Untitled Document

BJÖRK
Sunday Telegraph - 2004

My mother has long been a champion of synchronised swimming. People don’t like it, she reasons, because it’s artistic. Perhaps she is on to something. Australia is not, after all, a country noted for its sensitivities to the arts and swimming in odd positions to create fancy patterns seems to me as legitimate a skill as running for an hour before vomiting on your coach.

I often have cause to fall back upon the "synchronised swimming defence" when asked to justify my taste for Bjork (If art rock is the love that dare not speak its name then Bjork is the artist whose name I dare not attempt pronounce). Her new album is called Medulla and, even by her esoteric standards, it’s weird. Actually, "weird" doesn’t come close. It sounds like a recording that was found attached to a satellite sent into space five million years ago as a record of some alien civilisation.

Coupled to this relentless oddness (the album is made entirely of vocal samples and singing) are typically Bjork-like pronouncements: "Instruments are so over," she has been reported as saying. To which one might be tempted to add, "… and so is Bjork," if this album weren’t so unnervingly brilliant.

In the same way that anything that smacks of the "interpretive" is derided as a non-sport, Bjork is frequently derided as being "silly" or "bizarre" – as though to be either of these was a bad thing. Hearing Tony Squires, for instance, critique her beautiful performance of Oceania at the opening of the Athens Olympics was like watching a gorilla tear apart a stereo to find the little people inside - perhaps if she had been a panellist on an infrequently amusing chat show who laughed at her own jokes she might have come up to the taxing Squire’s standards.

To chastise Bjork for being oblique and inscrutable is to miss the point. It is certainly true to say that as genuine loopsticks go she gives Kate Bush, Prince and Sinead O’Connor a run for their money (it is possibly no coincidence that her work resembles all three to a greater or lesser extent). But one can forgive her cryptic ruminations if only because they are delivered free of all calculation. When listening to Bjork you get the impression that if she wasn’t performing in the world’s stadiums she would be dancing around her living room dressed as a swan and singing into a tape-recorder.

In a sense Bjork succeeds where Radiohead fail. If Radiohead are a good rock band posing as artists then Bjork is an artist posing as a rock star. Unlike Thom Yorke and co., Bjork’s work never feels stifled by the dictates of fashion, coming instead straight from where all good art ought, the heart.

With Bjork there is no distance between the audience and the star. This is the sign of an artist who is free of both guile and cynicism. Silly she may be; but in times rich with fashion models armed with white belts and the full powers of a record company publicity department I would prefer some authentic silliness to the weary cynicism of so much that passes for new music.