Bjork's Impossible-To-Predict Career

She stood at the edge of the stage, ghostly and luminescent. The audience – very young, very up for it – had been on her side all night. But now, at the death, the mood had changed. “I have to go,” said Bjork, sounding sad and small and alone. “But I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

It was 1995 and the singer – music journalism convention demands she be referred to as ‘Icelandic pop pixie’ at least once per article – was half-way through her first Irish tour. Her sell-out concert at Cork City Hall, a post-war bunker with delusions of architectural grandeur, had been a huge success. Or at least it had until the very end when a strict curfew had required her to cut the date short to attendees’ audible displeasure. She walked away, looking like she was oblivious to the boos, though surely she can’t have been, and the curtain fell. The moment she left it was difficult to imagine she had ever been there. In the flesh, as on record, she exuded a dreamlike quality. She was among us but she was not of us.
This was the height of Bjork mania. Debut, her, er, debut solo album was on its way to selling four million copies; the fashion world was in a swoon over her odd, eerie image. She’d also been honoured with her inaugural big splash in Hot Press. In an unusually frank interview she was eager to address the caricature that had already started to swirl about her as an inveterate control freak who brooked no opposition.
“It’s not because I’m a control freak, but because I want to be responsible for everything and know that it’s mine and done in a human way,” she told the magazine. “And that it’s not full of things I don’t know about. And that people get treated with respect. I look on all my songs as my children and that’s why I have to fight to make sure they get the videos and the record covers right. The photos and videos aren’t about me, they are about music. It’s like this child I’m protecting. You can’t give birth to a child and say, ‘See you later...’ Songs are the same.”
The interview was conducted at Jury’s Hotel in Ballsbridge. The days when you could casually meet Bjork for a quick natter in the lobby are, it hardly requires pointing out, long over. Nowadays she’s a signed-up member of the reclusive pop star club. Aside from a chinwag with natural history presenter David Attenborough – their surreal meet up is captured for posterity on a new BBC documentary – lately the world has seen precious little of the artist born Bjork Gudmundsdottir.
A mainstream pop star through the ’90s and early 2000s, she has, over recent years, withdrawn steadily from the public gaze. It now seems like a lifetime ago since she made herself the talk of Hollywood by turning up at the 2001 Oscars in a Marjan Pejoski ‘swan dress’, depositing eggs on the carpet behind her. Nor can you imagine her submitting to the ritual pop star humiliation of appearing in a motion picture, as she did in 1999 when she starred in Lars Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark and reportedly nearly came to blows with the director over his notoriously despotic tendencies.
“They didn’t get it. They actually thought that I was trying to look like Jennifer Aniston but got it wrong.” she would later say of Swangate, an incident which seemed to come close to achieving the impossible and make Bjork look ridiculous. “I probably wore a more eccentric dress for Cannes [in 2000], but nobody noticed. I think Europeans can stomach things like that more easily. I think Michael Jackson should settle in Switzerland or something. He’d be fine.”
On the very few occasions she’s deigned to speak publicly of late, the subject has been largely ephemeral. In a rare interview given last year she talked not about her music but her meet-up with Attenborough, likening his professional poise to the skills of a good MC.
“He would close off and take in whatever I was saying, and then come out with the most beautifully formed sentences you ever heard,” she cooed. “He just composes them in his head... I once read an interview with Jay Z and he was saying how he wrote his first rap on the subway and built it up to 20 minutes because that was how long the journey home was. He couldn’t have written it down, it’s just linked in his mind.”
Far from diminishing her particular allure, the less we see of her, the deeper a mystery she seems to present. Bjork turns 48 in 2013 but nobody seems to care or notice. In our imagination, she remains the same as ever: an odd-ball orbiting the musical universe, out there on her own, nearly, but not quite, beyond the limits of our comprehension.
When she does surface, she’s lost none of her power to shock. In her most high profile recent appearance, at the Bonaroo Festival in Tennessee in June she arrived dressed like one of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser monsters. In a dress that seemed to suggest rolls of grey fat sluicing down her body she sang from behind a head-dress that made it look as if her face was spouting crystalline spikes. It was quintessential Bjork: an eye-grabbing gesture that managed to shock, stun, exalt and horrify in the same moment. At Electric Picnic fans should be braced for more of the same.