Make It Triangular! Make It Primordial! Make It Hairy!

Caves full of bats and human trombones. Earthquake beats and microscopic sounds. Pagan poetry and scientific rigour… Thirty years on from the Sugarcubes’ “Birthday”, Björk remains a unique and brilliant creative force. To celebrate the anniversary, Graeme Thomson rounds up the elusive artist’s closest collaborators, and learns the secrets of her greatest albums. “It was like standing next to a volcano,” says Anohni. “I couldn’t keep up.”

In 1976, an 11-year-old music student named Björk Guðmundsdóttir appeared on the radio in her native Iceland. Over the subsequent 40 years, Björk has pursued her idiosyncratic muse through the nightclubs of Manchester, a cave in nassau, recording studios in Mali and beyond. There have been experiments with rare earth magnets, albums about “patterns in nature and music, and how they relate to each other” and annual board meetings of her old band, the Sugarcubes. Over the next 11 pages, we speak to many of Björk’s closest collaborators who provide eye-witness testimony to her remarkable creative achievements. We learn of an “inhuman oracle sound”, trips to record waterfalls and innovative instructions delivered in the studio to her co-conspirators: “You know when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste? It needs to sound like that…”

THE SUGARCUBES LIFE’S TOO GOOD

(ONE LITTLE INDIAN, 1988)

The seasick sway of “Birthday” introduces 22-year-old Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s extraordinary voice to the world, and a star is born. The Sugarcubes’ first single is followed by an LP of off-kilter indie, bubblegum pop, post-punk attack, conceptual art-rock… and plastic trumpets.