Björk On The Cover Of The Observer Magazine

[RAMROD 107,520]

 

Björk is in Paris, and her laptop camera isn’t working. The laptop is eight years old, she explains, and she doesn’t want to replace it, for environmental reasons. “But let’s just say I haven’t exactly been crying about the fact that it doesn’t work.” She is a black square on my computer screen, which feels quite un-Björk-like, somehow, and yet also very Björk-like, too. Even without the visuals, she is instantly familiar. She jokes, she teases, her answers unravel slowly as she weighs up every side of a response, pin-balling between as many angles as she can find.

She says she has always felt a bit weird about video calls anyway. “Even when they started, I would find more distance in talking to loved ones, because it’s sort of fake. You see people, but it’s not real. You’re not getting the presence. So maybe it’s just because I’m a musician, and musicians are weird creatures, because we’re so sound-driven, that if you don’t get to hang out with a person and feel what it’s like to be next to that person, or get the energy, or whatever, in the same room, you might as well just have audio. At least that’s 100% audio, you know?”

I turn off my camera so we can pretend we are on the phone. “I had this laptop all through Covid, so it was nice, I could just stay in my pyjamas all day.” Are you in your pyjamas now? “I am actually!” She pauses. “It’s worse. I’m in a hotel and I’m just wearing a robe. A bathrobe.” We can hear the tapping of a metallic, offbeat rhythm in the background. There is a lazy joke to be made about her next album here, but it is the plumber. She apologises and says she has to move. “I think somebody is fixing a pipe. I can’t not hear it. I’m gonna move. It’s better, right?” You sound like you’re in a cave, I say. “Yeah! Let’s do the cave interview.”

Cornucopia, her recent tour, had a cave, a small chamber on stage designed to reproduce the acoustics of singing alone on a rural walk. The ambitious tour, filled with intricate and fine-tuned details, has spanned five years and spawned two albums: Utopia and Fossora. It began in 2019, was put on hold during Covid, finished at the end of 2023, and is now returning as a concert film and an art book. Even by Björk’s standards, it is a lavish piece of work. The film begins with a brief explanation of the tour’s scale: for the audience in the theatre, there is 360-degree sound and immersive visuals, projected over 27 screens (“a monster to travel with”). The performance captured on film, in Lisbon, features a huge choir and a seven-piece flute ensemble, among many other musicians, who play bespoke instruments on a vast, forest-like set where a story of nature, “alchemical mutations” and a healing heart plays out.

Recently, Björk has been remixing her old albums for Dolby Atmos, a surround-sound technology. “It was weird to sit in the same chair and in the space of a week, to hear all of them back to back, which I’d never done.” She apologises for the long answer, but talks for over five minutes about whether she makes pop music or not. “On every album of mine, there’s always been songs that are not trying to please. And you always have songs that are more… ‘Oh, this is sugar.’ I love pop music myself, but I never made music that was just totally commercial. That was never my target.” She has worked with many of the same people since the 1990s, she says. “People who I believe are creative and very… I don’t know even what to call it, left-of-centre?” She says there are always poppier songs on her records. “Then you have had songs that were recorded in some toilet or whatever,” she laughs. “I do sometimes find it a little confusing when people think I was really poppy and then I stopped being poppy at some moment. That’s not the case.”

At home, Björk is a political activist as well as an artist. Among many other causes, she has protested against the return of commercial whaling in Iceland, against the sale of a geothermal energy company to a Canadian firm, against developing the wilderness for energy infrastructure and against industrial fish farming. In 2023, she released a single with the Spanish singer Rosalia to raise money for, and draw attention to, the latter, but she has said before that she prefers to keep her music and her activism separate. Does she still feel that way? “Yeah, I do, actually. I mean, I think maybe it’s being brought up by hippies,” she says.

She watches comedy all the time, she says. Like what? “At the moment, I watch Trixie Mattel and Katya. They are these drag queens, they do this unscripted comedy on TV, they just chat, and they also do podcasts. I’m also always trying to follow what’s going on in England, because you guys are the masters of comedy. There’s always something fun coming down your way.” And when she is the subject of parody herself? Over the years, there have been comedy sketches featuring impressions of her, from French & Saunders to Saturday Night Live. Does she ever recognise herself in them? “I mean, I’m not that bothered. I’m pretty thick-skinned. Katya, who’s a friend, she did me on Snatch Game [on RuPaul’s Drag Race], and I think it was hilarious. So obviously if it’s more intelligent and, little bit more, sort of, thought-out, I’m more up for it.”

Does she think people get that she has a sense of humour? “I think my humour is probably very hidden. With my friends, they totally would immediately see that most of my work has a humorous side and it’s also me taking the piss out of myself, for sure.” Her first proper solo album, Debut, didn’t come out until she was 27, in 1993. “Which is quite late for singer-songwriters. Maybe it’s just being an introvert Scorpio, that to be that narcissistic seemed like a bad idea to me.” The jokiness appears in some of her most famous and dramatic songs; both Isobel and Bachelorette “are kind of strange piss-takes on a drama queen, who is basically a celeb”.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jan/12/i-like-to-break-the-rules-bjork-on-comedy-darkness-and-the-most-flamboyant-tour-of-her-career

 

[elijahfan 25,771]

The Cornucopia show finally coming out… 

[Killa 17,041]

I probably hadnt ready a full Bjork interview in a while but She sounded different here in some answers. I really loved It as usual. can't wait for the Release of the performance 

[clownery 5,688]

CHARLI?

[Borisapillar 8,792]

2 hours ago, clownery said:

CHARLI?

Girl Charli wishes lol

[vanna shintuyu 10,404]

Holy ****. she looks 2