The story of Björk

A child of Reykjavík

Björk Gudmundsdottir was born in Reykjavík on the twenty first of November 1965. Her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, was a free spirited activist, and her father, Gudmundur Gunnarsson, was an electrician who would later spend almost two decades leading Iceland's electricians' union. They separated when she was very small, and she grew up moving between two very different homes. Her mother remarried a rock guitarist, Sævar Árnason, and ran a loose, hippie household that felt a lot like a commune. Her father's home was tidier and more conservative. One of the deepest influences came from her grandmother, who remembered the old rural Iceland and sang her the traditional folk tunes that Björk still calls the melodies of old women.[1] [2] [3]

Music school started early. As a small child Björk enrolled at a music school in Reykjavík, studying classical piano and the flute, and she later played the flute well enough to tackle an atonal Finnish concerto. A teacher pointed her toward the radical end of classical music, and she fell for Stockhausen, Messiaen and John Cage. She was already experimenting at home, building beats from a cassette of her grandfather snoring and drumming along to a popcorn machine. According to her later bandmate Siggi Baldursson, her parents would stand her on a table at the age of seven to sing for their guests. Not everyone found her charming. She has said that local kids sometimes threw stones at her because they thought she was strange.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Her first break came from a school recital. Björk sang Tina Charles's disco hit I Love to Love, and her teachers sent a recording to RÚV, then the only radio station in Iceland. It was broadcast nationally, and a record label called Fálkinn offered the eleven year old a contract. The album, simply called Björk, came out in December 1977 with help from her stepfather. It mixed Icelandic language covers of songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder with new material, including an instrumental she wrote herself as a tribute to the painter Jóhannes Kjarval. Her mother designed the sleeve. The record did well at home, but when she was offered a second album she said no, and spent her earnings on a piano so she could write her own songs.[1] [2] [3]

Punk, poets and Kukl

When punk and post punk reached Iceland at the end of the seventies, Björk dived in. As a teenager she formed an all girl punk group called Spit and Snot, sang in a jazz fusion band called Exodus, and then in 1981 joined bassist Jakob Magnússon in a new band, Tappi Tíkarrass. The name is a rude Icelandic phrase that translates as cork the bitch's ass, taken from a remark by Jakob's father about how tightly their music fitted together. They put out an EP in 1982 and an album, Miranda, in 1983. The band also appeared in Rokk í Reykjavík, a documentary about the capital's exploding new scene, and the teenage Björk became the face on its posters and its video cover.[1] [2] [3]

Around this time Björk fell in with a surrealist art group called Medusa. Through them she met the guitarist Thor Eldon and the poet Sjón, who would go on to write lyrics with her for the rest of her career. In August 1983, the radio producer Ásmundur Jónsson gathered a group of musicians from different Reykjavík bands to play on the last episode of a radio show called Áfangar. Björk was joined by the trumpeter and singer Einar Örn Benediktsson, drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson, guitarist Gudlaugur Óttarsson, keyboard player Einar Melax and bassist Birgir Mogensen. They enjoyed it so much that they stayed together as Kukl, a word linked to sorcery. It was in Kukl that Björk began to develop the howls and shrieks that became her trademark.[1] [2] [3]

Kukl played their first proper show on the twentieth of September 1983, opening for the English anarchist punk band Crass in Reykjavík. Crass liked them enough to sign them to their own label. The first Kukl album, The Eye, came out in 1984, produced by Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud, and its title came from Björk's favourite book at the time, Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. The band toured Europe, and when they played Denmark's Roskilde Festival they became the first Icelandic band ever to appear there. Björk also published a small hand coloured book of her own poems in 1984. A second Kukl album, Holidays in Europe, followed in January 1986, but personal tensions were already pulling the band apart.[1] [2]

In 1986 Kukl caused a small national scandal. They performed on Icelandic television with Björk heavily pregnant and her midriff bare, and Siggi Baldursson later remembered the TV switchboards lighting up with complaints. She was twenty but looked much younger, and viewers were horrified. That same year Björk made her first film, The Juniper Tree, a low budget black and white fairy tale based on the Brothers Grimm, directed by Nietzchka Keene. She played Margit, a girl whose mother has been killed for witchcraft. Money problems kept the film on the shelf until 1990, and it competed at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. As Kukl wound down, Björk kept working with Gudlaugur Óttarsson in a side project called the Elgar Sisters.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Sugarcubes

