Q 10/93Björk Gudmundsdottir's Record CollectionInterview by Martin AstonPhotography by ?
Taoist children's stories from Iceland. Film soundtracks
from the Indian subcontinent. Anarcho-veggie punk from, er,
Southeast London? Martin Aston can have stumbled upon the
private listening pleasure of only one elfin pop siren:
Why, it's. . . |
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Inevitably, there is a price to pay. "I'm well aware of making a sacrifice by leaving Iceland, because I'm so much from there," she confides over a cup of tea, "but I've been on a little personal mission, which is my album. Basically, the money, studio and equipment was all here, not in Iceland." Still, many of Björk's possessions remain in her Reykjavik home, including her favourite albums, the reason for this early morning meet. The ubiquitous Filofax and a coffee-table tome of presumably homesickness-inducing Icelandic landscapes perch on the kitchen table while a pile of CDs and tapes sit untidily on a work surface nearby. "When I first left home, I carried all sorts of stupid
stuff around with me in boxes, but I gradually learnt
to give that up," she says. "I realised that the best
thing is to have, when you go somewhere, is what
you're wearing. One book and you're laughing.
Especially when you're trying to move from one
country to another. You have to start again."
"This is what Icelandic kids get for a birthday present when they're young. Egner is this ideologist guy who made plays for children, on the same tip as Winnie The Pooh, I'd say: the Taoist tip, if you want. The songs are full of anarchy, like 'fuck parents, fuck teachers, fuck policeman, I can bring myself up'. One song is about the animals who live in the forest who decide not to eat each other, and become vegetarians. It's a bit of a heavy moral message for five-year-olds." "Basically, it's all about these two Icelandic trolls,
Karius and Baktus, who were the first punks, so I
was introduced to punks about 10 years earlier than
you lot. Anyway, they live in your teeth, and if you eat
sweets, they're really hardcore punks, so they like to
puke and spit like punks like to, and then they really
hit your teeth, and shout. There are brilliant sound
effects on this (impersonates tooth decay). It's a bit
like Igor Stravinsky for kids, with brass and string
instruments. There are happy songs and sad songs,
but it's all very dramatic. It definitely made you think
that authority was a bit dodgy. I think it's a bit of the
Bohemian Scandinavian over-socially aware thing,
the idea that kids can sue their parents, which has
gone out of date now. I must admit, I thought twice
before I played it to my son. Fairy tales are cruel,
aren't they? The wolf was eating the grandmother,
after all."
"I was brought up with all these hippies. Ten of them and one of me. At the age of seven, I'd really had enough of all those hippy records, that psychedelic crap, so I became like a kid who has to listen to different stuff to her parents. My dad was a bit on the case, and probably bought this Sparks album, but didn't really like it, but I played little else for a year, and drove them all mad. It's really for kids as well, you know, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us, and it ain't me who's gonna leave which was a pretty cool statement. They were a bit theatrical, I guess, more expressive than your average pop album, and not just about I-love-you-and-you- love-me. I loved the way Russell Mael sung like a geisha, and that they were into wearing geisha clothes, as I was really into Japanese people." "What kids get into is very picturesque music that is really easy to imagine what's going on. At that point, I'd got really bored of guitars and rock'n'roll, and Sparks were more interesting, more like a fairy tale. I was really into them until I read an interview with the singer a year later, when he said that the only two things in the world he didn't like was kids and animals. That broke my heart. "I left home first, actually, at 14. I got the feeling
that time was running out, and there were all these
exciting things happening out there, and you're
missing them. You wanted to rent a flat and cook
really bad meals, that sort of thing. I came back a
year later when I was broke."
"When I was about 10, I was listening a lot with my dad, to what he was getting into, like Frank Zappa, who I used to think was a dirty old man, but then got to appreciate a couple of years later, stuff like Don't You Eat That Yellow Snow (from Apostrophe) which I found hilarious, that someone peed in the snow and that someone else was meant to eat it." "When I was 13, though, I got into Joni Mitchell with my dad, and played it to pieces. I loved Don Juan's Reckless Daughter but Hejira was the one. It was more acoustic. I've always found guitars a bit difficult because my dad played since I was very little, and he was a bit of a Clapton and Hendrix kind of guitarist, and I've always been critical of that, but I loved her guitar sound very much, although it's very hard to say why. With hindsight, she was one of the first women I heard who weren't completely stupid. She had her own air of style and independence, whereas a lot of women just wanted to play men's music. I wasn't so much into her voice, more that she had her own world, with her own elements. You definitely knew that it was Joni the second you heard her. It was very strong, but very feminine, you know? It was natural and earthy but modern as well." "She was never my role model, though: I don't
think any singer was, to be honest. Instruments
influenced me more than singers, like brass and
stuff. You might start puking when I say it but I never
had the ambition to be a singer, I always wanted to
make good music. It's like learning shorthand writing. It's not so much that you're into it, but it makes
it easier to write anything. That's why I sing."
"At the same time as Joni, I got into Debussy at my grandparents' house, especially his dramatic little piano pieces, and I got into jazz. I love the way Ella and Louis work together: they were opposites in how they sung, but were still completely functional together, and respectful of each other. My favourite bit of Ella is from the Jazz At The Hollywood Bowl album, the one where she forgets the lyrics. She goes, 'I forgot the lyrics to this song, be bop be bop, I forgot the lyrics to this song, be bop be bop', which I thought was great." "I've always liked Ella because she's really
happy. I've never been into all these suffering
artists, I think it's a bit pathetic. You have your
problems, but you have to go one step further, and
see the funny side of it. Everybody has problems,
not only Morrissey. That's why I've always preferred Ella
to Billie, even though Billie is the singer of
the century and all that shit, but I think it's much
braver to be happy than to be suffering, taking
heroin and all that. Ella was strong enough not to
bore the audience with her own difficult life. I saw
her sing at the Montreux Jazz Festival when I was
15: she was 60, with white hair, but exactly the
same greatest sense of humour. She's always
teasing people. I guess her singing was an influence
on me but not in a direct sense, more in the
sense that you shouldn't take melodies too literally.
