One of the wildest vocalists in all
of popular music, Bjork Gudmundsdottir (known
popularly simply as Bjork) has spent most of
her life creating artful, experimental music that
defies classification. Those who know her only by
her solo career may be surprised to learn that she
released albums with three separate bands prior to
going it alone in 1993, and in fact this eccentric
and original talent has had some measure of fame
since she was sixteen.
When Bjork was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, it
was not immediately apparent that she would someday
become the world's best-known Icelandic musician, if
not the country's most identifiable citizen. As a
child, she studied flute, piano, and voice, and by
1979, she had joined her first band. At fifteen, she
formed the group Tappi Tikarass, a post-punk outfit
influenced strongly by Siouxsie and the Banshees. In
1982, two of the band's songs were included in a
documentary on the Icelandic New Wave called Rock in
Reykjavik, and as a result, Bjork was soon
recognized as one of the area's most promising new
talents.
In 1983, Bjork and other stars of the
Icelandic New Wave were invited to join together as
a sort of supergroup for a special radio program.
She and several of the other members ?among them,
Einar Orn and Sigtryggur Baldursson ?got along
rather well, and by the fall of that year, they had
formed a new band, Kukl. By the time Tappi
Tikarass's second and final album came out late in
1983, Kukl had become Bjork's main creative
outlet. Over the next two years, she and the band
put out two albums, toured Europe, and began to
develop a jazzy, political post-punk sound. But by
mid-1986, Kukl was finished.
Bjork and her husband, guitarist Thor Eldon,
had a son, Sindri, born June 8, 1986, and on the
same day a new band was founded, featuring the two
happy parents, plus several former Kukl members. By
the end of the year, they had finalized the group's
name: Sykurmolarnir, or, in English, the Sugarcubes.
The success of the Icelandic version of the group's
dreamy and remarkable first single,
"Birthday," in 1987, led to them signing a
record deal with Elektra. In spring of 1988, their
debut album, Life's Too Good, was released in
America to glowing reviews. Besides
"Birthday," the jangly, somewhat puzzling
"Motorcrash" also received a good bit of
airplay. A second CD, Here Today Tomorrow Next Week,
didn't fare as well, however. In 1990, Bjork
took some time out to record Gling Glo, an album of
traditional Icelandic jazz tunes.
Though the Sugarcubes' third album, 1992's Stick
Around for Joy, generated the aptly titled single,
"Hit," the band broke up later that year.
By that time, most of the Sugarcubes' notoriety
focused around Bjork anyway; her departure to
begin a solo career made sense. The Sugarcubes' swan
song, It's It, was released late in 1992; an album
of re-mixes, it presaged Bjork's solo work
with dance re-mixes.
Having split up with Thor, Bjork and her son
moved to London in 1993. The move allowed her to
work with producers in the British dance music
scene, and it was one of the finest, Nellee Hooper,
who helmed Bjork's first solo album, Debut.
Highlighted by a tremendous single, the
timpani-and-sampled-guitar-fueled "Human
Behaviour," Debut received wildly varying
reviews, getting trashed by Rolling Stone but lauded
by many others. The numbers tell the real story:
sales figures for Debut finally established Bjork
as a star in America.
In 1995, Bjork followed up with the more
melancholy Post. It didn't make the same kind of
sales impact as Debut, despite the hugely
entertaining, Busby Berkeley-ish video for
"Blow a Fuse (It's Oh So Quiet)," a Bjork-does-big-band-jazz
extravaganza. Early 1997 saw the release of
Telegram, in which nearly every track from Post was
either re-mixed or re-recorded by collaborators
ranging from Dillinja to Deodato to the Brodsky
Quartet. Where Bjork goes from here is
anyone's guess. She recently conducted a radio
interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen, the classical
electronic-music pioneer. Will she next create some
sort of experimental ambient recording? A new twist
on modern dance music? Either way, it's likely to be
another bold step along her utterly unique musical
path.
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