In the summer of 1986 Einar Örn came back from studying in London with a plan. With Thor Eldon and other friends from the scene, including Sjón, he set up an arts collective called Smekkleysa, which means Bad Taste, meant to be both a record label and a publisher. A band grew out of the collective, and by its members' own account it was a deliberately cute pop group, started partly as a joke to raise money for the collective. They called themselves Sykurmolarnir, the Sugarcubes. The band dates its birth to the eighth of June 1986, the same day Björk gave birth to her son with Thor, Sindri Eldon Thorsson. Their first Icelandic single came out on the twenty first of November 1986, Björk's twenty first birthday.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Sugarcubes signed to One Little Indian, a small London label run by Derek Birkett, who had played in the Crass circle, and to Elektra in the United States. Their first English language single, Birthday, came out in Britain on the seventeenth of August 1987. Melody Maker made it single of the week, and the BBC disc jockey John Peel championed it so hard that his listeners voted it number one in his Festive Fifty for 1987. The debut album, Life's Too Good, followed in 1988. It became the first Icelandic album to make a real impact around the world, eventually selling more than a million copies, and it pointed the global music press toward a small island that had rarely been on its map.[1] [2] [3]

America fell for them too. At a 1988 show at the Ritz in New York, David Bowie and Iggy Pop were in the audience, and on the fifteenth of October the band played Saturday Night Live. Behind the scenes, Björk and Thor had split up soon after their son was born, yet they carried on in the band together, and by several accounts stayed good friends. The second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week, arrived in 1989 to weaker reviews, with many critics complaining that Einar Örn's shouted vocals crowded out Björk. During a break in 1990 she recorded Gling Gló, an album of jazz standards and Icelandic songs with a local piano trio, which as of 2011 was still her best selling record in Iceland.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The Sugarcubes' third and final album, Stick Around for Joy, came out in February 1992 and gave them a genuine hit, fittingly titled Hit. That autumn they opened for U2 on the American leg of the Zoo TV tour, playing to around seven hundred thousand people in total, and a remix of Leash Called Love reached number one on Billboard's dance club chart. By then Björk had decided to go solo, and she only stayed to fulfil the contract. The band split at the end of 1992 after a last show in Reykjavík. Rolling Stone called them the biggest rock band ever to come out of Iceland. They reunited just once, on the seventeenth of November 2006, for a concert in Reykjavík with the profits going to Bad Taste.[1] [2]

London and Debut

Björk had grown tired of guitar rock. Late nights in London's clubs convinced her that house music was the only truly modern pop being made, and she moved to the city to start again. She already had a stack of songs, some dating back years. In Manchester she wrote with Graham Massey of 808 State, producing early versions of Army of Me and The Modern Things. She also recorded jazz standards with the American harpist Corky Hale, who nearly turned the job down until her stepson, a Sugarcubes fan, insisted. Then her boyfriend Dominic Thrupp introduced her to Nellee Hooper, the Bristol producer behind Soul II Soul and Massive Attack. She worried he was too tasteful for her, but once they talked she changed her mind.[1] [2] [3]

Debut came out on the fifth of July 1993. One Little Indian guessed it might sell forty thousand copies to Sugarcubes fans. Instead it sold more than six hundred thousand in its first three months, reached number three in Britain, stayed on the chart for seventy nine weeks, went platinum in America and was named album of the year by the NME. The first single, Human Behaviour, was inspired by the nature films of David Attenborough and looks at people through an animal's eyes. Its video was the first of many with the French director Michel Gondry. The bear in it is clearly a toy, because Björk felt that forcing a real animal to perform would go against everything the song stood for.[1] [2] [3]

Other songs drew on London's mix of cultures. For Venus as a Boy, her friend the tabla player Talvin Singh arranged for the strings to be recorded by a film studio orchestra in Bombay, giving it a Bollywood shimmer. Later that year she sang Play Dead, written with David Arnold and Jah Wobble for the film The Young Americans, and it was added to later pressings of the album. The video for Big Time Sensuality, with Björk dancing on the back of a truck rolling through New York, made her a fixture on MTV. At the 1994 Brit Awards she won best international female and best international newcomer. Björk herself was modest, calling Debut a kind of rehearsal and saying she could do much better.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Success brought offers from everywhere. Björk worked on tracks with Tricky and with the electronic duo Plaid, and she co wrote the title song of Madonna's 1994 album Bedtime Stories. She also brought new people into her world. For her first solo tour she hired the Iranian born keyboard player Leila Arab, and on the next tour she let Leila experiment with mixing the live sound from the stage, which became the basis of Leila's own career on labels like Warp. It was the first of many times Björk used her position to lift up younger or overlooked artists. In interviews she joked that if she had come from Nottingham instead of Iceland, the reviews would have been far more ordinary.[1] [2]

Post, fame and danger

Work on the second album began in late 1994 at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, in the Bahamas. Björk treated the island as part of the recording. She waded into the sea at sunset to sing, with a digital recorder running off a generator on the beach, and the first version of Cover Me was recorded in a cave, with bats audible in the background. The team grew to include Nellee Hooper, Tricky, Graham Massey and Howie B, and the Brazilian arranger Eumir Deodato added lush strings. She called the album Post because every song was written after her move to England, and because the word also means mail, a nod to her letters home. Post came out on the twelfth of June 1995 and reached number two in Britain.[1] [2]

