An interview

An interview from a TV-show named "Artistspecial" I transcribed when I didn't have anything better to do. The show was broadcasted in Sweden straight after the release of the "Isobel"-single. Source: ZTV. Please note, the pictures hasn't got anything to do with the interview.

The program begins with Bjork saying "Hello my name is Bjork in Swedish". It goes on with a clip of "Army of me".

Bjork: I think I'm half five years old and the other half of me is 50. But the side of me that's 50 is very private. And people don't see that side of me, cause actually I'm very organized, I'm very disciplined and I work very hard. I've always been that way since I was a kid and people don't see that side of me cause the 5-years-old is what I show the person that's outside, you know.

Bjork: Sugarcubes, number one was people. We liked each other and we had a good time together and the music that came out of that relationship was a bit of an accident. When I realized the Sugarcubes had become this serious band-thing....eh....I started to realize that it was now or never. If I didn't record all those songs I'd written in my head, then it would never do it.

Bjork: "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.

Bjork: I think the biggest difference between "Debut" and....eh...."Post" is that "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.

Bjork: This album is on the contrary. I've moved from Iceland to England and all the songs are written since then. So they're all written with in mind that many people are going to hear them. They're not shy and introvert, they're more sort of conscious and more....more confident.

Bjork: Because it's the girl who leaves home and tries out all these brand new things she hasn't done before. Seeing new cities and meeting all these lunatics. All the lunatics are like herself because there aren't that many back on Iceland. She's figuring out there are more people out there who feel like her. It's definitely a brave album but at the same time it's a bit scaring. "Post" is more scaring than "Debut" cause I'm definitely jumping off more cliffs this time.

Bjork: Most of Scandinavia exists for me like the children's stories I read when I grew up. It's obviously Pippi Longstocking and the Moomins from Finland and Thorbjorn Egners, you know Karius and Baktus. Well, at the moment I'm the Moomin-mother. Em....em....touring and doing this project I'm doing is very much like being like her. Being very understanding and always having a bag full of things. If someone breaks her favorite vas she just goes "Oh, I didn't like it anyway". Especially while touring, I'm very much like the Moomin-mother. But I think I used to be more of a Pippi Longstocking. I still am but I used to be more, especially as a teenager.

Bjork: All the things I do are by myself like from doing your lawyers contracts to T-shirt-colors and album-covers. Travel-ways on tours, lights. And I haven't mentioned things that obviously are closer. Like producing or co-producing, picking the instruments, the studios, the engineers, arranging, those things. So it's a very colorful job with a lot of people.

Bjork: In a funny way I love discipline very much. I used to think, especially after being brought up by hippies and later becoming a punk, that discipline was my biggest enemy. But then you realize very quickly especially when you start recording that you want to do a good song and record it and you want to do it in a very spontaneous way. The whole punk-scene was about gathering everyone in a studio and just doing one take. Rehearsals didn't exist because life isn't that way. You can't rehear for something, you just have to do it once. But you realize very quickly that freedom and discipline is the same thing. It's just two sides of the same coin. The more discipline you have, the more freedom you have. That is if you have the right kind of discipline.

Bjork: So the trick is very much to know what to have discipline about and when to be open. So you go to the studio and you make decisions on half of the things but not the other half. Cause it's very important to have the courage to not make decisions on the other half.

Interviewer: To trust other people?

Bjork: Yes. And to trust the day. That you will think of something when it happens. You have to relax and let go, you know. So my job is very much to organize an accident. In a way it's very much like hunting in the forest. You put up traps somewhere for your animal. But you don't know where it's going to run or how it's gonna behave. You can guess and that's how you become a good organizator. You become a good guesser. But you can never know. You will never know. And I will never know how to write a song cause no two songs are the same. Unconsciously I try tot treat each song different. There are no rules but I like it. I like it very much cause for me it's like playing a game for myself. Surprise myself and sometimes the most predictable can be the most surprising.

Bjork: I started to play in bands when I was 12 years old. Most of the times I was the only girl but what's most important is to make a good song. So if you want something like this you have to very quickly ignore things like the food-taste of the other person. If he likes sausages and you don't you can't let that stand in your way. And very quickly it goes on like the clothes the person wears doesn't matter, the sex doesn't matter, the raze doesn't matter, the age doesn't matter. I became completely like "I don't want to know". I just want to work with this person so that 1+1 becomes 1. If you're lucky then it will continue all the way until what's more impossible happens. 1+1 is 3. Then you have a song.

Bjork: So every time as a teenager when I played in bands and I was the only girl, then I could always hear someone say "Oh, but she's a girl". Then I knew I just could smell trouble. It doesn't stand in the way. You're just working with people, not with sex, age or raze. So one of the misconceptions people have about me is when they see me and sees a woman. "She can do this and she's a woman" or "She can't do this cause she's a woman". I just work with them for one or two days then they're forgotten. It's just the beginning-stage, you know.

