The matter of a proposed forthcoming album of remixes of Debut is causing some friction between the singer and her record company. The record company calls it Björk’s Affairs. Björk currently prefers to call it All The Remixes From The Same Album For Those People Who Are Not Into White Labels.
I don’t really want to put them out. We did a lot of remixes because I like it, there’s a lot of remixers I really respect. I like different points of view, I love the thrill of being in control of one song and then giving it to someone else to get their view of it. But I don’t really want to put it out, not yet. It’s a bit early - maybe next year.
Often it’s the sound that grabs you, but an album ends up on the shelf with something’s missing. I think what we’ve been talking about comes out strongly in your lyrics. Like "new damn, new times", "no way back ", to quote some of the lyrics on this album. The moment decides. Future romanticism, when pop songs bring out our possibilities in the image of modern life. Wasn’t the image in this music the image of modern life that was current then ?
I think the generation of hippies I know thought everything modern was a bad thing that we were all on the road to destruction. Nothing ahead but pollution, nuclear power stations and capitalism. It’s interesting to listen to it as a child and teenager, but it turns out to be just too pessimistic. I experienced that again to some extent with the group I was working in Iceland, who were a bit older than me and often not particularly fond of modern age and preferred listening to Julio Iglesias. When I was young I felt I was more of a listener. Like everything, it’s a question of attitude. The conclusion may be that my generation’s grown tired of all this modern pessimism.
When I did "Debut" I thought, ’OK, I’ve pleased enough people, I’m gonna get really selfish.’ And I never sold as many records as with "Debut". So, I don’t know, it seems the more selfish I am, the more generous I am. I m not going to pretend I know the formula. I can only please myself.
A lot of my songs - including ’Big Time Sensuality’ - are about my friends, not my lovers. It’s not erotic or sensual even if it may sound like that. As you know, you create pretty deep, full-on love relationships with friends.
A lot of it is also about myself. I can be a coward a lot of the time and there comes a moment when I write a song when I get quite brave. It’s a lot about me dealing with myself rather than attacking other people. Would I like to know the future ? No.
There’s a side to me that likes to plan a little bit ahead and there’s a side that just needs to be free. I’ve got problems with booking airline tickets - I always change them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just for me to feel free. To kind of not be nailed in is really important to me.
come to me was written to 2 friends of mine that
i felt like protecting .….. so i wanted the song to feel
like a velvet blanket wrapped around them.
talvin singh took this song and venus as a boy
to bombay and was a musical director at a recording
of a string arrangment by sureh sathe
we were doing all this very low budget
so we couldnt afford to go ourselves
talvin returned with a dat cassette
and our minds were absolutely blown !
In many ways, Debut was still much in the sign of conflicts. Conflicts with myself and with the outside world. I was wondering whether I had the right to fill an album with nothing but my own songs. Could I be so selfish ? And did I have the right to tell others what to do ? I didn’t think so. That was a little bit my problem : I really wanted to work with other people, but I didn’t want to dominate them. I wanted those people to surprise and stimulate ME. If I knew exactly what they were going to do, I was no longer interested. I had to get something in return.
In a interview at the Southbank show you talked about the atmosphere surrounding ‘Debut’ concert group, that it was “immigrants united“. The question is, did you regard yourself as an immigrant with the people from the Third World who live in London, or did you find your way into the community of people from different cultural backgrounds ? Brian Eno once talked about a new dimension in Western music, what he called the fourth world music. Were you experiencing this fusion of different cultural worlds too ? With the Unplugged session and working with people from different cultural backgrounds ?
I think so. Again I must say after a musical upbringing in Iceland and a certain paranoia about foreign influences, which in fact I really think is a good thing and am very grateful for. I wasn’t working with people from different backgrounds because it was so exotic, but because it’s the reality of London. It’s just as much the reality in Japan today that you don’t find everyone playing shakuhachi as it is with the ‘langspil’ (a traditional kind of zither) in Iceland. But you go to an Indian restaurant and you hear Indian music, especially when you live in London. There were always Indian films on television when I went to Britain, those musicals. That was the reality. It was an attempt to tackle reality. To glorify it.
At that time I was difficult to define what was Icelandic music. I’m still trying to solve that puzzle. Being very Icelandic but at the same time cosmopolitan, was that possible ? As a child I was always told that these were opposites. You had to be either Icelandic or cosmopolitan. Spending a lot of time with people like Talvin, Leila, Goldie and Tricky was a very special experience. People who were all immigrants but simply lacked an identity.
