There are lots of misconceptions about my music. People always want to classify what you do. I feel what I’m doing now is a natural continuation of what I’ve been doing in Iceland for the last 10 years. So I would rather everyone just think of this music as "Björk music".
I make Björk music, and Björk music is very flexible, very intense and very rich, but also very whimsical and always changing. I get bored very easily, I think... Yes, I think that is the reason why I do what I do : I get bored very easily.
Je ne me considère toujours pas comme le patron. Je suis seulement celle qui possède la carte et le sextant. Je sais où l’on va et mon but, en tant que navigatrice, c’est d’expliquer le voyage à chacun. On enregistre avec moi, on suit mon itinéraire.
Les disques qui m’ont le plus bouleversée dans ma vie ont toujours été têtus, ne reflétant qu’un seul et unique point de vue. J’aime cette clarté. Mais pour ça, il me fallait apprendre. Et j’apprends lentement, marche par marche. Prudemment, j’ai grimpé l’échelle. D’abord en apprenant à chanter, puis à écrire les paroles, puis à jouer des claviers, puis à arranger les cordes... La seule difficulté est mentale : me convaincre que j’ai le droit à l’égoïsme. Un jour, j’ai eu le courage de dire " Vous avez tort et j’ai raison". C’est dur pour une fille qui, comme moi, est le bébé du punk. Diriger les gens n’est pas dans ma nature. Mais il faut que je m’habitue au fait que c’est ma musique et que je la connais mieux que tout le monde. Ce n’est pas du génie, juste de l’instinct.
La musique était très joyeuse, une pop gentillette. À la fois « bubble gum » et « fofolle ». Il s’agit plutôt de chansons pour enfants, mais aussi d’un titre que j’ai écrit moi-même.
I would be very happy if I could make my music in the same sense as a biologist doing research. Scientists, whatever, or inventors. Something. Probably my favourite people. Not having to explain it because it’s like ridiculous, really.
Because in a way, there’s nothing more to it than the music. That’s where all the magic is and the messages, and all the creation.
It’s always difficult to gather together songs that make a complete whole when you’re doing an album. I think in the end you don’t always pick the best songs, but you pick songs that complete the jigsaw puzzle.
I just love doing music with people ; it’s the biggest kick ever. But what I need is patience to make the song finish in my head because now in my head I’ve got a lyric, a string arrangement, a bass line, the sounds, what instruments I want to use, I’ve got the rhythm, but if I would have met a person that I would have musically fallen in love with, say, in June, that probably meant that I would have only written the melody and the bass line by then, so he would have written the rest. But if I wait, I end up finishing the song myself.
It irritates me when people try to separate the two : dance music has to be brainless and simple while, ’serious’ pop music has to be difficult and lyrically oriented. I’ve always felt, even before I made my own music, that everything should be possible, all combinations. I want to be everything at once : clever, dumb, angry, sweet, ancient and childish, naive, experienced happy and melancholic.
BJÖRK : Drugs ? What are you talking about ? (Laughter)
POLLY : You mean drugs as a tool to help write ? Only really alcohol and then not much.
BJÖRK : I sing best without anything. I know this sounds really hippy, but being on top of a mountain in the middle of the day would be best for me. But to be able to socialise with all these people, because I’m quite an introverted sort of person, I’ll have a cognac before I go on stage. But even that’s more of a ritual than anything. And maybe a bottle of wine afterwards to chill down.
I’m very hard on myself. The film was probably one of the biggest things for me to get over. Then again, with every album I walk away from there’s always a moment where I think, ’Shit, I could have done that better.’ And then the trick, of course, is to use that as fuel to do another thing. Through the years you learn to use the disappointment as drive for the next project.
I guess I have days where I think I’m pretty pleased with the amount of work I’ve done, and then there are days when I go Fucking hell, I’m never going to get it together before I die. I’ve just got 50 years. Fucking hell. You lazy slag, you know. Sort it out.
My role has always been pop and, I guess, to be some sort of translator. To introduce common people to the things they hadn’t heard before, some sort of David Attenborough of music. I show them the spiders they never knew were living underneath rocks. My mission in life, in a way, is to introduce mysteries to people.
The cliché is true, that the older you get the more abstract time becomes. When you see those films with time travelling, something that happened 50 years ago feels like 5 minutes ago. It’s very sort of abstract. It’s like pockets. I mean, my relationship to music actually hasn’t changed that much, it’s pretty similar. and I would think overall, when I made Homogenic . I had just been a lot, in a city and I basically escaped, to the mountain in Spain and we recorded an album full of homesickness to Iceland. And that doesn’t sound too different to what I’m doing now.