Post gave Björk her biggest hits. Army of Me, a heavy, industrial track built on a drum sample from Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks, was written as a tough love message to a relative, and it became her first British top ten single. Its video, in which she blows up a museum, was dropped by MTV before it aired because the Oklahoma City bombing had just happened. Then came It's Oh So Quiet, a cover of a big band number made famous by Betty Hutton in 1951, itself adapted from a German song. It reached number four and spent fifteen weeks on the UK chart, helped by Spike Jonze's video of a whole street bursting into a musical. Hyperballad followed it into the top ten.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The attention was relentless. The Post tour ran to one hundred and five dates, with Aphex Twin opening in North America, and the tabloids followed her love life, from a brief romance with Tricky to an engagement to the drum and bass producer Goldie. The press built a cute pixie image around her that she later worked hard to shake off. In February 1996 it boiled over. Björk landed at Bangkok airport with her nine year old son after a long flight, having asked reporters to leave the boy alone until a press conference. When a television reporter, Julie Kaufman, approached Sindri, Björk lunged at her and wrestled her to the ground before security stepped in. Björk apologised, and Kaufman chose not to press charges.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Far worse was coming. Since 1993 a young man in Florida named Ricardo López had been obsessed with Björk, filling a diary with hundreds of pages about her. When he read that she was dating Goldie, he became enraged, driven partly by racist anger because Goldie is Black. On the twelfth of September 1996 he mailed a parcel to her London home, a hollowed out book rigged to spray sulphuric acid in the face of whoever opened it. He then filmed himself taking his own life. Police found his body and his tapes four days later and warned Scotland Yard, who intercepted the parcel at a south London sorting office and destroyed it safely. Björk was unharmed. She and Goldie had in fact split up days before.[1] [2] [3]

Björk spoke only briefly in public. She said she was very distressed, that it was terrible and sad, and she sent a card and flowers to López's family. A year later she admitted that she could not sleep for a week, and that the thought of her son being hurt had frightened her badly. Sindri was given a minder to take him to school. Her tour drummer, Trevor Morais, offered her his studio in the south of Spain, and she left London to work there, away from the press. Looking back in 2001, she said it was not only the bomb. She felt she had reached the end of her experiment in being an extrovert, and needed to go home and find herself again.[1] [2] [3]

Homogenic and Dancer in the Dark

In Spain Björk made a decisive change. She ended her partnership with Nellee Hooper, saying they had stopped surprising each other, and brought in new collaborators, above all Mark Bell of the Leeds techno duo LFO, along with Guy Sigsworth, Howie B and the engineer Markus Dravs. The idea was a record with one flavour, about Iceland itself. Björk wanted it to sound like rough volcanoes with soft moss growing over them, with electronic beats as a heartbeat and the Icelandic String Octet supplying the old world colour. The sessions were loose. Wu Tang Clan nearly contributed but were too busy, and a young woman hired as a babysitter, Rebecca Storey, ended up on the production team after showing an interest in the equipment.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Homogenic came out in September 1997 with a striking cover image of Björk as a kind of futuristic warrior, shot by Nick Knight and designed by her friend Alexander McQueen. She later said she wore ten kilos of hair, special contact lenses and clogs she could barely walk in. The first single, Jóga, was named for her best friend Jóga, the wife of Jón Gnarr, who would later become mayor of Reykjavík. Its words, like those of Bachelorette, were written by Sjón. Bachelorette had originally been offered to Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Stealing Beauty, until Björk sent him a fax saying she was keeping it. That April, Iceland had awarded her the Order of the Falcon.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The album's quiet closing track became one of its most famous moments. All Is Full of Love was written and recorded in half a day, after a lonely winter in the Spanish mountains, when Björk woke one April morning and heard birds singing. For the single in 1999 she chose the director Chris Cunningham, known for his unsettling videos for Aphex Twin. He made a short film of two white robots with Björk's face being assembled in a factory and then kissing. It is regularly named among the greatest music videos ever made, won awards across the world and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The single is also often cited as the first ever DVD single.[1] [2] [3]

