When I get drunk I’m usually over-the-top happy, just on a mission. It’s like all or nothing. You can stay at home and be sober, or get completely drunk. I wish I could be all polite and sit and drink two bottles of red wine and make it last for nine hours, but unh-uh. It has to be fucking blitzkrieg.
When you do it rarely and go all the way, it’s better than any fucking psychotherapy. Because your body just screams for these needs and just goes and jumps on a table if your body needs to.
Juergen Teller : That is pretty incredible. So I was wondering, would you say that you are an exhibitionist ?
Björk : In my most natural state, I’ll be introverted for say, six days in a row, and then on the seventh day I’ll become very extroverted, completely inside-out. Then I’ll have to go back inside myself. Sometimes the change can be quite forceful-it’s something I can’t really control. It’s a bit like the ocean and the tides.
Juergen Teller : Yeah, I know what you mean. Do you ever try to fight it ?
Björk : It’s quite interesting. If you always go by how you feel, life can end up quite a lonely affair. But if you go against that sometimes-say you’re in the middle of an introverted stage and a friend comes for a visit, and you make an effort to get out of yourself, to communicate-I think that’s beautiful thing. It’s a sacrifice of your own emotional state for someone else.
Juergen Teller : Right.
Björk : That was one of the most painful things about doing the film. The cast and crew only saw me when I was being extroverted. We’d film, and then we’d have lunch, where I felt compelled to be outgoing, and then we’d go back to filming, and then I would go to bed, and then I’d wake up the next morning, and I’d have to be extroverted again !
Juergen Teller : For months and months...
Björk : I experienced that time as very violent, because I’m not like that. I’m far more secretive. There are sides of myself that I don’t show to anyone-I’m actually quite a loner. So when I had to be extroverted everyday for the film, the pressure built up like a volcano. I certain people are born to be actors, and they’re naturally extroverted when they wake up every day.
Juergen Teller : That doesn’t apply to you at all.
Björk : But I am quite attracted to people who are like that, because I’m not.
I could be more in control but I don’t want to be. I’m in control as much as I want to be. I decide what happens. I’m always so thirsty for this element of surprise that I don’t want to plan more than a few days ahead
Half of me is a bit of a rebel, thinking that someone my dad used to listen to, stuff like Cream, saying that my stuff is all right must mean I’ve gone wrong somewhere. But half of me is really flattered. If you want the honest truth I’ll be sickly sentimental and say that if my best friend says she likes a song it would affect me a lot more.
I’m terrified of getting bored. I always make sure that I’ve got nine things, at least, to do. I panic if I think I’m going to have to twiddle my thumbs. I’ve tried lying around the house doing nothing but I hate it. It’s my worst point but it’s a good point as well ’cause you get a lot of things done. I like action.
Björk : I went to music school for ten years, but I rebelled against it. I felt the school was too controlling, and I didn’t understand what a ten-year-old Icelandic girl had to do with all these three-hundred-year-old German guys. Quite a few times the schoolmaster called me to his office, where we would have these three-hour debates where we’d both cry, because I didn’t agree with the direction the school was taking. I thought we should talk more about this century, and more about composers that were closer to us. I ended up playing stuff by twentieth-century Finnish composers, for instance.
Juergen Teller : I think he’s excellent, Neil Young. So when you left school, did you sort of turn your back on all the classical stuff ?
Björk : Actually, back in the early days, I toured with a string octet, eight kids who’d gone to that same school in Iceland. Since I could have gone the classical path too, it was very interesting to work together. We toured for one-and-a-half years, and we’d get drunk in all the cities and have long, healthy debates about music. And luckily enough, We all had different points of view.
Juergen Teller : That sounds really good.
Björk : But afterwards, I basically ignored that side of me until 1996, When I made Homogenic. I decided I had to confront it. I also worked through a lot of craftsmanship issues by doing the soundtrack to Dancer In The Dark-all that orchestral stuff. I caught up with myself, but it took three albums.
It irritates me when people try to separate the two : dance music has to be brainless and simple while, ’serious’ pop music has to be difficult and lyrically oriented. I’ve always felt, even before I made my own music, that everything should be possible, all combinations. I want to be everything at once : clever, dumb, angry, sweet, ancient and childish, naive, experienced happy and melancholic.
Mes parents écoutaient Jimi Hendrix et Janis Joplin en pensant que le reste, c’était de la merde. À l’école de musique, on me disait que le classique, c’était génial et que le reste, c’était de la merde. Quant à mes grands-parents, ils n’écoutaient que du jazz parce que le reste, ce n’était vraiment que de la merde. Et moi je m’amusais à jouer les trublions en passant Hendrix à mes grands-parents ou en chantant comme Ella Fitzgerald à l’école de musique.