Were these people you named second-generation immigrants who had been brought up in Britain or had they gone there as children ?
It depended. Leila moved to Britain when she was 10.Talvin was born in England but went to Indian a lot. Tricky and Goldie were born in Britain, of British and Jamaican parents. A lot of the music that was happening around me at that time was drum’n’bass and Indian techno. I was left along because I was an Icelander. As black, Indian or Iranian Britons they got hassled on a daily basis. They weren’t English, they were Indian or Jamaican. They weren’t anything. This stirred up a lot of anger and a sense of being second-class citizens .But it also stirred up a certain musical culture. I experienced this world when drum’n’bass and Indian techno were born. Music was a kind of passport for them. We don’t come from where our roots lie, we don’t come from where we live, our world is a third one a mixture of those two .But the characteristics are always embedded in the roots. There’s always a cool primal energy in a new movement, when people really have to fight for their right to exist and every statement has a deep meaning, They were blazing a trail, doing something that had never been done before. Their parents didn’t agree with them, society didn’t agree with them. They were a symbol of new times which contained basic elements of both but weren’t either. I didn’t think about this much at precisely that time but I think it influenced me a lot. Being Icelandic with different baggage from those people led me to ask ; what is Icelandic music ? Can I just be a girl who grew up in Reykjavik and be proud of it ? But still use the drum machine and have something to say in the musical capital of the world today, without making me feel the yokel deep down inside me, the fish factories and dried fish ? It was also a kind of attempt to make a passport for myself, a statement that didn’t want to be locked up in either box, I wanted people to take me for what I was.
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.
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.
"Debut" turned out to be the private party everyone wanted an invitation to, and in the eight months after its release, almost half a million copies have been sold worldwide. Much to Björk’s embarrassment.
It’s as if you started cooking at this restaurant and everybody heard about it and started coming, she says, shifting in her seat. But you’d still only learned how to fry eggs. You’re doing your best and everyone’s happy, but it’s not exactly what you wanted to do with your life.
"Debut" was very much for me like a virgin trying to express herself, I mean a virgin musically. And that’s why I named it "Debut". And people who knew I had been around for many years just thought I was taking a piss or something. But for me it was very much like the songs I had kept in darkness and locked in my little diary, only to be seen by myself. The first time they were out on there own and had to figure out how to survive their own way.
I get the feeling you were very happy, free then - exciting times with new adventures every day. I think ’Debut’ gives the impression that life was fun ?
It was of course. I’d been the youngest person in the group for a long time. It was time to let yourslef go. It was like when you’ve been holding back some pressure for a long time and it bursts its way up to the surface. I’m not criticising the people I worked with. It was kind of metamorphosis that took place.
People often ask me if I know why I only became really famous after I traded the Sugarcubes for a solo career. But I don’t really understand that myself. Even though I do have a suspicion. There’s a strange kind of law that says : the more selfish you do something, the stronger the result will eventually be. I started on Debut with that idea. I made that record from a completely egoistic point of view : I was only pleasing myself and making a record I would buy. Because if I’d concentrated on other peoiple’s tastes and on the question whether other people would appreciate what I did, a sort of compromise-album would have emerged. And you can hear something like that right away : an album like that just radiates insecurity and doubt. Because of that too, a lot of people thought that Debut was a very string, very powerful album, I think. But you know, maybe Post is another story and nobody likes it.
It all starts with a concept, regardless of wheter it’s a song or a concert or a concept for an album or a concert tour ? What’s the basic concept behind ’Debut’ ? If you look at the process from start to finish. Was it difficult to preserve that essence when you started working on ’Debut’ ? You were in the Sugarcubes , then comes a period when you’re doing your own experiments that later led to ’Debut’ ?.
I’d been working in groups for ten years where everyone was equal and no one told anyone else what to do, musically speaking. That was when we were doing the third Sugarcubes album. Although I’d always been romantic about the group, I felt the time had come to do my own material. At that time I could feel I was starting to repress certain musical ideas and how to make music in general. The atmosphere was more doing your own thing. Maybe more like doing something because you went out to a record shop and couldn’t find anything you fancied.
To leave Iceland was a very big decision for me. Pride. Mission. To London. I became an Icelandic immigrant in England. Conscious. Decision. When I started the audition for my band, I found myself after watching many hundreds of people play, with a group of immigrants. Iran, India, Turkey, Saint Kitts. And all these people were very proud of where they come from. Obsessed. The youth. Dance culture.
When I do my album, it was very much a collection of the songs I’ve written in private, for the last 10 years, like pure. So when I start to organize, to play the songs live, I knew straight ahead that it has to be something completely different. Solid. Position. Trust eachother.
