Isobel

I like the saga idea, the way that some songs bounce from one to the other. Presumably that’s your Icelandic roots coming out, the sagas in your history.

Bjork : I think so. I also think that being in bands for so long, and thinking if I don’t go to London and do my record I will explode. I had to justify it to myself what egocentric behaviour that was. So it started from there, that I would make part of the songs I was writing by taking the gentle piss out of myself being that self-important, but at the same time, confessing that I enjoyed being this central character in a story, which was about me, first being a kid in Human Behaviour then leaving and going, when I never thought I would leave Iceland, to the bright lights and being tempted by all the corrupted things.

By being a bit over-excited and coming from nature, in the song Isobel, a creature that functioned purely on some very intuitive, compulsive ways and that clashing a lot with a very well-behaved and well brought-up British, and ending up getting hurt and escaping into the forest and training those little moths to be my messengers of intuition. So I would send them all to fly back to the city and go in front of the nose of all those people who were being too clever and not following their instincts and they would shiver in front and go : "No, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah" until the clever people would click out of their logical behaviour, and then they would say " Oh, I’m so sorry" before they flew back to instinct stuff. That’s the ’nah nah nah’ stuff at the end of Isobel. In the video of Isobel we had a load of those moths, and it was his idea to make them tiny aeroplanes that grew inside light bulbs. So I was planting those tiny little light bulbs in the ground and they grew to be big light bulbs before the little aeroplanes would break out, like chickens from eggs, and fly out into the world in front of peoples’ noses and getting them to stop thinking so much.

In Bachelorette, which was maybe the third leap into the epic trilogy, once the moths had prepared the city, Isobel would take the train and go to town and confront the people that had hurt her before, where instinct and logic clashed with love. Bachelorette is quite a confrontational song. But in the end nature wins and all the trees and plants grow all over all the skyscrapers, and it all becomes nature again. So I guess it’s some form of revenge.

David Toop Interview, 2002