Anohni, for instance, has a good tale about recording Volta with Björk in New York, where the singer suddenly decided the whole operation should decamp to Jamaica for a few weeks. Anohni tells of how Björk went swimming out to sea one night. “I was so nervous about it,” she remembers. “[Björk’s] friend said, ‘Don’t worry, she does this all the time !’ I marvelled at her courage and sense of abandon.” In the studio, Anohni “couldn’t keep up, I felt like a little dog chasing a horse… It was like standing next to a volcano.”
Thirty years after the Sugarcubes’ “Birthday” first presented that astonishing voice and imagination to a worldwide audience, our investigation of Björk’s musical history – a study of her key albums, illuminated by her key collaborators – reveals an artist whose appetites have gained a kind of mythic potency. It inspired me, among other things, to revisit an interview I conducted in 1993, at the beginning of her solo career. In a rehearsal studio in North London, she lamented how her old friends had lost their fearlessness. “People are really wild when they’re teenagers, and then they think either you stay like that, or you become conventional,” she said. “But you have to re-invent yourself every day, you have to re-invent every day what is wild.”
It’s a great manifesto, and one which is implicit in the maverick spirits which proliferate in Uncut every month. [...]
“I make it all sound so easy, don’t I ?” laughed Björk back in 1993. “It’s not that easy at all. ‘Björk, you should start a religious sect !”
