The always uncjorked Bjork

Interview, June, 1995 by Jon Savage

JS: There's a great lyric on "Big Time Sensuality": "It takes courage to enjoy it." Do you have that courage?

B: I've got a lot of courage, but I've also got a lot of fear. You should allow yourself to be scared. It's one of the prime emotions. You might almost enjoy it, funny as it sounds, and find that you can get over it and deal with it. If you ignore these things, you miss so much. But when you want to enjoy something, especially when it's something you've just been introduced to, you've got to have a lot of courage to do it. I don't think I'm more courageous than most people. I'm an even mixture of all those prime emotions.

JS: Sex does take courage sometimes.

B: I think so, because if it lacks that sensation of jumping off a cliff, it would just miss so much. Then again, it has to be pleasurable and enjoyable and lush and all of that. But "Big Time Sensuality" was actually about when I first met Nellee Hooper. I think it's quite rare, when you're obsessed with your job, as I am, when you meet someone who's your other half jobwise and enables you to do what you completely want ... so it's not a sexual romance.

JS: Are you currently in a stable partnership?

B: No. I split with my boyfriend at the beginning of last November, and at that point I'd been with a stable boyfriend since the age of sixteen, though in different relationships. When we broke up, I thought I might as well enjoy this, which I do and I don't. It's scary at times. The best bit is that you're kind of skinless, you're more vulnerable and emotional and on the edge. There's also that silly thing that I had when I was fifteen and sixteen - looking around and wondering who it will be! So I'm sitting there on the subway thinking, Will you have a long nose or a short nose? Will you enjoy this or that film? It's like a little party game.

There's something really stupid and romantic, thinking that it's just going to be one person. Even though both of us might have five partners before we die, we always think of that one. Then there are all these things saying how brilliant it is to be self-sufficient and not needing anything or anybody and getting all these tools so that you can do everything yourself. It's like you're a little warrior armed with your Walkman and your video and all this technology. Everything's geared toward self-sufficiency. Fuck that. For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings.

JS: Do you have visual ideas in your mind when you're writing your songs?

B: Definitely. It's natural for me to express things first musically, then visually, and third, with words. So the words are like a translation of noises and pictures.

JS: "Army of Me" Is a heavy song. Did you have a picture in your mind when you wrote it?

B: I'm a polar bear and I'm with five hundred polar bears, just tramping over a city. The lyric is about people who feel sorry for themselves all the time and don't get their shit together. You come to a point with people like that where you've done everything you can do for them, and the only thing that's going to sort them out is themselves. It's time to get things done. I identify with polar bears. They're very cuddly and cute and quite calm, but if they meet you they can be very strong. They come to Iceland very rarely, once every ten years, floating on icebergs.