Lögberg-Heimskringla - 17.12.1993, Page 17

Lögberg-Heimskringla
Föstudagur 17. desember 1993 • 17
SUGARCUBE LOGIC:
Best way to be in love
Björk is riffling from
London about the best
way to be in love:
“You know the situation
when you’ve been dancing all
night oryou’ve gone to a real-
ly loud concert or something,
and then you come out and
the sun is coming out, or it’s
really raining? Just the clash
between coming from a loud
place and being out in the
street?”
Uh-huh.
“I wanted somebody in
love to be like this.”
The pixie-ish 28-year-old
former lead singer and key-
board player for Iceland’s
Sugarcubes—who made her
Canadian solo debut at the
Toronto Opera House in
November — not only
dreams in technicolor, she
talks in technicolor.
She’s explaining why she
recorded “There’s More To
life Than This, " in the wash-
room of a London club called
the Milk Bar, and how she
conned a deejay into putting
bed tracks for the song on his
tumtable, and how she then
recorded live over top of
them... and how all that con-
nects to love.
“There’s actually a deejay
working at the Milk Bar that
we all really know, and we
came up to him and said,
‘Listen, you’ve got to tmst us
on this one.’ You play this
tune, and it’s brilliant, it’s
really good, and he thought
we were obviously bringing in
some army or something
“TVnd I sneaked out, and I
had a I
and ended ujp
side.
“That’s because I
someone in love to be 1|
this.”
Follow this logic — deliv-
ered without a pause for
breath — and you’ve fígured
out not only Björk’s music,
but also that of the
Sugarcubes, the art-pop sex-
tet from Reykjavík that hung
up its sleigh last year after
touring behind its Stick
Around For Joy album.
The ‘Cubes were big in the
late ‘80s, but they melted
faster than the Wicked Witch
in The Wizard Of Oz after
deciding they’d had enough.
The way Björk casually
recalls her former band, it
was just the sideshow act of a
six-piece collective called
Bad Taste, whose members
supported each other’s film
and book projects, jokingly
handing out “Bad Taste
diplomas” to Iceland’s arts-
community stuffed shirts.
“The Sugarcubes was just
a hobby band,” she says.
“We just had this silly
band on weekends, and we
called ourselves the stupidest
name we could think of, like
the Monkees or something.
“It was a chance to put on
a fancy costume, to go and
have a laugh and get drunk.
es'weren’t
pf:Ör “musos”
as Bjðrk calls them, which
ötay or may not explain
everything about their sonic
science-lab experiments with
hard rock jazz and Iceland
soul, but Björk has a confes-
sion to make. She leans close
to the telephone and whis-
pers into it
“Now that I am working
with a new band, I must con-
fess: I am a muso. I must
come out of the closet. I’ve
been trying not to be for a
long time, but I guess here I
am.”
It must be the effect of
working with her new six-
member band, which is so
intemational in scope that it
could apply for a United
Nations’ charter.
“We’ve got a percussionist
from India, a drummer from
Turkey, a jazz pianist from
Iran, a bass player from
Barbados and another key-
board player from Wales,”
Björk says.
The diversity is represent-
ed in the music, with its
infectious rhythms and inter-
esting textures complement-
ing Björk’s vocals, which
range from feral growl to oth-
erworldly whisper.
It makes her debut album
(with its lead single “Human
Behaviour’) one of the year’s
most compelling pop releas-
Björk
es, and Björk credits that to
allowing her players to just
play as they feel, not as she
tells them to feel.
“They come from all over
and they’ve all got their own
cultures,” she says.
“It’s a bit like me, because
all this Iceland thing is very
much me. I don’t want to for-
get about that, and I want the
other musicians not to forget
about where they come
from.”
Her total willingness to
experiment led to other
unusual match-ups for Debut.
Björk met her producer,
Nellee Hooper of Soul II
Soul, in a chance encounter
with mutual friends, and even
though neither of them had
heard of the other’s music,
they quickly set up a strong
working relationship.
“I met someone who
thinks exactly the same way I
do, and that only happens
every five years or some-
thing,” Björk says.
She sought out Michel
Gondry, the young French
director of her striking
“Human Behaviour" video,
after seeing the way he incor-
porates clay animation figures
into live action.
The “Human Behaviour’’
video has a twist, which by
now you’d expect from Björk.
It shows a stuffed bear
being chased by a hunter in
the woods, but in the end, the
bear gets to drive off, literally,
into the sunset.
“The animals win at the
end,” Björk says proudly.
“They always lose in films,
and I hate that”
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