Bjork: There are things that happened when you were a kid you'll never forget. When I was about five years old and I played with some kids in my neighborhood....I can't remember what it was but we were all doing something together and we had such a great time and then all the other kids suddenly said "We can't do this". And I was like "Why" and they said "You're not supposed to". And I said "But we won't hurt anyone" and I just realized, it was such a great feeling. Doing what you're supposed to do was like over here (she points to the left) and doing what I wanted to do in my intuition was over here (she points to the right) and there was a great canyon between them. And it was like a cross-road. And I went over here (she points to the right) and I've never regretted it. All I have is intuition. People don't understand me. They're from over there (she points to the left) and they don't get it. I still meet many of my old friends from school back on Iceland and they go like "Now I understand you" and I'm like "OK". But it can be dangerous cause I remember when I was on television when I was very pregnant. I was 19 with my stomach sticking out. And the Icelandic television had never got so many complains. People called, wrote letters and were angry and one woman got a heart-attack. So it can be dangerous to do what you want.

Bjork: Yeah, I'm very, very over-romantic and I very much believe in relationships. But I don't think it's as simple as being husband and wife, you know. I've got relationships with many people, like most of the people on the album "Post". Like Tricky, Nellee Hooper, Marius the programmer, the engineers and Graham Massey who wrote a song with me. My manger is a friend since 12 years and the guy who drew the album-cover together with me is also a friend for 8 years. These are all relationships I've got and they're very important to me. But none two are the same, you know and that's very important. I definitely believe there is something as meeting a person and being with for the rest of your life. But I think people have to stop putting standards to relationships. You can have a friend you sometimes feel erupted with, a friend you never feel erupted with. You can have a friend who's very humorous, a friend you're feeling strong with. You can have a friend you feel very angry with and it feels good cause you're both angry together on the rest of the world. You can have a friend you feel very childish with and all this must exist cause everyone's got this inside. You can't stop and say "Oh, this relationship is like this". No relationships are the same. No marriages are the same, you know.

Bjork: If I hear one more person who comes up to me and complains about "computer-music has no soul" then I will go furious, you know. Cause of course the computer is just a tool. And if there is no soul in computer-music then it's because nobody put it there and that's not the computers role. It's the role of the songwriter. He puts down his soul in the song if he wants to. A guitar will never write a song and a computer will never write a song. These are just tools. And I think people were terrified in the beginning of the century when the telephone was invented. They were like "People will stop meeting each other and just talk in the phone all day" but that's ridiculous cause nothing can replace a meeting with another person.

Bjork: You'll see, we'll win.

The show ends up with Bjork drinking a cup of tea.



Herstory

Bj?k Gudmundsdottir began her professional musical career at the age of 11, when she released her self-titled debut album. The album was mostly covers of Icelandic folk songs with one Bj?k original, an instrumental number "Johannes Kjaval" a tribute to the well respected Icelandic painter. From the age of six until she was 14, Bj?k attended a local music school, where she studied music and trained on the piano and flute.

Bj?k was born in Reykjavik on 21 November 1965 and brought up in a Bohemian, musical household. Her stepfather was a guitarist in a band called Pops who played mainly Hendrix and Clapton influenced music. Influenced by the late arrival of punk and new wave in the late '70's and early '80's, Bj?k rebelled against her parents hippy inspired lifestyle and formed a number of short-lived punk bands. Exodus at age 13 and Tappi Tikarrass at 14, and Kukl at 18, which lasted from 1984 until 1986 recording two albums for British anarchist label Crass.

After three years of politically motivated, punk sincerity, Bj?k, Einer Orn and Siggi Baldruson split the band to form The Sugarcubes and have some fun. In 1987 The Sugarcubes, with three new members, Thor Eldon (Bj?k's ex husband and the father of their child Sindri) Magga Ornottsdottir and Bragi Olafsson released their dazzling debut single "Birthday". It brought Bj?k's voice to the attention of the British music press and secured the band a solid fanbase. They formed their own collective in Iceland called The Bad Taste Family, through which they ran an independent label and produced art events. In 1988 they released their debut album of surreal pop, Life's Too Good, to widespread critical acclaim. Over the next four years, they released three more albums, Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, which was not as well received as their debut and sold less. Their third album Stick Around For Joy, released in 1991 was however, considered a return to form.

It was also around this time that Bj?k began to get seriously involved in dance music with her first vocal excursions on a dance record appearing courtesy of Graham Massey's 808 State. Two songs that feature Bj?k, "Oops" and "Qmart" appear on EX:EL.

The final Sugarcubes album "It's It", was released in 1992, at a point when the band knew they were going to split. It was a remix album of their previously recorded materia, maily curated by Bj?k's growing interst in the British dance scene. Despite the Sugarcubes' success, Bj?k felt the need to express herself in her own songs, so she finally left the band she had helped form, to pursue a solo career.

In the interim period before the release of Debut, while working in various jobs in Reykjavik, Bj?k began to consolidate her relationship with the Trio Gudmundar Ingoltssonar, recording Gling-Glo a none-off album of jazz and popular standards.

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