It's a bit irrelevant what a melody is like in a song:
the point is more the mood, and the emotions, and
it doesn't matter if you forget the lyrics. You can still
sing the song. You can do whatever you want to."
"I was in a muso band at 15, playing seven-ninth rhythms, being complicated and diffcult. Then I got into punk. I started by forming this punk band, called Spit And Snot, believe it or not. I was the drummer, with no hair. That was a big scene in Reykjavik: I think we hold the world record of how many people lived in Iceland, and how many punk bands there were. But it was very difficult to get English punk records: you'd get one, like a Gang Of Four record, and everyone would go to that one person's house. So all these bands started to play, and we definitely got over the problem of not knowing how to play - that was mind over matter." "The one classic album from that time was
Never Again (a double 12-inch album featuring 10
one-minute songs), though I had three or four of
theirs. They had such hardcore energy. I've always
thought this line between complete energy and
getting muso should be kept very thick. I wasn't
into the new wave scene when they started to put
chords to punk. What do you call the Teenage
Turtles? Mutants. It was a bit like that, not pure any
more. That's why I liked Discharge, and really
respected Crass too. We'd met Crass at the time
we were running this organisation in Iceland called
Bad Taste, before we formed The Sugarcubes,
when lots of people came over to play, including
Crass. They heard our band, KUKL, play and
offered us a deal. I was 18 at this point and had
never been to England, so I couldn't relate to
Margaret Thatcher. It was very hard for Icelandic
people who were still a bit in the middle ages."
"Roland Kirk and Sun Ra are what I've been most into in the last five years. Both aren't academic jazz people, they're totally earthy and natural, like ancient, somehow, but very modern at the same time. The sound is muddy. If I had to pick one person as my hero, I'd have to say Kirk: He plays brass, for one, which has always been a soft spot for me, and he plays in a very intuitive way as opposed to with brains. He plays songs that are like pop songs, they're so simple, but at the same time, are mind- expanding experiences. It's not too much of any- thing but has got all the extremes. He plays freejazz that a five-year-old kid would understand, that anyone could get into, which is something I always like." "Pick five Roland Kirk and five Sun Ra albums
and you'll probably have my favourite record. But if
you're forcing me to pick one, it's Kirk's The
Inflated Tear. It's at the brilliant stage in his life,
before he got too much into fusion, which I don't
like, when he was getting really basic, back to
roots. The title track is about when he was two
years old, and had some eye disease, and was living in this black ghetto. He had this white nurse who
didn't really have time to take good care of him, and
gave him the wrong medicine for his eyes, which
blinded him for life. The song is based on memory:
he could remember the last minute he saw and the
first minute he couldn't."
"I'm completely fascinated by Indian string sections, and have been for a while. The music is completely sensual, and very pretty, and again, more to do with instincts than brains. I think my love of it has a lot to do with having to deal with England. I'm eventually falling in love with England, of course, but like all flirting periods, it's a lot to do with being hard to get. When I tried to get into English culture, I always ended up going out and buying Indian music. I'm a visitor here: I call myself an immigrant housewife. I hang out with the Indians in Southall and go to Thai takeaways. Indian culture is beautiful, more so than the English. I felt some sort of sup- port, or sympathy there. I felt like I belonged there." "I don't know much about Bappi Lahriri. I just
know that if I buy 10 Indian albums, and one is by
Bappi, I'm safe. Snake Dance is a film soundtrack
which me and Nellie really got into when we were
making my album, and ended up sending two of my
songs to Bombay where Indian strings were
recorded. Indian soundtracks have this incredibly
pure sound. They've tried to record string sections
in England, top quality microphones, top quality
Indian musicians, the lot, but it's just not the same.
Tarvin Singh, who plays with my band and who
works a lot in Bombay, told me that the sound
engineers there are so used to working under poor
conditions that their ears are incredible, and they can
get that particularly earthy sound. Apparently tabla
players all surround one microphone, and they can
tell exactly who it is who is playing out of tune."
"I can get lost in this. It's pure joy, this music. It's a
bit of an escapism, from all the intellectual conversations
and arguments you have in your life, and
just being silly and happy and stupid, but it's pure,
as pure as pure can get. You just want to dance on
the table. The Sugarcubes wanted Benny and
Björn to produce our second album, but they didn't
want to. We were naturally upset."
"We argued about all music on the tour bus but the two things we could all agree on was Abba and Chet Baker. I'd say Baker is my favourite vocalist of the century. There were two albums, both with the same title, ridiculously, which were released with Bruce Weber's film of his life, Let's Get Lost. One was recorded when the film was being made, when he was older, and the other with all the stuff he sung when he was young, which I prefer." "I wouldn't say he's an influence as I didn't hear
him until much later in my life, but he's the only
singer I've ever been able to identify with. I love the
fact he's so expressive, so over-emotional. It's
classic stuff; it makes me soft in my knees. He was
a bit of a heroin casualty, silly guy, but you couldn't
tell he had a habit when he was younger. He was so
into it, like, 'fuck those notes I'm singing, and fuck
those songs I'm singing, what I want is the emotion'.
That's how I feel about it too." |