I knew immediately that the people I had to find - first I thought about fifteen - had to be musically from all sorts of different directions. It took a while for all these people to melt together because they were almost puritanist in what music they like. Working 24 hours, spontaneous, together, and for us to come from such different culture and from such different musical style too, it was very fascinating.
When I wrote the album I didn’t think of doing it live. But the two ways of doing it were just having tapes and DATs and sequencers and just me, or doing it live and consciously trying to create a new sound. I kind of went for that.
I think one of the reasons my album is the way I wanted it to be is because I could do it in my own corner without anyone poking at me and Derek let me do anything I wanted. I’m probably not going to get the same peace next time around unless I do it totally on my own and don’t let anybody hear it for a year. So that will change me into more of an eccentric than I am already.
Well I don’t believe in astrology, but if it works, it was probably written in my map that ’93 was going to be a good year. The whole thing has been so effortless for me. At the same time, I realise that it was something I’ve been preparing for unconsciously for ten years, so it’s not just come out like that. But it’s been ten times better than I ever thought.
The first show was a rehearsal and it was 10 per cent. And it’s gone so obviously like 20 per cent, 30 per cent...The show in Manchester I’m really proud of, and in many ways it was better than the record. I’ve always been a big fan of live things. Then again, I’m a big fan of synthesizers.
My record company warned me. They felt Debut was so weird it would only sell a third of what Sugarcubes sold. At the time it was the only album I could have made. Probably the same story with all my other albums as well...
the melody of this song i wrote while i was in the sugarcubes
it was called ’"marsinn minn" and never kinda got completed
i saved that melody though, and when i wrote the lyrics few
years later, i felt the melody had found a match
the words are about humans from a child’ s point of view
grownups mostly
this is why i asked michel gondry to make a video from the
point of view of the animals
all wet and furry
’Human Behaviour’ is an animal’s point of view on humans.
And the animals are definitely supposed to win in the end.
So why, one might ask, is the conquering bear presented as a man-made toy ?
I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t think it would be fair to force an animal to act in a video. I mean, that would be an extension of what I’m against.
...
I told him (Michel gondry), ’I want a bear and textures like handmade wood and leaves and earth, and I want it to seem like animation.’ Then I backed out.
After the Sugarcubes, I guess I had a mixture of liberation and fear. It had been obvious for a while in the band that I had different tastes than the rest. That’s fair enough - there’s no such thing as correct taste. I wrote the melody for ’Human Behaviour’ as a kid. A lot of the melodies on Debut I wrote as a teenager and put aside because I was in punk bands and they weren’t punk. The lyric is almost like a child’s point of view and the video that I did with Michel Gondry was based on childhood memories. Have I worked out human behaviour ? I guess not.
I was more influenced by ambient music than what you’d call dance music, and by things that were happening way back in Chicago and Detroit that were sensual and daring and groundbreaking in their time. Ninety-five percent of the dance music you hear today is crap. It’s only that experimental five percent that I’m into - the records that get played in clubs after 7 o’clock in the morning, when the DJs are playing stuff for themselves, rather than trying to please people.
A lot of the songs on my record have dance beats, but I think they’re beats that are more reflective of daily life - like life in the middle of the day in a city, as opposed to the night life of the clubs
I think that the real modern beats are made of machines and cars and elevators and roadwork and people shouting and dogs barking. That’s what daily life sounds like, when you close your eyes and listen.
Jean Baptiste Mondino à propos de la couverture de Debut
La première impression que j’ai eue d’elle et qui dure, c’est qu’elle est un mélange de maturité et d’enfantin (…). Mon travail avec Björk n’avait rien à voir avec les représentations esthétiques que j’avais eues jusque-là, quand je portais à l’écran ou en photo des femmes chez qui, souvent, la sexualité dominait. (...) Certaines ont l’impudeur de se déshabiller, de se mettre à poil, de faire des choses provocantes, elle a l’impudeur et la provocation de nous montrer quelque chose d’intime mais autre.
Was the atmosphere in London a strong influence on you at that time ?
I’d been in a band for so long in Iceland where everything was genuine, all programmed music was bad and clubs meant something cheap.Throwing myself into this was a way of letting off steam. Moving to the big city and meeting all those people, that was breaking taboos. It was a very extroverted period. I don’t think I’ve ever socialised so much.
At that time you were looking in new directions. Looking around to work with new people. You talked about "brass arrangements" on your new songs. And you were experimenting with electronic music ?
