Bjrk has made the journey from Icelandic child star to globally famous techno- chanteuse, haunted by an obsessed fan. She spoke to Lindsay Baker about her new album
When Bjrk Gudmundsdottir wanted a break from her job in the local fish factory, she’d go camping. She’d hitchhike alone to the stark lava fields in the uninhabited centre of her native Iceland and, with the Northern Lights rippling across the sky above her, sing to herself at the top of her voice. Years later, in London, she tried it a couple of times late at night on Hampstead Heath. People thought she was bonkers.
They still do. It’s the most famous thing about her, that barmy, shrieking eccentricity. And the Bangkok-airport incident last year – when she went “Bjrking mad” and beat up a TV reporter – certainly did no harm to her crazy-woman credentials.
But then, Bjrk does hail from Viking territory. Iceland is an extreme place if ever there was one: at the very top of the world, just below the Arctic Circle, the country consists of vast expanses of cracking, seething, freezing, shifting land; volcanoes, earthquakes, glaciers, geysers, the Aurora Borealis. At certain times of year, there is sunshine at midnight, darkness at noon. Nordic mythology still fuels the collective psyche of the island’s affluent inhabitants, as does vodka; rotting shark pickled in sour milk is a favourite Icelandic dish. Bjrk’s job in the factory was to pluck worms from the fish with tweezers.
The singer is something of a national treasure in her homeland, not surprisingly. The sound she created was unique, and the success of her two solo albums, Debut and Post, and her numerous, exuberant hit singles – Human Behaviour, Violently Happy, Big Time Sensuality and It’s Oh So Quiet – has turned this singular, diminutive Icelander into an international star, dubbed the “Madonna of the Nineties”.
It’s not been all plain sailing. This Icelandic ingnue has been lampooned – mercilessly and hilariously – most notably by both Dawn French and Spitting Image, which showed her screeching along to fax machines (she took it as a compliment). But then, Bjrk is an easy target: her singing style is idiosyncratic, to say the least, and when she skips around with that trademark wide-eyed exuberance of hers, there is something of the Teletubby about her.
So it comes as something of a disappointment that, when Bjrk arrives at the Reykjavik hotel restaurant where we have arranged to meet, she doesn’t skip into the room – although she does look about 12. Nor does she seem to be about to punch anybody.
The Bangkok ruck, she says, was just one incident in a turbulent year, during which the tabloids provided a running commentary on her private life, including a traumatic split from boyfriend Goldie. And then, in September 1996, a potentially lethal letter bomb was sent by an obsessed American fan to her west London home. After sending the device, Ricardo Lopez filmed himself on video as he blew his brains out with a pistol. American police warned the authorities, and the bomb was intercepted on its arrival in England.
The bomb changed things. “I was very upset that somebody had died. I couldn’t sleep for a week,” says the singer, taking a sip of coffee, her dark eyebrows knitting together into a frown. “And oi’d be lying if I said it didn’t scare the fuck ou’ of me,” she adds in an outlandish accent that oscillates wildly between Icelandic and cockney. “That I could get hurt and, most of all, that my son could get hurt.”
Two days after the incident, she went to southern Spain and – apart from Christmas in Iceland – remained there for six months. It was at a residential studio in El Madronal that she recorded her new album, Homogenic, her third. This time, without the glossy production style of Nellee Hooper, who had collaborated on both her previous solo albums, Debut and Post, before going on to produce Madonna’s latest album, the sound is more direct. “It’s just tunes from now, from a similar place. It’s kind of like a 31-year-old female – like me.”
Homogenic is a wayward, sombre album. A couple of the tracks are so submerged in sci-fi digital beats that they hard to listen to, but overall the album is captivating, a mesmeric collection of classic, modern torch songs.
The arrangements are complex, with luscious orchestral sweeps. And then there’s that voice. It’s clear as a bell, by turns growling and soaring, choir-boy pure, primal and sensual. And those strange, at time indecipherable, lyrics.
