PARTY’S OVER
The story behind Björk’s dramatic rise and fall
One weekend in 1992, Björk turned up at the door of a terraced house in Manchester. There to greet her was Graham Massey of electronic music pioneers 808 State. The pair had met before, when the Icelandic singer helped write two songs for 808 State’s third album ex:el. This time — having recently left her own group The Sugarcubes to embark on a solo career — Björk was hoping Massey could return the favour.
The two musicians came up with a couple of songs. One was a ballad; the other, a propulsive banger based around a drum loop borrowed from Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks. The track came to be known as Army of Me.
“It was really spontaneous,” Massey tells me now. “We knew there was an energy to Army of Me. But it seemed too easy, too simple. It was just a breakbeat and a sequence and a kind of scat vocal.”
When neither of that day’s songs were included on Björk’s first solo album, Debut, the following year, Massey feared they would never see the light of day, but they reappeared on its followup, 1995’s Post. What’s more, Army of Me became the album’s lead single.
Now, 25 years on, Post is seen as one of the finest albums of the 1990s — weird, wonderful and widescreen. Musically, it spans techno, trip hop, jazz and the kind of glitchy ambient soundscapes that would later become Radiohead’s signature.
But critical and commercial success brought with them devastating consequences. By the time Björk started work on her next album, Homogenic, her life had spiralled out of control.
Her music would never sound the same again.
In 1993, Björk Gumundsdottir moved to London, where, she has said, she lived “the most happy life.” Not yet 30, she immersed herself in club culture.
“She was living large, definitely,” says Massey.
“We were clubbing left, right and centre,” Bernstein recalls. “It wasn’t just London. It was New York, Paris, everywhere. It was a pretty dynamic time.”
Björk picked up musical influences, like a shopper on a spree, leading Bono to dub her “the Imelda Marcos of good ideas.”
Björk’s zest for experimentation
extended to the recording of Post. It has been rumoured that she sang the echoey album track Cover Me while naked in a cave full of bats.
Bernstein, who was with her in the Bahamas at the time, dispels this myth, although it is true, he says, that Björk had wanted to record the track in a cave for its “beautiful reverb,” even though he reassured her he could use mixing desk trickery to create the same effect in a studio.
When she insisted, Bernstein had a special outdoor microphone flown in from Miami and the team trekked to a nearby cave.
“There was a really small hole to get in and it was full of bats,” says Massey. “It took me about three minutes to go forward and I came back on my knees in about two seconds . ... And then Björk went in and she came out just as quickly.”
But the singer did record another track while standing in the sea with a long microphone lead stretching to a diesel generator on the beach.
“It was quite an exciting thing because there was a strong risk of her getting an electric shock,” recalls Bernstein.
Post was released on June 13, 1995, amid a blizzard of problems. The original arty cover photo shoot was scrapped for something more poppy and colourful, and MTV temporarily banned the video for Army of Me which appeared to show Björk bombing an art museum.
Then, a sample on the track Possibly Maybe became the subject of a lawsuit launched against the singer. Björk and Derek Birkett,
the boss of her record label, One Little Indian, responded by threatening to recall and destroy all 750,000 copies of Post before the situation was resolved without a day in court.
But these obstacles were nothing compared with what happened next. In July that year, the singer embarked on a gruelling 105-date world tour. She arrived at Bangkok airport accompanied by her nine year-old son, Sindri. A radio reporter, Julie Kaufman, approached them, saying: “Welcome to Bangkok.” Video footage then shows a livid Björk pounce on Kaufman and wrestle her to the ground. She would later claim that Kaufman had directed the greeting at Sindri and had been pestering her for days. The fracas was reported around the world.
“I was gobsmacked by that,” Bernstein tells me, stressing that the singer was the one under attack. “It was like ‘ Whoa!’ In front of her kid. It hit us all ... an attack’s an attack.”
Björk, he says, was “in bits” about the incident. She later apologized to Kaufman, who chose not to press charges.
That autumn, things took an even bleaker turn. On Sept. 12, Ricardo Lopez — an obsessional fan said to be angry that Björk was in a romantic relationship — filmed himself in his Florida apartment preparing to send a homemade acid bomb concealed in a hollowed-out book to her London address.
On his return from the post office, Lopez started filming again. Standing naked in front of the camera, with Björk’s music playing in the background, he placed a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Police found his body four days later. In the U.K., officers intercepted and detonated his explosive device.
For Björk, everything had changed.
“It wasn’t just the letter bomb. Things were happening all around me, and I realized that I’d come to the end of the extrovert thing,” she would say.
She left London, moving first to Spain and then back to Iceland, saying, “I had to go home and search for myself again.”
Björk continues to release intriguing, acclaimed music today. But, after Post’s traumatic stress, she would never return to its carefree, carnival world. The party was over.
We were clubbing left, right and centre. It wasn’t just London. It was New York, Paris, everywhere. It was a pretty dynamic time.