In 1999 the Danish director Lars von Trier asked Björk to write the music for his film Dancer in the Dark. Then he persuaded her to star in it, arguing that only the composer could truly play the character. She became Selma, a Czech immigrant factory worker in nineteen sixties America who is going blind and saving every penny for an operation to stop her son suffering the same fate. The shoot was famously bruising. Björk and von Trier clashed constantly, and at one point she walked off the set for four days. Von Trier said she was not acting but feeling everything, and her co star Catherine Deneuve said much the same. At Cannes in 2000 the film won the Palme d'Or, and Björk won best actress.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For the soundtrack, Selmasongs, Björk recorded the sounds of the set itself, factory machines and trains, and turned them into rhythm. On the album the duet I've Seen It All is sung with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and it was nominated for an Academy Award for best original song, losing to Bob Dylan. At the ceremony on the twenty fifth of March 2001 she wore a dress shaped like a swan, designed by Marjan Pejoski, and pretended to lay an egg on the red carpet. It was widely mocked, but it later became one of the most famous red carpet outfits of all time. After the film she said she would never act again, though she later explained she had never wanted to act and made an exception for von Trier.[1] [2] [3] [4]

New York, Vespertine and Medúlla

In the late nineties Björk met the American artist Matthew Barney in New York's art world, and by 2000 they were living together in Brooklyn Heights. The new relationship shaped her next album. Vespertine, released in August 2001, was the opposite of Homogenic, hushed and intimate, a winter record about love and home. Its working title was Domestika. Björk wrote much of it on a laptop, and the San Francisco duo Matmos helped her build tiny beats from household sounds like shuffling cards and cracking ice. There were music boxes, harp from Zeena Parkins, choirs, and words drawn from E. E. Cummings and the playwright Sarah Kane. She described the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack as the day job and Vespertine as the hobby.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Vespertine sold two million copies by the end of 2001, her fastest seller up to then. Its videos pushed the boundaries. Nick Knight's clip for Pagan Poetry, with close up piercings and a topless McQueen wedding dress, was banned by MTV, and so was Eiko Ishioka's video for Cocoon, even though Björk was wearing a skintight bodysuit. She toured opera houses and theatres for the best acoustics, with Matmos, Zeena Parkins and a choir of Inuit singers she had auditioned in Greenland. She turned down an invitation to sing Gollum's Song for The Lord of the Rings because she was pregnant, and her compatriot Emilíana Torrini recorded it instead. Her daughter, Ísadóra, was born on the third of October 2002.[1] [2] [3]

The next album began with a moment of subtraction. While eight months pregnant, Björk was adding her own drums to demo tracks when she realised she liked them better with the instruments muted. Medúlla, named after the Latin word for marrow, was built almost entirely from human voices. She recruited the Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, the beatboxers Rahzel and Dokaka, Mike Patton of Faith No More, Robert Wyatt and choirs from Iceland and London. Beyoncé was also invited but could not fit it into her schedule. Björk said the record was partly a reaction to the flag waving she saw in New York after the September eleventh attacks, and called it anti patriotic. It debuted at number fourteen in America, then her highest position.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 2004 Björk sang at the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics. The organisers had hoped for something along the lines of We Are the World. Björk found her own attempts at a sporty lyric so silly that she laughed, and asked Sjón for help. He even took a short course in Greek mythology, and together they wrote Oceania, sung from the point of view of the sea. As she performed, her dress slowly unfurled into a map of the world about nine hundred square metres in size, which spread over the athletes. The following year she and Barney made the art film Drawing Restraint 9, in which they play guests on a Japanese whaling ship who turn into whales, with a score by Björk.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After the tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean at the end of 2004, Björk invited musicians and fans to send in their own covers and remixes of Army of Me. More than six hundred people responded, and the resulting album raised about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for UNICEF's work in the region. In February 2006 she travelled to Banda Aceh in Indonesia to see the work for herself, a trip that later fed into her next album. In 2005 she also headlined the Live 8 concert in Japan, and the British magazine Q gave her its Inspiration award, presented by Robert Wyatt. The Sugarcubes' one night reunion followed in Reykjavík in November 2006.[1] [2] [3]

Volta, Biophilia and the fight for Iceland

Volta, released on the first of May 2007, was loud and joyful after the quiet of her previous records. Björk worked with the hip hop producer Timbaland on several tracks, including the single Earth Intruders, which grew out of her visit to Banda Aceh. Other guests included the Congolese group Konono Number One, the Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté, the singer Anohni and an all female Icelandic brass section. Volta entered the Billboard 200 at number nine, as of 2026 still her only top ten album in America. The tour lasted eighteen months, with Mark Bell, drummer Chris Corsano, pianist Jónas Sen and Damian Taylor playing the Reactable, a glowing touch table instrument, alongside ten brass players.[1] [2] [3]

