J’ai été élevée dans une famille nombreuse où avoir un enfant n’a jamais été un frein à quoi que ce soit. Alors, ça ne m’a pas fait peur et j’ai continué à faire ce que je faisais avant très naturellement.
I was able to make a record already at the age of eleven. It became a
hit, I became a child star and - hated it. The picture on the cover was
of me, but it didn’t feel like it was my album. All I did was to sing on
it and there was only one song I had written myself.
I felt horribly guilty. The papers wanted to do interviews with me, the
kids in school wanted to be friends with me and all of it felt horrible.
Then I was offered to do another album, but I said "fuck off" and
started a punk band with people my own age.
I had orange hair and everybody hated us, which was exactly what we
wanted.
In my head, as a kid I always had this romantic idea of me in a lighthouse with a pipe organ, being a composer, and kind of doing it all myself. I didn’t need any outside stimulus. Also, because I enjoyed being on my own so much, I never really understood the word ’loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature. Now it’s all about thousands of people, and I’m communicating with them full-on.
Going to my conservative family and being the really freaky hippie, with the long hair and barefoot, and I go back to my hippie people and say, ’listen, actually you’re supposed to sleep once a day, you’re supposed to eat bread’, and being really down-to-earth practical, conservative, being the little kid to say, ’listen, I want food now, mum ! Dinner, no, stop it, comb your hair, now’, sort of thing.
Björk : I went to music school for ten years, but I rebelled against it. I felt the school was too controlling, and I didn’t understand what a ten-year-old Icelandic girl had to do with all these three-hundred-year-old German guys. Quite a few times the schoolmaster called me to his office, where we would have these three-hour debates where we’d both cry, because I didn’t agree with the direction the school was taking. I thought we should talk more about this century, and more about composers that were closer to us. I ended up playing stuff by twentieth-century Finnish composers, for instance.
Juergen Teller : I think he’s excellent, Neil Young. So when you left school, did you sort of turn your back on all the classical stuff ?
Björk : Actually, back in the early days, I toured with a string octet, eight kids who’d gone to that same school in Iceland. Since I could have gone the classical path too, it was very interesting to work together. We toured for one-and-a-half years, and we’d get drunk in all the cities and have long, healthy debates about music. And luckily enough, We all had different points of view.
Juergen Teller : That sounds really good.
Björk : But afterwards, I basically ignored that side of me until 1996, When I made Homogenic. I decided I had to confront it. I also worked through a lot of craftsmanship issues by doing the soundtrack to Dancer In The Dark-all that orchestral stuff. I caught up with myself, but it took three albums.
Björk : It’s a different thing to marry in Iceland. We are not married in a church. You get more rights if you’re married. For me and Thor, it just took ten minutes. And then we could get money from the state to buy contact lenses for him. So it’s not very...
At nineteen, Björk discovered she was pregnant. She’d been with her poet boyfriend, Thor, for the best part of four years. It was a surprise. She was overjoyed. But then she talked to people, took their advice - "kind of being all brainy," she now says, emphasizing the last word as though there were no worse quality on earth than dry, unimpulsive reason - and scheduled an abortion. And then, on the morning of her appointment, she simply decided not to go.
I think it’s funny and actually I couldn’t be more pleased with the situation. When I was growing up, I always had this feeling that I had been dropped in from somewhere else. That was how I was treated at school in Iceland where the kids used to call me ’China girl’ and everybody thought I was unusual because I looked Chinese. It gave
me room to do my own thing. In school, I was mostly on my own, playing happily in my private world making things, composing little songs. If I can get the space I need to do my own thing by being called an alien, an elf, a China girl, or whatever, then that’s great ! I think I’ve only realised in the past few years what a comfortable situation that is.
I was born with the need to sing. Even worse ; I was one of those kids from that famous cliche : I could sing before I could talk.
Where I grew up, there lived 18,000 people. There was a main street and one big square. You only had to cross the street naked once and the people would remember for the rest of their lives.
It wasn’t as bohemian as it sounds. They all had proper jobs. There was never any unemployment in Iceland until about two years ago. My mother made furniture at one point but she also worked in an office doing Computers. My father was a full time blues musician. Everybody worked. Everybody got up early. In Iceland, even the hippies are workaholics.