When I made ’Debut’ I think the ideas had been gathering for a long time without me necessarily thinking about a solo album. Hundreds of ideas in my pocket that couldn’t find an outlet with the band. Then it was a bit clumsy at putting things into pratice, at that time anyway. I started with those "brass concepts". I met Graham Massey and of course I was working flat out on concepts that didn’t come to the surface until the later albums. I just managed to touch on what I had in mind, or I thought so anyway. That was my experience of ’Debut’. Meeting Nellee Hooper went a bit against the grain there. It wasn’t planned. I met loads of people at that time, met Nellee and went clubbing a lot. At the clubs we often ended up discussing music and more than not we had totally different ideas. So in the end we decided to do one song together and then we did another. We did one song at a time, and in the end I asked him if he wanted to do the whole album with me. I was in the position that this was the strongest musical relationship I was in at that time. The good thing about it was realising how totally crazy it was for us to work together. When we met, I’d just left the band, he’d been working with Soul II Soul, a trendy band with black influences. I came from a completely different direction and my ideas were totally different. I think that was why we could blend together.
"Debut" was all the songs I wrote during ten years in my house on Iceland after my son had gone to bed. They were very intimate, like little experiments. It was like a diary, something that kept you sane rather than you’d want to tell the whole world about it.
You know what the greatest merit of Debut’s success was ? The money it made me. So I could travel all the way to the Compass Point Studios on the Bahamas for Post and I could finally sing like I learned when I was just a little girl. I took a microphone and walked onto the beach and stood with my feet in the ocean in the middle of the night. That’s were I sang most vocals.
It’s a bit of a nostalgic album because all of the songs were written in the past. It’s like a photo album of what I’ve been thinking over the ten years before I recorded it. Sometimes you’re learning and sometimes you’ve learnt enough so that you can use it, which is what happened here. I became a grown-up. Well, not a grown-up, but I was in charge. It was a lot easier than being in The Sugarcubes. It was a very simple relationship between me and my songs.
When I made Debut , I kept saying to people, ’Please don’t get overexcited. I can do a lot better’. People thought I was being like a pretentious uncle, but I wasn’t at all, I really meant it.
When I made this album, I wanted to do a private little album full of all my eccentricities, without trying to please anyone. Kind of like sneaking into my room, like I said before, and doing all my little things - the things you do in your house when you’re on your own. Having a long bath and singing silly songs in the bathtub and eating grapes, you know ?
When I met David Arnold he’d already written the score - like a three minute greatest hits of what’s in the film - and Jah Wobble had written the bass part. My role was basically to write a melody and a lyric that would make it into a pop song.
Björk persuaded the director to write a whole page comprising phrases that represented the emotions of the characters in the film.
At the end of the day I only used the title and one line : "Sometimes, it’s just like sinking." For the rest, I used my words, because I could see what point of view I was supposed to be singing from. It was very difficult for me because at that time I was very happy and all the lyrics I’ve done lately have been happy and hilarious. To do something so painful I had to get help from Danny.
I’d just written Debut when I was asked to do this song for ’The Young Americans’. I watched the film and wrote ’Play Dead’ based on the main character. It was actually fun because the character in the film was suffering and going through hardcore tough times and at the time I was at my happiest. It was quite liberating to sit down after writing a whole album to write from someone else’s point of view.
The particular character was pretty fucked up, you know. In the film, he had a girlfriend who just wanted him to be happy and in love and he just couldn’t get his head ’round it. It was just me trying to imagine what he would say to her. Things he never actually said to her in the film but things he would have said to her.
It was all right the first six months ; seven months was a bit tricky ; eight months was when I started hitting people. I’ve been telling this hideously pathetic, stupid joke that the Bible in England is different. God created the world in one day and then he talked about it for eight days.
When I started doing these recordings, I did it all on my own, and with all the people who got involved, like the engineers, brass students and Oliver Lake, I was like : ’Listen, there’s no budget yet, if you’re interested, you have to be interested for yourself and if it goes on record you will get paid.’
Oliver was interested and he arranged it, sent it back. I then got Derek Birkett (One Little Indian’s chief) on a good day and said : ’Listen Derek, I want to do an album, but it’s not going to be what you think it’s going to be, because I am in no mood to please anyone, and it’s not going to be your chanteuse, easy-to-sell album.’
Birkett, a former founder member of anarchoagit punk band Flux Of Pink Indians, remembers that "Björk had recorded some songs in Los Angeles with Franny Gold, which I thought were the most commercial things she’d ever written". They were not to appear on the album, though.