One Volta song made headlines around the world. Declare Independence was written for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, both still part of the Danish kingdom, and Björk used it in concert to support other causes. After she dedicated it to Kosovo in Tokyo, her appearance at Serbia's Exit Festival was cancelled. Then on the second of March 2008, in Shanghai, she ended the song by shouting Tibet again and again. China's Ministry of Culture denounced her and warned she could be banned from performing there, and months later it brought in new rules for foreign acts. Björk said the authorities had sensationalised the moment. She had played at Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the United States back in the nineties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At home, Björk was increasingly an activist. Her mother had gone on a hunger strike for twenty three days in 2002 to protest a huge aluminium smelter and dam project in the Icelandic highlands, and Björk shared her concern. She founded an organisation called Náttúra to promote Icelandic nature and small green industries, wrote about the country's economy in The Times after the 2008 banking crash, and helped set up a venture fund for sustainable business. In January 2011 she staged a three day karaoke marathon to protest the sale of a geothermal power company to a Canadian firm, and her petition gathered forty seven thousand signatures. In 2010 she received Sweden's Polar Music Prize alongside Ennio Morricone.[1] [2] [3]

Biophilia, released in October 2011, was her most ambitious project yet, billed as the first app album. Every song came with its own iPad app linking music to nature and science, from crystals to viruses to the moon, with an introduction narrated by David Attenborough. New instruments were built for it, including the gameleste, a mix of gamelan and celesta, a harp driven by swinging pendulums, and a Tesla coil used as an instrument. The live show premiered at the Manchester International Festival in June 2011, and an education programme for children aged eleven to thirteen was later taken into every school in Reykjavík. In 2014 the Biophilia app became the first app in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There were setbacks. In 2012 Björk had to cancel some Biophilia shows, and that November she revealed she had undergone laser surgery on a polyp on her vocal cords, after years of trying to manage it with diet and exercise. She said she stayed silent for three weeks, and then found her voice as good as before. Two years later came a real loss. On the eighth of October 2014, Mark Bell died at the age of forty three from complications after an operation. He had worked on almost every Björk album from Homogenic to Biophilia, and she once named him alongside Stockhausen, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno as her biggest influences. She marked his death by sharing LFO's track Love Is the Message.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Heartbreak and utopia

In 2013 Björk and Matthew Barney separated after more than a decade together, and she called it the most painful thing she had ever experienced. She poured it into Vulnicura, Latin for cure for wounds. To keep her mind busy she became, in her words, a violin nerd, arranging everything for strings, and she brought in the young Venezuelan producer Arca, whose mixtape her manager had sent her, along with the British producer the Haxan Cloak. Björk said it was the most fun music making of her life, about the most tragic subject. The album leaked online on the eighteenth of January 2015, so it was rushed out digitally two days later, two months ahead of schedule.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

That March, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a retrospective of her career. It featured the Biophilia instruments playing by themselves in the lobby, a room of her videos, her notebooks and costumes, and a new ten minute film for Black Lake, the album's rawest song, shown in a room with forty nine hidden speakers. That same year Time named her one of the world's hundred most influential people that year. An all acoustic version, Vulnicura Strings, followed, featuring the viola organista, an instrument designed by Leonardo da Vinci but only built centuries later. The Vulnicura tour ended abruptly in August 2015, and none of it was filmed, the only tour of her career left undocumented.[1] [2]

The Vulnicura videos led Björk into virtual reality. Stonemilker was filmed as a three hundred and sixty degree video on the Icelandic beach where she wrote the song, and in June 2016 she launched Björk Digital, a touring exhibition of VR music videos, in Sydney. In Tokyo that month she took part in what was billed as the first virtual reality live stream on YouTube, singing Quicksand. The VR film for Notget won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions festival in 2017. Björk later said people had cried inside their headsets, and that the isolation of wearing one suited what she called a private opera. The exhibition went on to visit around twenty cities.[1] [2] [3]

In October 2017, as the allegations against Harvey Weinstein spread, Björk wrote on Facebook that a Danish film director had sexually harassed her. The Los Angeles Times identified him as Lars von Trier. She described unwanted embraces in front of the crew, whispered sexual propositions, and a threat to climb from his balcony into her room, which she said forced her to sleep in a friend's room instead. When she began refusing him, she said, he became furious and smashed a chair on set. Von Trier denied harassing her, while admitting they were definitely not friends, and his producer claimed they were the real victims. Her manager Derek Birkett backed her fully, saying it was the only time she had ever fallen out with a collaborator.[1] [2] [3]

Björk called her next record her Tinder album, or at least her dating album, and described it as paradise after the hell of Vulnicura. Utopia, released on the twenty fourth of November 2017, was co produced with Arca from the very start, and it was full of flutes, played by a twelve piece Icelandic flute section, and birdsong, some of it recorded by Björk herself. Buyers even received a small amount of cryptocurrency. The album earned yet another Grammy nomination. A year later came a deep personal loss. Her mother, Hildur Rúna, died on the twenty fifth of October 2018 at the age of seventy two, after a long illness. Björk said she and her brother had believed their mother had ten more years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Utopia became the basis of Cornucopia, which Björk called her most elaborate staged concert to date. It opened in May 2019 at The Shed, a new arts centre in New York, directed by the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, with a stage designed to look like giant fungi and digital visuals by Tobias Gremmler. The Hamrahlíd Choir, an Icelandic choir Björk once sang in herself, opened each night, and Björk sang some songs inside a special reverb chamber built to mimic singing alone in nature. Before the encore, a video message from the climate activist Greta Thunberg played to the audience. The show travelled to Mexico and Europe in 2019, and returned after the pandemic.[1] [2] [3]

