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.
“I basically went to Derek [Birkett], my manager, and said, ‘Listen, I’m going to do digital theatre and it’s going to be the most over-the-top, flamboyant thing I will ever do, and I’ll probably only do it once,’” she says. Birkett has managed her for more than 40 years and she describes them together as “old punks”. Financially, such a set-up is restrictive; she paid for it by doing occasional orchestral performances of her work alongside it. Now Cornucopia has ended, any excess has been exorcised. “I can go back to something that’s more flexible, more like a troubadour, simpler. It is very glamorous to say, ‘Oh, I need 50 people to be able to perform the song,’ but it’s also very glamorous to say, ‘Oh, I actually don’t.’”
In 2011, when Björk released her seventh album, Biophilia, she changed the way she toured. Instead of moving from city to city every night, she set up a musical residency and stayed in the same place for weeks at a time. “The nuts and bolts are more flexible,” she explains. “Maybe being a woman, or a matriarch, or whatever, I try to make it more that people can actually have a life. I have gently fought, since my teenage years, this macho way of how people organise both films and tours. ‘Oh, let’s now work 18 hours a day, every single day, until everybody throws up.’ I always wanted to coexist. You can have a personal life. You can have your kids. You can have your partners there. I’m not saying I’ve succeeded,” she says, laughing, “but at least I’ve tried to create a world that is more open to things like that.”
On her most recent album, Fossora, in the song Fungal City, Björk sings of a positive outlook on the world: “Vibrant optimism happens to be my faith, too.” Is she an optimist by nature? “I would say in my group of friends, I am. I play that role, but it’s not like it doesn’t have its shadow.” In any group of friends, she adds, there are different archetypes: the healer, the academic, the pessimist. “But, then, of course, things are not so black and white. Sometimes people who are more the Pollyanna characters, they have a shadow. And I think the same with the pessimists – they have light. The few times when things actually do work out, they are very pleasantly happy. I think we have all the sides inside us, even though one is prominent, in how we execute light or navigate the world.”
For many years, Björk split her time between London – then New York – and Iceland. But she sold her Brooklyn apartment in 2019 and is now based in Iceland full-time. “I was always more in Iceland, but my daughter was finishing school in Brooklyn.” Björk turned 59 in November. Her daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney, is now 22; her son, Sindri Eldon þórsson, is 38. “Every year I was a little bit less in Brooklyn. It was a gradual fade, like 10 years, or something.” Does she think that Reykjavik is her place now, forever? “I mean, I think so. I’ve always lived there 60%, so for me, I’ve never moved away from that. When I’m there, I don’t do any press or I don’t go to any openings. I just live a very quiet sort of low-key life. So people usually don’t know I’m there, as well.” Does anywhere else tempt her? “Obviously, it’s about the people who live there. But also, maybe we are together on this, but I think the UK and Iceland are not exactly delicious in the winter months.” She laughs. “It’s nice to break it up. I think a lot of Icelandic people do that, to be like migrant birds. But the Icelandic summer is perfect. It’s the best place on earth.”
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.
Her parents divorced when she was a small child and her late mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, a feminist and an environmental activist herself, took her to live in a shared, commune-like house. “For me, listening to music with really charged lyrics, I was like, hmm, I don’t think this is the place to put that in. So for me, it is quite separate. But, like everyone, I set myself rules and then, obviously, I like to break them.” She mentions Declare Independence, a noisy blast from 2007, about colonial rule. “That was me breaking my rule, but part of it was humour. Most people connect protest music to Woodstock and acoustic guitars and butterflies and something really gentle. But Declare Independence was the opposite.”
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”.
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.”
Björk has released 10 studio albums as an adult solo artist, each standing secure in its own identity. She rarely, if ever, repeats herself, visually or sonically. “I feel dizzy when I look at them, but look at the lyrics. I have shared my shadows and my darkness, for sure. I feel like I have been quite truthful with the dark things and self-pity and things like this. But I have also tried to document the more optimistic or the playful side of my character. And music is about celebration. You listen to fado [a traditional, melancholic Portuguese style of music] and cry your eyes out if you have a rough year, but I do really look up to cultures like Argentina, with tango, where you can dance until you’re 100 years old. Music is such a celebratory thing, especially when people are going through hard times. It’s great to be able to just think, fuck it.”
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.”
When Björk looks at mainstream pop today, I wonder if she sees anyone and recognises any sense of herself in the 1990s, when she was a mainstream pop star, albeit not entirely intentionally? “I have a blind spot on myself, thank God. Most people can’t see themselves, what they are, in the context of the world. So it’s really hard for me to compare to other people. I’ll see some old photograph of myself and will be like, ‘Oh, wow!’ I’m as surprised as anyone else. I know what it feels like from the inside out, not outside in, if that makes any sense?”
A phone rings loudly, a real one this time. Björk is talking about Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), a record label and shop in Reykjavik that she helped to set up when she was a teenager, and the new generation coming up through it. “They help us with a lot of energy and fun and everything genius,” she says. “It’s still DIY, hand-make the poster, oh sorry, I have to…” The phone keeps ringing. “Yeah, I have to run,” she says. “I’m sorry.” And just like that, the black square is gone.
Björk’s Cornucopia, £60, is out now (shop.bjork.com)
Watch the exclusive live performance featuring Björk on Apple Music on 17 January at 7pm PT / 10pm ET. The Apple Music Live: Björk set list was arranged to celebrate a lifetime of creative innovation and performed in front of a live audience. Relive highlights from the show after the livestream in Spatial Audio exclusively on Apple Music