I played him the three songs so far with saxophone and voice. He liked it and said : `Fair enough, I’ll put money into it,’ and had complete faith. It was very surprising to me. I thought he’d want me to do hit songs, go commercial.
"I did want her to do that," Birkett confirms. "She played me ’Violently Happy’, which I hated, and still do. I told her she could do whatever she wanted, because that’s the way I work, but I didn’t think the album would do as well as The Sugarcubes’ first album, which did a million [worldwide]. I was wrong. It looks as if Debut will sell a million."
I started recording my album secretly, because I had pressure since ’Birthday’ to do an album on my own and I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, she explains, recalling how as soon as ’Birthday’ became popular, major record labels had tried to sign Björk as a solo artist. We had that bullshit since Day One and it was ridiculous.
In the case of ’Debut’ of course there was a lot of mixing done by the record company who wanted some radio hits. I wasn’t particulary pleased about that.
With ’Debut’ you left the rock world, I think. Is that your feeling ? Does ’Debut’ say goodbye to rock ?
If I take rock on its own, I never listened to rock much, with a few special exceptions, such as when I got the Swans craze. My stepfather listened to so much guitar music that maybe I OD’ed on it. I never listened to those hard punk bands or Iggy Pop or David Bowie, with all due respect for them. It wasn’t quite my scene. I preferred DAF and Brian Eno. If there was a guitarist, it was Robert Fripp. That was more my department. This is when I was 14-15. With the Sugarcubes, it was more a question of being in a band with your friends. They played the instruments they played. So when I made ’Debut’ and it wasn’t rock, it maybe wasn’t as much a hardcore statement for me personally, which surprised people who’d always heard my voice with rock. The music I did with Gulli and Sigtryggur went in completely different directions from rock. The only rock I enjoy is when it’s really extreme, it turns into a wall like Swans or the speed metal craze I had for a couple of months. That’s just the way my taste has always been, either totally sentimental or totally hardcore. Nothing in between stuff, like some of the stuff from Aphex Twin. If it’s completely brutal, noise,abstract, then more, then I’m game. But Beatle rock, that three-chord business, I’ve never had a taste for that. Maybe it’s because I was brought up with it, exactly what I don’t feel I need any more of.
The reason I mentioned that is the reaction to ’Debut’ in the States when it was released there. Reviews in the American press shared disappointments about this first solo album by the singer with the Sugarcubes, no guitars, and compared the music with euro-pop.
That’s all changed today. After I made ’Debut’ came a period of five years when there was a gap between European and American music. I remember explaining that to someone else. You see the opposites in "Grease", Olivia and John, the good and the bad. When I was 12 it was punk and disco that said if you were on the good side or the bad side. In Europe, rock was normal, it was the good side, U2 and so on. But rebellion was in the electronic world. In America, it was the complete opposite. Drum machine music was disco. It was mindless yuppie music. Rock, on the other hand, was if you wanted to be a part of the rebellion. You got a guitar when you were thirteen if you wanted to fuck the system. There was an exciting clash between European and American there. Whatever meaning it had was totally opposite on different sides of the pond. I talked to people who were very frank and maybe didn’t have quite the same taste in music I had, but lived in Chicago and for them drum machine was just yuppie music.
Even though it was used a lot in hip-hop and breakbeat music ?
I’m not talking about black music. This goes more for the circle of friends I was in. As far as my music was concerned I felt the criticism was couloured by this. Hip-hop is quite a different matter of course.
Hip-hop wasn’t middle class american teenage music ?
This was the time of ’Public Enemy’ that everyone fell for.
When I did Debut, it was to do something that I could be proud of. Something that I could play to my grandchildren and not blush. If people like it that’s just a bonus.
Of course I’m very honoured, especially because it was my own little album of just the things I like. But sometimes you so badly want something else and you need to get that first. Say it’s a number, like 5.7, and you’re at 1.2, then suddenly you get 9.8 and you wanna get that 5.7. Everyone thinks you’re really ungrateful, ’cos you got 9.8 and you should be very happy, but it’s a bit tricky.
When I brought my demos of Icelandic brass players doing The Anchor Song to my record company, the boss said it was only going to sell a third of The Sugarcubes. It sounds naff to say these things, but it’s just a happy accident that people liked it.
’ANCHOR SONG’ was written in summer 1990, when Bjork left her boy Sindri with a child-minder for a while and set out across Iceland on a "freedom thing". She rode her bicycle around the island with the express purpose of visiting all the hundreds of churches she’d heard about.
