"Before punk, the only live bands were cover bands who'd sing in English. Instead, it was about overthrowing Anglo-American pop-culture imperialism. Icelandic punk had a different inflection – it wasn't fuelled by political rage (Iceland has no class system, claims Björk) or death-tripping nihilism. Spit & Snot, the first of four (some accounts say seven) bands she participated in before The Sugarcubes. I only wrote one tune on the LP." Instead of doing a follow-up, she shaved her eyebrows and started an all-girl punk band. "And I felt weird 'cos all I did was sing the songs.
"I didn't like being recognised on the streets," she says, nibbling at a tofu salad. Björk first became a star aged 11, when her album of pop covers was a smash in Iceland. Maybe this hard shell is something you acquire when you've been in the public eye for 25 years. "Born stubborn, me," as she sings on Vespertine, an album that is all about sanctuary, withdrawal, and privacy.
Seemingly made of the same stuff as Iceland's igneous landscape, she's like a pebble: small, but elementally obdurate. But 'flinty' seems a better fit for this new Björk. In the past she's talked of being a warrior, and 'fierce' remains one of her favourite words. Over the next two hours, Björk is perfectly forthcoming, but there's this sense that she's wary, withholding herself somehow. But nope, clean as a whistle – two of the daintiest nostrils I've ever seen. These tics go on for so long I start sneaking peeks to see if anything's lodged up there, some dangling boulder of bogey. One symptom of her discomfort is an almost Tourette's-like compulsion to pull at her face – tugging at her cheeks, wiping her nose and almost-picking with little digs on the rim of the nostril. We're in a Japanese tea room a few yards from the rehearsal studio in Chelsea, New York, where she and her "band" – experimental electronica duo Matmos – are adapting the new album Vespertine for Björk's upcoming world tour of opera houses. She's also oddly awkward for a seasoned superstar who's been interviewed a gazillion times, nervously asking if I mind if she has something to eat. From the public persona of song and video, you might reasonably expect effervescence, an explosive extravagance of self at a bare minimum, vivaciousness. She's not a bit how you'd think she'd be.
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