Home again: Fossora and beyond

When the pandemic stopped touring, Björk went home to Iceland, and found she loved it. She planned a series of orchestral concerts at the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, but they were postponed again and again, seven times by her count. When they finally happened in the autumn of 2021, more than a hundred Icelandic musicians joined her across four shows, which were streamed to raise money for a women's shelter in Reykjavík. She said her father's years in the unions made her want to fight for musicians' pay. She also returned to film, briefly, as a seeress in Robert Eggers's Viking drama The Northman, co written by Sjón. Her daughter Ísadóra made her acting debut in it too.[1] [2] [3]

Her tenth album, Fossora, came out on the thirtieth of September 2022. The title is a made up feminine form of the Latin word for digger, and the album was about coming back down to earth after the clouds of Utopia. Mushrooms became its guiding image. Its two main sounds were a sextet of bass clarinets and bursts of gabber, the pounding Dutch techno she had been playing at small lockdown parties in her living room, and she brought in the Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi. Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are about her mother's death, and Ancestress features her son Sindri. It was the first album Björk produced entirely on her own.[1] [2] [3]

Activism has stayed at the centre of her life. In November 2023 she released Oral with the Spanish singer Rosalía, a reworked song from the late nineties, to raise money for Aegis, a group she helped found to fight industrial fish farming in the Icelandic fjords. She had earlier dedicated Declare Independence to Scotland's independence campaign in 2014 and to Catalonia in 2017. In 2022 she said the gun violence in the United States was one of the reasons she moved back to Iceland. In 2024 she appeared on the cover of Vogue Scandinavia, her first ever Vogue cover, and a newly described species of butterfly was named Pterourus bjorkae in her honour.[1] [2] [3]

Across five decades Björk has sold more than forty million records and built one of the most admired catalogues in modern music. She has won five Brit Awards, and as of 2026 holds sixteen Grammy nominations, nine of them for best alternative music album, more than any other artist in that category. Debut is credited with helping bring electronic music into mainstream pop, and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien said her reinventions pushed the band toward Kid A. Thom Yorke called her song Unravel one of the most beautiful he had ever heard. Rolling Stone included her among the greatest singers of all time in 2023. The critic Simon Reynolds has argued that nobody else has kept reinventing pop so fruitfully for so long.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Björk

Björk and Thor Eldon. Björk met the guitarist Thor Eldon through the Medusa surrealist group in Reykjavík. Their son Sindri was born in June 1986, the day the Sugarcubes date their formation, and Thor played guitar in the band. The couple split soon afterwards, yet kept playing together in the Sugarcubes until 1992 and reunited on stage in 2006. By Björk's own account the breakup was entirely amicable.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Einar Örn Benediktsson. Einar Örn, often called Iceland's first punk, sang and played trumpet beside Björk in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, and co founded the Bad Taste collective. Critics often complained that his shouted vocals crowded her out, but friends saw him as the band's chaotic spirit. He later played trumpet on Post, and in 2010 was elected to Reykjavík's city council for Jón Gnarr's satirical Best Party.[1] [2] [3]