Since Iceland’s Christianity is based on a crafty get-out clause (the Viking Assembly said they’d pretend to worship Jesus if they could remain Pagans on the quiet), the religious places Bjork found were the wildest.
Lots of farmers had these little churches, like just one wooden room the size of a bedroom, and they’re really over-decorated. The farmers would make these naive paintings of the baby Jesus, really smiling, and they’ve got his beard all wrong, and there are all these stars in the ceiling. Completely beautiful churches, and they’ve all got harmoniums.
So I used to bike between them, and have my little Walkman and go and ask the farmer if I could play his organ. I expected a no from everyone, but they all said yeah, why not. I’d play for two hours and then aim for the next church. I wrote a lot of tunes, and `Anchor Song’ is one of the ones I finished. I’d recommend it as a holiday.
i wrote anchor song when i moved into my house by the harbour. i was ecstatic ! i had dreamt a dream about diving into the ocean at night and dropping the anchor there soit is about the satisfaction in putting down roots finding a home and belonging i once told my grandmother ( who was an amateur oil painter ) that that song was based on her colours and the compositions in her paintings she simply looked at me and said : "i know"
Compared with other music that was happening at that time, 808 State, electronic music fermenting, the British soul scene - ’Debut’ is quite different. A long time later you defined the music on ’Debut’ to me once ; " The concept behind ’Debut’ was house music, where the starting point was songwriting". Was this done consciously ?
I don’t think it was conscious. When you look back you can often be incredibly profound and a lot of what you say might be right. But when things are happening you don’t see them like that, You’re chasing you’re instinct more. Ever since I started clubbing with Graham in 1989-90 and was listening to a lot of acid jazz, house, which was quite abstract music then for partying and quite improvised, I experienced incredible moments. Those moments occured if you could be bothered to listen, go to seven clubs, listen to a lot of bad stuff, hang out around until six or seven in the morning, then maybe some deejay brought along a synthesizer and a magical moment occured. Everything was open to me. Being an old-fashioned sonwriter and getting into sound and writings songs. Today you can come up with loads of good songs, for instance R&B. But at that time, I remember having endless conversations at clubs about how there really weren’t any good songs.
It’s more like I’m inviting someone over to my own house, where everything is just as I want it to be. And it’s very private ; like I’m inviting just that one person to come into my bedroom and showing him or her my things and the maybe cooking a little meal for us.
When I decided to do this album, I found that I had piles of songs from way back.
Björk had originally intended to record the songs with a variety of producers.
I wanted to have all these different flavours. The most important thing was going to be my songs, as opposed to what style they were done in.
I had seen the “Red Hot Chilli Peppers“ video that he did, sort of black and white and silver, and I want to do a video to song called “ Big Time Sensuality“, and I was very aware that I want it to be quite different from “Human Behavior“, which is more sort of epic story-telling thing. ‘Big Time Sensuality’ was more like a personal statement, it has to be very in-your-face. Then he called up, a little later, with something he taugh he was even better, basicly to get a truck and drive up and down manathan as long as the light would last. I guess the idea to put someone on a truck , and kinda drive the truck, and you have to dance really instensely, and just the elements of danger at the top of that, do it in a city like New York. I think the policeman, very aggressive, asking us to try to stop to do it and we were kind bit like , we were kinda like anarchists not stopping
, the police were after us .Then, you get all those people who actually want to jump on the truck and take part like ; “ Are you doing a movie ? Can I take part of it ? We had very big speakers and were blasting the song, everybody was kinda listening, and you know how New York people are, they’re very sort of open anyway, they were clapping and dancing along, it was a bit of a performance statement. It was a great day, we had great laughs.
Stephane : When I went to L.A. the first time, I heard her music and I was like, ’Wow, who is that person...". And I remember I had been contaceted by someone to do a portrait of an artist called Björk.
Björk : I’d been photographed by so many people, and you only come across a few in your whole life that have that sort of physical presence like Stephane. He’s taken photographs of Kurt Cobain, and they are the only photographs of Kurt Cobain, where I’ve seen him laughing out loud and dancing. But not like he’s immitating Stephane. Stephane just has that effect on people, that they go really strong. And they go really physically expressive. And you can see that gratitude, that they’re all expressing.
Stephane : I saw her face and I heard her music... and I couldn’t sleep.
Björk : He does portraits of people. But they’re like, in 3D, you know ? And that’s why it would be a shame if he only did photographs because he’s so great that he gets people to move.
Stephane : She contacted me to do Big Time Sensuality. And we were supposed to go to Iceland. But no matter how simple the idea was, going to Iceland was too big for the budget. And I was trying to find an idea...
