could talk about diseases or something! That's why I mention David Attenborough a lot in my interviews, because he's always talking about animals, do you know what I mean? I mean I am very proud of the attention I've had as well. I've felt very honoured at times. And I can't imagine that someone wouldn't be if Italian Vogue offered to do 12 pages on them! But after a while you get the feeling that they're misunderstanding something, and they're expecting something you can't give, because it isn't in you. I think a lot of the attention I've had from the fashion press has been to do with being the right person at the right time. There was just a space in the English media that needed to be filled. Everybody has been into recycling and green issues, and I was wearing second-hand clothes, and making new things out of old things, which I've been doing for 15 years, so it was no accident. I've had a certain clothes sense since I was 12. It comes from a lack of good clothes shops in Iceland! I would go to second-hand shops because I always spent my money on records, and because it was more creative and a lot more fun than going to your average Miss Selfridge type place. When I was 13 or 14, I was wearing tiny little dresses with big boots, and I just thought it was funny. I've always liked to have a sense of humour in the way I dress, which is probably very anti-stylish, because being stylish is all about being very serious. I like to have fun with everything, it's not just clothes. It doesn't matter what it is, I like to do everything with passion, whether it's driving a car, or choosing a restaurant, or where to go on holiday. I think everybody knows what they like. There is definitely an element of escape involved. I want new things everyday, and I guess early on I decided to make an advantage of that. If you listen to all the records I've been on in Iceland, you can really hear it. One month I'm playing jazz with a lot of people, six months later I'm working completely alone with computers and synthesizers, and then I'm a vocalist in a band, and next I'm in charge. So it is about escape, but at the same time, if I look back, there is a certain continuity to it. I move on and I learn. This year I've learnt really fast, to face the responsibility of being the person who asks for things, because it's very easy to give. Ridiculous as it sounds, once you start taking and saying 'No I want that!' it becomes like a one-way street, you become a spoilt kid. But if you are the one who's giving all the time, you just automatically get things back. If you love somebody very much, you just feed off that somehow, but if you reverse that circulation you become a greedy bastard who's never fed. I know all these things sound very sickly and very housewifey, but I guess that's what I function on. But it's funny, this year I could definitely feel some macho vibes happening! I said all my life it doesn't matter if you're a girl or a boy. Fuck all that shit, it's just people making a big thing out of nothing at the end of the day! But I've definitely felt this year with being my own boss that certain things have been linked with men and it's not a coincidence. What really pisses me off is not being dealt with by people on an equal level. I'm a housewife from Iceland and I like to write and sing songs. You either like it or you don't. But it gets blurred and changed into something it's not, it pisses me off. Women are just not allowed to be characters. A man is allowed to be scruffy or a hunk or a Woody Allen or an Albert Einstein, and still be accepted as 100 percent man. But if a woman hasn't got a certain figure or doesn't make an effort to remain on a level which is considered feminine, she isn't in the game. If you had a woman who was the equivalent of Woody Allen, charming, brilliant and with her own personality, she'd be nowhere. That pisses me off more than being dismissed as an Eskimo or what-ever, because if I had to pick between the hunk and Woody Allen, I'd say I was more in the Woody Allen category! Still, with music you can express yourself and you can do so many things. I guess I'll stick with it, but I am terrified of plans. Plans are the biggest turn-off for me. The minute something is decided I just freak out! I like to live my life like the line in my song 'Big Time Sensuality' - 'I don't know my future after this weekend, And I don't want to!' Of course when you've got a kid and things going on, you have to make some plans, but when you ask me about the future, I would like to take it as it comes and see what happens. And that takes the most effort! Credentials Signed to: One Little Indian Records Managed by: Derek Birket Select past bands: Exodus Tappi Tikarrass Kukl Sugarcubes Select discography: Sugarcubes- Life's Too Good LP (1988) Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week LP (1989) Stick Around for Joy LP (1992) It's It LP (1992) Björk- Debut LP (1993 'Human Behaviour' single-various mixes available (1993) 'Big Time Sensuality' single-various mixes available (1993)