At the moment I have this new album inside me, which is somehow more vulnerable then the others that came before it. Vespertine is a lot more emotionally brave and fragile, and I want to make sure that the pictures are like that too.
The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it’s very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music.
Most people’s eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they’ll understand the music. So instead of having to listen to my album ten times, they’ll get it the first time.
I’m very much a person who has intimate musical relationships with people and they are almost like love affairs, you see. But I’m very loyal. So me and Nellee got through half the album and then we just stopped turning each other on. We remained friends, but we would just kind of know each other’s taste too much for it to be a surprise.
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.
Lyrics add something to a song. Otherwise, I might just as well sing ’babba dabba doo’. But the lyrics are mostly just describing the atmosphere, translating it into words.
Emotionally, I should have just a few musicians and invite one listener at the time into the room because it’s so personal.
When I’m playing small rooms for 200 people, it’s actually very liberating, because that’s how I learned to sing. I used to walk around to school, back as a child, and I would sing at the top of my lungs. In venues with 3,000 people, I did try to sing acoustically, but it wasn’t even brave. It was foolhardy. It’s just not possible.
It’s such a contradiction in a way, to have an orchestra and a choir. Because you’ve got 74 musicians and 3,000 people watching you. And we’re trying to create a one-on-one situation.
I think a lot of pop music is written in reference to other pop music, which is ridiculous. You have to write pop music about real life, so I keep trying to change old songs and old styles to get more real-life things, so that it comes out almost like film music.
I had a lot of music in my head when I was a kid and this is the closest I’ve got to making it. To be making that music now is literally a dream come true. But I still think I’ve got very far to go. It helps to come from a country where the older you get the more mature you are - in England and the States, it seems the closer you are to being 20 in a sports car with the roof open the better it is, and anything away from that is downhill. My grandmother is still painting : it’s just between her and herself but she’s still moving closer to the target, and that is how I want to be when I’m her age.
I want music to be more real. More what your day is like. Music has to be more like a film. I love listening to film soundtracks because they capture lots of different moods. It allows human feelings to exist, the music allows you to be a bit unpredictable whereas pop music today is so clinical and sterile. There’s so much bad pop music around that people don’t believe in magic any more.
I’m just a music nerd. I would love to be in a Thai punk band and do a string album in Mexico City and run a discotheque in Kenya and I just don’t have time to do all those things.
If I do a song, people have to listen to it 10 times to grasp it ; but if they have an image to go along with it, they only have to listen to it a couple of times.
I’m not an artist or a poet. A poet is someone who can create something with words that can stand on their own on paper, that become a world of their own you can enter. My words are very dependent on their music. I try to make the music into a world in its own right. But really, beyond that, I haven’t got a lot to say
I think if there is a place to reveal yourself then it’s in the songs. It’s not like you decide, OK, I’m going to reveal myself. It’s just a certain need. You’re just focusing on the things you’re talking about and not necessarily yourself. I compare what I do to sleeping, because most journalists seem to get that pretty easily. There’s no way you can decide what position you’re going to be in when you wake up in the morning. You just roll around the bed and it happens. And if you don’t do it for a week, you go mad.
I’ve always been very anti-style. Music has got nothing to do with style, it’s a question of sincerity. So I wanted to make it irrelevant what style was used. It’s just like a jumper and a pair of trousers. When you meet a person, you try to find out what the person is about. What she’s wearing doesn’t matter. The songs were what mattered, and they could have anything they wanted. It didn’t matter if they needed a 20-piece brass orchestra from Bombay, or a trombone player from Kent. Journalists see all these different styles as a statement, but why I was doing it was to make that invisible, to make the songs more visible.
It’s a shame elevator music has got that title. It’s lost evervone’s respect. You should have music for Interviews, music for train rides. Music doesn’t have to want all your attention, not at all. I think music is even stronger when it’s unconscious.
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 never used to believe in words, and at first I didn’t sing in words, it was just noises and sounds. I used to be in an experimental band with my best friend when I was 15. She played the popcorn machine and miked it up, and I played the drums to it. We weren’t even trying to be funny. And my friend organised to record my grandfather snoring, and that was supposed to be our loop, our rhythm [she snores theatrically] to do a song to.