Björk : We met several times and I kind of blabbered on about how I wanted it to be. You know, when you’re living on the edge and it’s about the courage to enjoy life.
Stephane : I went to New York and I was in a cab, and I was listening to the song and I looked around me and I saw that it would work amazingly with the city. With all the big buildings and everything and her voice. And at the end of the day I called her back and I said, "I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an idea" !
Björk : The best way to get me in that state, physically in front of a camera is to put me on a truck...
Stephane : That’s what we did. We took a truck and we drove the truck for one day, up and down...
Björk : Driving with a big P.A., with my own songs. I was very, very, very shy. And you know how New York people are. They were like, ’Hi honey, let me get up on there". They were pretty cool about it. So we drove for twelve hours in circles. And everybody was following the truck. So it was like a twelve hour concert.
Stephane : We stopped the truck, we did a U-turn. It was fantastic.
Björk : I just had to get as extroverted as humanly possible, and quickly.
Stephane : The performance was so unbelievable from the beginning to the end. From the first take to the last take. There was no need to do anything.
Björk : He makes a connection with people he’s filmed or photographed. And people on the other side of that connection can feel fueled with confidence. You feel very strong. But you are yourself, you don’t need him. And I think I haven’t met many people like that.
“It takes courage to enjoy it.” Do you have that courage ?
I’ve got a lot of courage, but I’ve also got a lot of fear. You should allow yourself to be scared. It’s one of the prime emotions. You might almost enjoy it, funny as it sounds, and find that you can get over it and deal with it. If you ignore these things, you miss so much. But when you want to enjoy something, especially when it’s something you’ve just been introduced to, you’ve got to have a lot of courage to do it. I don’t think I’m more courageous than most people. I’m an even mixture of all those prime emotions.
’Debut’ had three different aspects for me. The studio album, the tours and the MTV Unplugged session. Would you mind touching on the concpet behind these three difeerent elements concerning this period of your career ?
A lot of those songs were written before I made ’Debut’. Many of them were old ideas. So they existed as songs before they were arranged in the final form they took on ’Debut’. Maybe it’s always turned out like that ever since. ’Debut’ was shaking hands with Nellee, maybe on equals. Maybe most of all shaking hands with London club scene. So the songs were dressed for the occasion.
When I was going to do the tour an emergency broke out. The songs were there but I hadn’t particulary thought of performing them in concert. Loads of people were called to audition for the concert band. A group was put together and rehearsed, all in three weeks. It was great fun. Maybe partly because I’d never conceived the songs for performing. In the groups the instruments were - like it or not - exactly the same in concert as on the album. Part of the inital freedom was not thinking about performing the songs. When I made ’Debut’ there was so much freedom in being able to use whatever instruments I fancied. Didn’t have to think about being able to load them on the tour bus. When I did that album I felt like a kid in a toyshop, chocolate. But when the ’Debut’ tour came around there were all sorts of snags to sort out in the space of 3-4 weeks. I thought we managed fairly well but for some reason I convinced myself that I don’t want to work like that in the future. I had to make some compromises. There were saxophones, vibraphones and all sorts of instruments you couldn’t tour with. It was simply too expensive.
Then when the invite to do MTV Unplugged came along I totally let myself go, like a kid in a toyshop. You didn’t need to travel with the instruments and musicians. It was just a single concert. MTV put money into the project so all the people who played on the album could be flown in, like Corky Hale or Oliver Lake. After playing the songs in concerts all over the world I’d got the know them better. What worked and what didn’t. We’d just finished touring when we did Unplugged so I was still hot. I could leave out what didn’t worked and keep what did. I can’t remember how many musicans were involved. We rehearsed for two days, I think, and didn’t sleep at all. Then when we did the concert we were exhausted. Got though the event and slept for 18 hours afterwards. It was incredible fun.
I think I wrote it in my living room in Iceland and sang it into my dictaphone. Later, by accident, we were going through sounds and I found this broken bottle sound. It wasn’t intentional but it sounded great. It was one of the last songs recorded for Debut - the album was ready to go. Sometimes the more unpredictable side of me does several headstands and flicks-flacks once the album has been delivered and the best song come out.
It is about a specific person but I’ve always been very protective. I’ve never told the press who a song is about and I always make sure I tell the person themselves. I’ve shown people lyrics and asked them to live with them for a week, to make sure they would feel comfortable.
