1er album des Sugarcubes.
Selon Mark Pytlik (Bjork : Wow and Flutter), le groupe a choisi de nommer leur album « La vie est trop belle » suite à la réaction très enthousiaste d’un de leur ami poète à qui on a simplement offert un café et une cigarette.
À propos de l’album
Siggi Baldursson : I started working with Björk and Einar in 1983, in a band called KUKL. She always had a very special relationship with her muse. She was a stunning musician from an early age, very creative. She would play little flutes, xylophones and keyboards. She didn’t usually play guitar or stringed instruments, but she was a good drummer. Rhythm was important to her. We started a collective in Iceland in the summer of 1986 called Smekkleysa, or Bad Taste, a meeting of musical people, visual artists and literary folks. We had two practising poets, Bragi and Thor, and Einar and Björk had also released little books of poetry and sold them in bars. We decided we needed a pop band for the collective to make some money, so we devised this hilarious idea of The Sugarcubes. It was a bunch of avant-garde pseudo punks creating a conceptual pop group.
It was an unwritten rule that you could bring an idea to rehearsal, but you couldn’t bring a finished song. Your mates would have to contribute. That’s how the songs were written. Björk had lots of ideas, but she was also selective. We threw away a lot of stuff.
In the winter of 1987 into 1988, we were finishing the record between Iceland and London. “Birthday” was released in autumn 1987, it had been recorded in Iceland and remixed in London. It popped up in rehearsals and was written in about two minutes. Björk started singing, Einar was wailing away on his pocket trumpet, we were all having a blast – and wham, it was there. It popped out like a full-grown child.
Einar Örn Benediktsson : We began fooling around, making non-imaginable pop music. There was no hierarchy. Everybody did everything. All of us were very strong on what we should be doing, and how ; on how to behave, and possibly how not to behave ! If someone didn’t like what was happening, it wasn’t done.
We did a gig and got paid in studio time, so we started recording songs in Iceland. That was the basis of Life’s Too Good. We called Derek Birkett at One Little Indian, who was an old friend, and said, ‘We’ve got 10 songs, do you want to put it out ?’ We translated it into English for his benefit, so he would understand what we were singing about ! Then we came over to London to add little bits and finalise the mixes, and we had the album. We slept in a one-bedroom basement flat in notting Hill. It was very sweaty !Within the band, there was no focus on Björk as the main vocalist. I was the vocalist, as well. After Life’s Too Good got some media attention, I should have been shot, apparently, because I was spoiling this ethereal voice that people were jerking off to ! But she didn’t think like that. We didn’t think our forte was Björk’s music ; our forte was the chemistry of the band members. We were in it together, a unit, not to be split up.
Uncut - Avril 2017
Anecdotes
L’album est sorti sous 6 pochettes de différentes couleurs.
Annie Lennox a fait une reprise du titre Mama.
