Not everything she does works - repeated playings of her maddeningly over the top cover of blonde bombshell Betty Hutton's It's Oh So
Not everything she does works - repeated playings of her maddeningly over the top cover of blonde bombshell Betty Hutton's "It's Oh So Quiet" are now being used by the CIA to extract confessions - but the things that do, work in a new way. Her fond memories of the late eighties boom in British DJ culture attest to its liquefying influence on her music. "Sometimes you have to go to 50 clubs, and then at number 51, if you're still there at six in the morning, you will just see miracles - something to make you believe it's mind over matter and everything is possible."This is exactly the effect Bjork's best songs can have. "In a lot of ways England stood for everything I couldn't stand," she admits, somewhat undiplomatically. "That kind of conservatism of deciding chairs should be brown and making them brown for a thousand years - it's just in my system to go 'Aargh! Make them pink'." Bjork pauses.
"But then that is a fault of mine as well, because there are only so many times you can change the colour of a chair."She is now Anglicised to the point of dissolving into helpless laughter at the very mention of Alan Partridge, and the oddest feature of her speech is not the flurries of extravagantly rolled R's but the occasional sentence that could have been uttered by a life-long Londoner. This resolute independence of spirit has served her well since she dissolved the Sugarcubes in 1992. "People say 'You're so lucky to have such a great situation with your record label', but they don't realise it's a long story. I have had 500 options to sell out or compromise, and I never did. Each time it was maybe not a big step - people might say 'oh that wouldn't matter, that's just a detail' - but when you've gone 500 compromises down the road, you're fucked."The choice of London as the launch pad for Bjork's solo career must have been something of a compromise, as she'd often spoken of her antipathy towards the city. "Then drive around Europe playing in black cellars to twenty punks - stealing petrol from other people's cars and running into motorway shops and eating sugar to get energy."Few can boast of having seen the band she used to play with whose name translates as "Cork The Bitch's Arse", but the success of the more accessibly labelled Sugarcubes made Bjork an indie pin-up.
Some had their doubts about the unsettlingly child-like brand of sexuality she projected. Bjork in turn resented the way her Icelandicness was exoticised. "I think English people still have more imperialism in them than they think. A lot of people here can't deal with the fact that there are places on the planet where people don't drink tea. The English eat all sorts of birds - pigeons, ducks, sparrows - but if you tell them you eat puffin, you might as well come from Mars."As a matter of general interest, what do puffins taste like? "They're quite tough and the meat is very dark." There was - and is - a steely- eyed quality about Bjork's refusal to be typecast as a novelty turn. we were the first rappers of Europe!" The scientific bias of Icelandic TV - in Bjork's youth broadcasting for just three hours a night, with Thursdays and all July off - seems to have had an impact too.
"There is such a big chunk of me that is David Attenborough," she says, very seriously. "I think he is my biggest inspiration."A healthy scepticism about the value of fame for its own sake ("In Iceland you just have to walk once naked down the main street and everyone will call you 'the naked person' for the rest of your life") saw Bjork through an awkward brush with child stardom at the tender age of eleven. In her mid-teens she fell in with the anarchic crowd that sustained Iceland's only independent record shop, and underwent a rigorous musical education."We would do odd jobs all year to buy a van," Bjork remembers. "That's very much how I still operate," she agrees.What was most important to her in the culture of her homeland? "We've always been obsessed with information, that has been our role for the last 1,000 years Icelandic people were the ones who memorised the sagas ... "But it was very much a question of getting a key round my neck and becoming my own little trooper. I learnt very quickly to just go to the right place to find what I needed - if I wanted someone to make me hot chocolate, I would go to my granny's house, if I wanted to laugh I'd go to this uncle or if I wanted to find out about Stockhausen I'd go to another."The ease with which Bjork seems to skip from one shrewdly chosen collaborator to another suggests that this "hunter and collector" mentality has carried through into her professional life too.
While this is so, England will always believe they have a chance of winning the series.Peter Robinson writes for The Star, Johannesburg. the mellow tinkle of a grand piano mingles with the ambient gush of an indoor waterfall. In the glitzy tea room of her favourite Hyde Park Corner hotel, Bjork Gudmundsdottir and her press officer are enjoying a sorbet. There is probably an even better No 3 than Cronje already in the team, but Brian McMillan is unlikely to be moved from No 6. The most consistent and technically adept player in the side, McMillan's reward for scoring a century at the Wanderers was to be shifted down a place to No 7.South Africa corrected this mistake here in Port Elizabeth but the overall frailty of the batting remains. In particular, there is a problem with the No 3 position, from which Cronje has stubbornly refused to budge and move down to No 5, a position to which he is surely better suited.