The record label offered me all these songs and I turned them down because they were shit. I got very upset in the end so my mum ran around to her hippie musician mates and they all did songs for me. "The music was happy, light-hearted pop ; half bubblegum, half crazy. It was mostly adaptions of kids’ songs, as well as one I had written myself called ’Johannes Kjarval’.
Everyone at my school hated the record and they hated me. The musicians wanted me to make a second one but I didn’t want to. I wanted to be with kids my own age for a bit.
My mother had a strong father who was really sexist, who beat her down. Her solution was to give me all the freedom she couldn’t have. She let me do whatever I wanted - probably more so because I was a girl. It’s a classic, isn’t it ?
Did she ever wish her mother was like other mothers ?
Not in the practical sense, because if I wanted that I could go to my grannies. One granny used to put me in a chair and comb my hair, because it was down to here - she gestures to her waist - and it used to get, like, dreadlocks. Another granny, my stepfather’s mother, used to take my socks off and darn the holes. I was not very tidy because I just took care of myself.
My mum was like a kid. When I was three my relatives saw me look left and right and take her across the street. Don’t get me wrong. She is a lovable person, a gorgeous creature, she said, though while saying it she looked, and sounded, sad.
I admire her a lot for her freedom. The practical things, like having a meal ready, I don’t mind. Her not ironing my clothes or changing my sheet ? I don’t mind. But emotionally not being there ? I would be lying if I said that. It does *** me off. This
remoteness on her mother’s part seems to have been pretty far-reaching. When I asked her if Hildur behaved differently with Sindri, Björk replied, without a trace of irony : Definitely. They talk together.
I think, without wanting it, I’ve got a lot of my mum in me - very restless and searching. And I’ve got a lot of my dad in me, which is probably what I’m more proud of - powerful, energetic, organised, a sort of fighter for righteousness.
I am a typical example of valuing what my mother did to me, and how she did it, more and more as I got older. You seem to paint it all black when you’re 14, and then it grows lighter the older you get.
My mum is about to becone one of the first homoeopathic doctors in Iceland. A few years ago, she fell in love with the chief of a tribe of American Indians and she was living in tepees in the mountains of California. I still feel maternal towards her. I’m the one to tell her off.
My mother and father divorced when I was 1 and my dad started a quite conservative family and a home that was full of people because he had another wife and, like, three kids. And my mom just invited all these friends to live with her so I kept being the hippie amongst the conservatives or the conservative amongst the hippies. And I quite liked that, I was kinda the outsider always going "Hmmm, but why can’t we have one meal a day please ?" and "Why does everything have to be purple ?"
Going to my conservative family and being the really freaky hippie, with the long hair and barefoot, and I go back to my hippie people and say, ’listen, actually you’re supposed to sleep once a day, you’re supposed to eat bread’, and being really down-to-earth practical, conservative, being the little kid to say, ’listen, I want food now, mum ! Dinner, no, stop it, comb your hair, now’, sort of thing.
It wasn’t as bohemian as it sounds. They all had proper jobs. There was never any unemployment in Iceland until about two years ago. My mother made furniture at one point but she also worked in an office doing Computers. My father was a full time
blues musician. Everybody worked. Everybody got up early. In Iceland, even the hippies are workaholics.
They all had normal jobs but they all wanted to change the world. It was great for a kid. I knew who to go to if I needed kindness, who to go to for a laugh, who to go to if I wanted to hear a particular kind of music. It was very free. And there was a very warm vibe which kids intuitively pick up on. If I fancied eating bananas for two days, that was cool. One day I didn’t want to get out of bed so I cut a hole in my bedsheet, put it over my head and went to school like that.
My first memory is being in a kindergarten and I refused to be one of the kids, I was always helping the ladies out. I remember putting butter and rye bread out for the kids. That’s it really.
I liked paper a lot and different cardboards and I would tear them to pieces and whatever came out would be pictures and I would make little worlds.
And once, says Björk, she spent a whole day making one of these paper worlds, a huge, special paper world.
I’d fallen in love with this girl in school, I was six, and I took it to her. And I’d never talked to her before. She kind ot rolled it apart and it was just a lot ot torn pieces of paper with nothing written on them. I just suddeniy realised it wasn’t that brilliant, just rubbish really. She just laughed really hard and threw it in the dustbin. Björk laughs. It’s a sad story.