You have one relationship with your grandmother and one with your boyfriend and one with the guy in the grocery shop. That doesn’t mean you’re being fake or untrue, it’s just that you have those different colours in you.
My future ? I just want to keep on going. I get so easily bored, I have to find something new every fucking day. But then again, I don’t even have to find it. Because there are so many things out there. Films, books and just ... people. That’s what I’m up to, really, when it comes down to it.
I’ve got the right to be an idiot and I’ve got the right to be clever, both at the same time, and I refuse to be only one or the other. I insist to be happy. I make an effort not to forget all those different colors : to get hilariously drunk sometimes and to pay all my electricity bills and to forget what time it is and run a band without a fault.
My mind is very demanding, and I get very easily bored. For me, falling in love is such a head thing. It has to be someone who can turn you on with your imagination, and the body usually follows.
And as far as love, and the falling out if it...
It all just tumbles, doesn’t it ? In one week. Even less. You end up saying, `What was it we did the last three years ? I forgot.’
I hope those weren’t your exact words.
No, I’m being cruel.
She thinks a moment, realizing that words which were supposed to be free-floating and emblematic suddenly seem horrible and specific.
When I was one year old I would get goose pimples when I heard a beautiful song. When he was one my son got goose pimples on his arm whenever he heard a beautiful sentence. And some other people get goose pimples when they see something pretty. But I’m more like that with sounds and noises.
I’ve got just one life. And that’s sad because there are too many brilliant things out there. I’d love to be a nurse in Africa and a ballet dancer in New York and run a children’s music school in China and a cafe in Peru. There’s so much that I want to do that I haven’t got time for.
I’m both, but I’m an optimist in the end, because I always have a strong sense of wonder for everything. Even when I feel down i still think, ’mmmm, maybe there’s a song to be had from this’. As a rule, we Icelanders are gloomier folk than others because living in the high north we get very little light, but we have developed a natural immunity against that. That is why there are so many artists in Iceland - art is a natural way of dealing with gloomy feelings. But I want to prove that music can be happy and facinating at the same time. That there is as much intense emotion in ’I feel fantastic,’ as in ’oh, I’m such a martyr !’
Everything must be done with passion. Dancing, fighting, fucking, eating. Yes ! I don’t get into many fights, I usually stop them. I was attacked by a dog, though, but that was self-defence.
I want to be quite self-sufficient like that. I think people should only do that in the case of emergency, but at the end of the day you’ve got to learn to live with yourself and if you need constant assistance just to do that... also I think you are supposed to be able to solve those things through friends and your relationship, not in an analysed, calculated manner, but in a free flowing, natural way, so you don’t end up stuck with the same problems for ten years...
I don’t see why people can’t take things as they are. What’s wrong with bread and butter and tube stations and cinemas, all these things around us ? I think they are the most intereesting and exciting and crazy things, the real things, so why do people have to put pretentions on things. like seeing things through pink sunglasses ? Reality is much more exciting than fantasy.
I think if there is a place to reveal yourself then it’s in the songs. It’s not like you decide, OK, I’m going to reveal myself. It’s just a certain need. You’re just focusing on the things you’re talking about and not necessarily yourself. I compare what I do to sleeping, because most journalists seem to get that pretty easily. There’s no way you can decide what position you’re going to be in when you wake up in the morning. You just roll around the bed and it happens. And if you don’t do it for a week, you go mad.
I think there’s a picture in everybody’s head of what is ordinary - It’s just like a model. You’ve got standards for so many things, for your typical business meeting, your typical rock concert, your typical meal, your typical love affair, your typical marriage, your typical wife. But it doesn’t exist really. It’s all very personal and all very up to you really
I don’t like in-between stuff.I love really, really sweet stuff like chocolate cakes and then I love curry, vindaloo, do you know what I mean ? I guess I’m an over emotional person. I’m very, very happy or I’m very, very this or very, very that. Always two verys.
But doesn’t she find this kind of big dipper existence a bit exhausting ? Are the highs worth the lows ?
Yeah, because even when I’m miserable it’s over in five minutes. It’s like (sticks out her chin, bulges the veins in her neck and clenches a fist) brraaaaaagh ! And, then it’s over, I go all the way to the bottom but then I go (the fist now soars skyward and she leaps off the chair for added emphasis) whooooooosh ! That’s a very Icelandic thing. A Viking, hardcore, don’t-feel-sorry-for-yourself attitude. When I laugh, I laugh really loud. You have to hurt yourself laughing or it’s no good.