Bjrk’s parents divorced in 1967, when she was two. She was brought up by her mother Hildur Run Hauksdottir (a martial arts instructor) and stepfather Saevar Arnason, who played guitar in a Hendrix-influenced band. Bjrk saw her father, Buomunder Gunnarson, who lived nearby, frequently. When she was five, her parents decided to send their daughter to a local music school, which she attended for 10 years, studying piano and flute. Some of the other kids in the village teased her because of her musical talent and exotic looks – they said she looked Chinese or Inuit. She was a A-grade student. At one point, she wanted to be an astronomer.
When Bjrk was 11, TV documentary-makers visited the school. Icelanders fell in love with her performance of the Tina Charles pop hit I Love To Love, and within a few weeks she had a record deal. Her debut album was mostly covers of traditional folk songs, with one Bjrk original – the instrumental track Johannes Kjaval, a tribute to the Icelandic painter. For the rest of her childhood, encouraged by her mother, she was the Icelandic equivalent of Lena Zavaroni.
But with the arrival of punk in the late Seventies, Bjrk rebelled against her hippy parents and formed a series of short-lived punk bands, working in the fish-canning factory to support herself.
She met Thor Eldon when she was 16, and they married a couple of years later. At 20, and seven months pregnant, she went with Kukl to support hardcore industrial band Einstrzende Neubauten in “some dodgy German clubs”. But back in her homeland, she had her detractors, and there was an outcry after she performed on national TV with her bare, seven-months-pregnant tummy protruding – it was shocking enough to give one old lady a heart attack.
In 1986, she joined a new band, The Sugarcubes (among the members was her former husband), with whom she made five albums before they split in 1992. The band’s peculiar brand of surreal pop got them noticed in Britain, at the same time as Bjrk was becoming increasingly interested in the British dance music scene. A year after the split, she released her first international solo album, Debut. It was a breakthrough for her, selling more than half a million copies worldwide and spawning four top-20 hits.
Iceland is still home. And she’s not kidding when she says she’s proud of her country. An inquiry about what, if any, religion she was brought up with sets her off. “I get upset when people talk about religion and churches because I think it’s full of manipulation and cruelty.” Iceland is “quite a funny one”, she says, “because it’s – I can never say it in English -aye- theist, you know, godless”. Officially, it’s Protestant.
She recalls her solitary teenage camping trips. It was how she learned to sing. She started doing the same thing in Spain when she was writing songs for the new album – wander off alone to the hills for a couple of hours. She took the same route every night. “I remembered what I was made of. It’s to do with your relationship with yourself. Certain people have diaries, certain people get drunk once a week.” What seems like weirdo behaviour to some is, for her, a basic, primal necessity. Singing at the top of her voice in the middle of a deserted lava field or on a Spanish hilltop is “as necessary as going to the toilet or sleeping or having sex. It’s one of those basic primitive physical functions.”
After the freneticism of the past few years, and the “crash” that followed, it’s not surprising that she felt the need to calm down and focus herself. There’s a particularly heart-wrenching song on the new album called So Broken that is stripped down to the bare bones of a flamenco guitar and an extraordinary vocal performance, with the haunting refrain “My heart is so broken”. It is so full of pain that you’d imagine its creator to be much more troubled and unhappy than Bjrk actually seems to be. And the hymn-like finale to Homogenic, All is Full of Love, implies that she has reached some kind of resolution. Perhaps by writing and singing about her demons, she is able to exorcise them. It must be her way of packing up her troubles, so that she can be that happy, pixie-like Bjrk again.
But she’s under no illusion that she can have total control of her life. Things are far more complicated than that. “Thank God. You can’t just buy a Filofax and write it all out, because life’s gonna surprise you like a motherfucker every day for the rest of your life, and we’ve got 50 years to go.”
She still has an apartment in Reykjavik – a former blacksmith’s shop overlooking the whaling boats in the harbour – and hopes to be spending a lot more time here. “A lot of people think I’m bonkers, but I’m more conservative than anything you can imagine, like an old bottle of whisky. I’m so much of a patriotic Icelander that I could get arrested for it. It’s just the oxygen here. I know how to walk the streets. It’s just me. I’m made of this.”
BLURB: Her new album is ‘just tunes from now, from a similar place. It’s kind of like a 31-year-old female – like me’