I ask her about the video Venus as a Boy, in which she suggestively fondles an egg while singing explicitly about copulation. In the video the egg is eventually fried. This touches off a slightly sore spot for Björk. She gave Sophie Muller, the video director, a copy of Story of the Eye a couple of days before they filmed the but didn’t insist that she read it. Muller didn’t have the time.
She kept going on about it being fried, sighs Björk with exasperation.
I was saying, `No way is that book about a fried egg ! I’m sorry. Poached ? Okay. Boiled ? Okay. Raw ? Okay. But not fried.
And a fried egg is unsuitable because......?
Because it’s too hard. It’s rough and it’s greasy, It should be about being sort of liquidy and wet and soft and open.....
After the video was finished, Sophie called Björk. She had read the book. Now she agreed with Björk : Fried was the wrong egg.
I want to give and I want to tell stories. I was like that as a kid. I wanted to go to my grandmother’s house and if she was feeling grumpy or something, I wanted to make her happy by singing to her a song. It’s probably quite naive but that’s what drives me. I’m a storyteller and I love telling stories : I wanna be generous.
Do I put a lot of my private life on record ? I think you feel it when you are revealing too much when you write a song. It’s just the same as if you go out with a mate and get drunk and get to the ’truth’ stage and you wake up next day and think ’fuck, what did I say ?’. Sometimes you feel fine, sometimes you feel embarrassed, sometimes you feel a friend has told you something they shouldn’t have. I think our instincts know when you’ve given too much.
Violently Happy is about when you’re a junkie on exchanging emotion, not at one but at the level 200. That thing. And then the person goes away and you really miss someone. When you’re with that person you’re really peaceful because you get what you need back and you both give everything you need to give. And that person goes away and all that exchange is not there so you get your kicks elsewhere, you end up running on rooftops in blizzards, drinking 97 tequilas just to feel. You know what I mean. So it starts off really happy then the longer the person’s away from you, it starts getting self-destructive.
It’s very hard to say just what it’s about. I’d like it to be a statement of individuality. But I’ve still got a long way to go, so I’m a bit confused, because I just know I can do so much better than this record...
If you went out somewhere and had a really good time, you don’t wake up the next morning and try to figure out why you did. It’s not because of anything. It’s just the atmosphere, the people, the chemistry of friends, your mood, what happened before, what will happen after. And you can’t explain it, and I don’t understand why you should. And it’s the same with songs.
This record is really about being tired of going into the world’s largest record store in the hopes to finding something fabulous, and walking out with fucking yet another Miles Davis record because there’s nothing happening that’s challenging.
So you felt that you had to make that music yourself ?
Largely, yes. That was my impulse.
I think pop music has betrayed us. Everybody in the world needs pop music, just like they need politics, their pay, and oxygen to breathe. The problem is that too many people dismiss pop as crap because nobody has had the courage to make pop that’s releant to the modern world. Pop music has become so stagnant. This is really a paradox because it should change and evolve every day. I don’t think anybody has made a decent pop album in years.
I want this album to be pop music that everybody can listen to. I think not sticking to any particular musical style makes the album real. Life isn’t always the same. You don’t live in the same style from day to day, unexpected things happen that are beyond your control. That’s this record. One song is about the mood you’re in walking to the corner shop, another is about being drunk and out of it on drugs in a club, and the next one is about feeling romantic and making love.
Pop is music for a particular moment. You should be able to throw it away the next day but it has be real for that one moment so that as you’re doing the dishes and hear it on the radio, you can relate to it, go deep into it, and know that it matters and makes a difference for you. It doesn’t have to be some existential arty piece, it can just be a song that everybody can sing along to. But it has to touch you deeply for that moment.
That’s how I want people to experience this record. As pop music for 1993.
It’s hard to judge yourself but I don’t think they’re my best. Debut was the album that went the highest up there in terms of what is "Björk music". But I think that the persona I created, which was entirely accidental, is better captured on the later albums.
I think I might put a record out next year, and the title might be, All The Remixes Of Bjork'sDebut’ LP For People Who Don’t Buy While Labels’, just to keep it very down to earth. Obviously I could tour America for a whole year, but you know, there’s more to life than that...
You once talked about part of what happened there, being the climax of your work with Talvin Singh. Was it the end too ?
We’re still talking about doing something. He’s always inviting me over to Bombay for six months to make an album. Maybe the time will come around some time. As far as all Talvin’s talent is concerned, I’ve always felt that we hit it off best as instrumentalists. Me on voice and him on tabla. I think the song ’One Day’ that we did on Unplugged demonstrates that. Of everything we did together, that was the least effort. So somehow it became specially memorable.