Björk and Sjón. Björk met the poet Sjón as a teenager in the Medusa group, and he became her most enduring collaborator. His first song lyric was Isobel on Post, and he went on to write words for Jóga, Bachelorette and Oceania, for which he took a course in Greek mythology. He also co wrote lyrics for Dancer in the Dark and co wrote The Northman, in which Björk appeared.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Björk and Nellee Hooper. The Bristol producer Nellee Hooper shaped Björk's early solo sound on Debut and Post. At first she thought he was too tasteful for her, but their ideas matched. Several songs, including Big Time Sensuality and Cover Me, were written about their partnership. In 1997 she ended it, saying they had stopped surprising each other, and they fought a copyright lawsuit together and won.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Björk and Tricky. Björk and the Bristol trip hop artist Tricky had a brief romance around 1995 and worked together on Post, where he co produced Enjoy and Headphones, while she sang two songs on his Nearly God project. The song Five Years on Homogenic was widely read as a response to their breakup. In 2013 Tricky said he had not been good for her, but that she had given him a lot of love.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Goldie. Björk was engaged to the drum and bass producer Goldie in the mid nineties. Their relationship was one of the triggers for Ricardo López's attack, as the obsessed fan was enraged by it and by Goldie's race. The couple had split days before the bomb was posted. Björk later wrote Immature about mistakes in past relationships, shortly after the breakup with Goldie.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Matthew Barney. Björk met the artist Matthew Barney in New York in the late nineties, and they moved in together in Brooklyn Heights in 2000. Their daughter Ísadóra was born in 2002, and together they made the art film Drawing Restraint 9. Their love shaped Vespertine. The couple split in 2013, which she called the most painful thing she had ever experienced, and the breakup became Vulnicura.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Björk and Mark Bell. Mark Bell of LFO gave Björk a demo tape before Post, and from Homogenic onward he was her closest musical partner, producing or co producing almost every album up to Biophilia and playing in her live bands. She named him among her biggest influences, alongside Stockhausen and Kraftwerk. He even appears in the Declare Independence video. He died in 2014, aged forty three.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Lars von Trier. Von Trier cast Björk as Selma in Dancer in the Dark, and the result won both of them honours at Cannes in 2000. Their relationship on set was bitter. Björk later said he needed a woman to give his films soul and then tried to destroy her, and in 2017 she accused him of sexual harassment. He denied it, saying only that they were never friends.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Arca. The Venezuelan producer Arca joined Björk late in the making of Vulnicura, after Björk's manager passed on a mixtape. On Utopia they worked together from the very start, and Björk called it the strongest musical relationship she had ever had, comparing it to Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius. When some fans objected to Arca appearing in a video, Björk defended their collaboration across generations and sexual orientations.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Michel Gondry. Björk spotted the French director Michel Gondry through a video he made for his own band, Oui Oui, and asked him to film Human Behaviour. He went on to make eight videos for her, including Army of Me, Hyperballad, Jóga, Bachelorette and Declare Independence. Gondry later asked her to star in his film The Science of Sleep, but she turned him down.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Björk and Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. Björk's mother raised her in a bohemian, commune style home and nudged her toward the stage. An environmental campaigner, she went on a twenty three day hunger strike in 2002 against an aluminium smelter and its dams, and designed the sleeve of Björk's childhood album. She died in 2018 at seventy two, and Fossora's songs Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress are her daughter's farewell.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Björk