Björk liked being alone. She would walk around, sing, and play games. She would rehearse running down the middle of the street, a busy street with several intersections, with her eyes shut, and eventually she learned to run down it as fast as she could without looking, just relying on her other senses. It was such a kick. So much adrenaline. Then one day she ran into a lamppost. She still has a scar on her right palm.
I’ve been singing since I was a little kid. I used to sing walking to school, whether it was raining outside or snowing. In Iceland, you can sing at the top of your lungs, and no one can hear you. Most of my youth was a very euphoric experience, me walking and singing at the top of my lungs. I never thought I’d sing for other people. It was always my secret and my survival kit. I’ve been singing for many, many years, long before I sang for others. It wasn’t really until I was 27 that I sang for others. But singing outside on my own while walking was where my voice developed. It’s very acoustic on its own, without microphones.
I left home when I was 14 because I got the feeling that time was running out, that there were all these things happening out there and I was missing them. You decide that you want to rent a flat and cook really bad meals. I had to come home a year later when I was broke.
Je ne comprends pas cette obsession permanente du passé. J’ai eu de sérieuses prises de bec avec le directeur, mais en même temps, je suis celle qui a fréquenté cette école le plus longtemps. Nous avions une relation passionnelle d’amour-haine. J’avais envie de faire des choses neuves, pas de copier ce qui avait déjà été fait.
I left home first, actually, at 14. I got the feeling that time was running out, and there were all these exciting things happening out there, and you’re missing them. You wanted to rent a flat and cook really bad meals, that sort of thing. I came back a year later when I was broke.
Money just saves time. It means I can do more of the things I love to do and less of the things I hate to do. All my family are very hard working people. They’re electricians, carpenters, bricklayers. My mother always worked. Now, that I have some money, she doesn’t have to work but she does. She’s actually studying homeopathy, making her lifelong dream come true alter all these years. We don’t have the class system in Iceland but we were a working class type of family. Our money came from work. That’s what I’m used to, work.
If I didn’t have a job or any money tomorrow morning, I’d go down to the market and sell junk or whatever. Self-sufficiency. I make fun of because it’s pathetic being such a workaholic but it’s what I was brought up with. You have to learn how to manage. And if you have, you can manage. But it doesn’t mean that you stop working or that you change as a person. Not for Icelandic people.
J’avais le droit de faire tout ce que je voulais. Il n’y avait aucune restriction ni aucune discipline. Je me suis donc élevée toute seule. Ma mère avait toujours l’air de planer. Elle ne se droguait pas, non, mais elle était du genre à peindre des nuages au plafond ou à courir dehors toute nue à l’heure du dîner. Mais l’avantage de vivre dans un petit village, c’est que tout le monde est un peu de la famille et que j’avais donc des dizaines de gens qui s’occupaient de moi, me faisaient à manger et me grondaient aussi quand c’était nécessaire.
When I was younger I used to play with the cat a lot - I would teach it how to fly. Because, you see, he used to watch all the birds flying about and I could tell he wanted to fly and chill with the birds. I wasn’t very successful though.
For the first five years I toured with my kid. That was brilliant, because we were just looking for waterslide parks. I became an expert on those things... where to find nappies in various cities around the world ! I could write a book on where to find second-hand baby clothes.
Je fais ce métier depuis que je suis toute jeune et j’ai appris à ne pas mélanger ma vie privée et ma vie publique. Cela ne veut pas dire que tout ce que je raconte pendant les interviews est faux, mais ce ne serait pas honnête si je vous disais que je vais vous raconter des choses dont je ne parle qu’à mes proches.
When you’re 11, you’re not listening to Sesame Street any more. I wanted to write music about walking down the street, having visits, laughing, having a swim, the things you do every day.
I’ve always been a bit soft on scientists and men who can work miracles with their brains. And, oh yeah, my grandmother. She’s sixty-eight and she goes camping and paints and just lives life large. I want to be like her. I’m in a situation now that I’ll probably never be in again, I can go into a studio and I don’t have to worry about the bill. I bought myself a computer the other day that I can draw pictures on to siut the music. I don’t have to fight so hard for things now but I might again. And, when I do I pray that I’ll be as self-sufficient as my grandmother.