• As a child, Björk made beats out of a cassette recording of her grandfather snoring. At music school she was drawn to Stockhausen and John Cage, and at home she experimented, building rhythms from a tape of her grandfather's snoring and drumming along with a popcorn machine.[1]
• With the money from her childhood album, eleven year old Björk bought herself a piano instead of recording a second album. Her 1977 album sold well in Iceland and she was offered a follow up. She turned it down and spent her earnings on a piano, so she could start composing her own songs.[1]
• Her 1977 childhood album included an instrumental recorder piece she wrote at eleven for the painter Jóhannes Kjarval. Alongside Icelandic covers of the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, the record featured her own recorder tribute to Kjarval, one of Iceland's most famous painters. Her mother designed the cover.[1]
• Björk has said children in Reykjavík once threw stones at her because they thought she was weird. In a 2004 interview she explained that the British press calling her an elf never bothered her much. As a young singer at home, local kids had thrown stones at her for being strange.[1]
• Kukl were the first Icelandic band ever to play Denmark's Roskilde Festival. Signed to the English anarchist label Crass Records, Kukl toured Europe in 1984 and 1985, and their Roskilde appearance made them the first act from Iceland to play the festival.[1] [2]
• Kukl's first album, The Eye, was named after Björk's favourite book, Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. The same book later inspired the egg imagery in her video for Venus as a Boy, where she famously argued with the director over which kind of egg the book was really about.[1] [2]
• Björk's son Sindri was born on the eighth of June 1986, the date the Sugarcubes give as their founding. The band's history links the two events, and their first Icelandic single was released on the twenty first of November 1986, Björk's twenty first birthday.[1] [2]
• Listeners of John Peel's BBC show voted the Sugarcubes' Birthday number one in his 1987 Festive Fifty. Peel's championing of the song introduced the band to Britain. It later also placed in his listeners' all time chart.[1] [2]
• David Bowie and Iggy Pop were in the crowd when the Sugarcubes played the Ritz in New York in 1988. The band's North American tour that autumn was a success, and on the fifteenth of October they played Saturday Night Live.[1]
• Björk's 1990 jazz album Gling Gló was still her best selling record in Iceland as of 2011. Recorded over a few days with a local piano trio, it mixed jazz standards with Icelandic songs. Its title is the Icelandic equivalent of ding dong.[1] [2]
• Her label expected Debut to sell forty thousand copies. It sold over six hundred thousand in three months. One Little Indian based its guess on the size of the Sugarcubes' fan base. Debut went on to become her best selling album in the United States.[1]
• Björk co wrote the title track of Madonna's 1994 album Bedtime Stories. Bedtime Story grew out of an earlier song of hers, Sweet Intuition, which appeared as a B side on the Army of Me single.[1] [2]
• A first version of Cover Me was recorded in a cave in the Bahamas, and bats can be heard on it. During the Post sessions at Compass Point in Nassau, Björk also waded into the ocean at sunset to record vocals, using a recorder powered by a generator on the beach.[1] [2]
• The Army of Me video was pulled from MTV because it ended with Björk bombing a museum, just after the Oklahoma City bombing. In Michel Gondry's video she drives a giant truck, fights a gorilla dentist for a diamond and blows up a gallery to wake a sleeping boy.[1] [2]
• Aphex Twin was Björk's opening act on her first proper North American solo tour. The Post tour ran to one hundred and five dates. Aphex Twin, real name Richard James, remained a friend and later tipped her off about gadgets for recording vocals outdoors.[1] [2]
• The Hyperballad video was shot on a single roll of film with no editing at all. Michel Gondry layered every effect by rewinding and re exposing the same four hundred foot roll, and insisted nothing be cut afterwards. Björk sang the verses live for it.[1]
• A woman hired as a babysitter during the Homogenic sessions ended up joining the production team. Rebecca Storey showed so much interest in the studio equipment in Spain that she was added to the production staff. Wu Tang Clan also nearly worked on the album.[1]
• Bachelorette was first written for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Stealing Beauty. Björk later sent the director a fax telling him she would use the song on her own album instead. Sjón wrote the words after long kitchen table conversations over red wine.[1] [2]
• All Is Full of Love was written and recorded in half a day after she heard birds on an April morning. After a lonely winter in the Spanish mountains, a spring walk inspired the song. It became the album's closing track and, with Chris Cunningham's robot video, one of her most famous works.[1]
• Björk had two copies of the swan dress made, because it could not go to the dry cleaners. One copy of Marjan Pejoski's design was later auctioned on eBay for the aid agency Oxfam, fetching nine thousand five hundred dollars in 2005.[1]
• Björk turned down the chance to sing Gollum's Song for The Lord of the Rings because she was pregnant. The song for The Two Towers was recorded instead by another Icelandic singer, Emilíana Torrini.[1]
• The track list of her 2002 Greatest Hits was chosen by fans in a poll on her website. Hyperballad won the most votes, with All Is Full of Love second.[1] [2]
• Vespertine's sounds were chosen partly so they would survive being compressed for download on sites like Napster. Björk favoured tiny beats, whispers, harp, celesta and music boxes, instruments she felt would not be spoiled by low quality digital files.[1]
• Björk was convinced to use beatboxers on Medúlla after seeing Rahzel beatbox an entire Kraftwerk track without stopping for breath. She had worried human beatbox would be cheesy, but found Rahzel above any cliché. The Japanese beatboxer Dokaka was recruited after she saw his covers online.[1]
• The Icelandic lullaby she sang on Medúlla turned out to have been written for a little blue eyed girl. The composer Jórunn Vidar told Björk the song Vökuró was a lullaby for a blue eyed girl. Björk had been working on it for four years, long before having her own blue eyed daughter.[1] [2]
• Volta accidentally went on sale on the UK iTunes store for six hours, two weeks before release. The slip led to the whole album leaking online the next day. Later, a manufacturing error meant twenty thousand copies of the Voltaïc box set had to be destroyed.[1]
• The most expensive edition of Biophilia came in a wooden box with ten tuning forks and cost five hundred pounds. Each chromed fork was tuned to the note of one Biophilia song. The edition was limited to two hundred copies and drew some criticism for its price.[1]
• A 2013 Kickstarter to bring the Biophilia app to Android raised only about fifteen thousand pounds of its three hundred and seventy five thousand goal. The campaign was cancelled, but the team later found a cheaper way to port the apps, and they reached Android that July.[1]
• Björk once staged a three day karaoke marathon as a political protest. In January 2011 she sang for three days in Reykjavík against the sale of an Icelandic geothermal company, and her petition drew forty seven thousand signatures.[1]
• Vulnicura Strings features an instrument designed by Leonardo da Vinci, the viola organista. Da Vinci sketched it centuries ago, but it was only built for the first time in modern times by the Polish musician Sławomir Zubrzycki.[1] [2]
• People who bought Utopia were given a small amount of cryptocurrency. Through a partnership with a British blockchain start up, buyers received one hundred audiocoins, worth about nineteen cents at the time.[1]
• To close the Utopia era, Björk released a box set of fourteen hand carved wooden flutes that imitate bird calls. She chose each flute herself with a French maker, and the set came with a booklet explaining which bird each one copies.[1] [2]
• Björk once sang in the Hamrahlíd Choir, the Icelandic choir that opened her Cornucopia shows. The Icelandic government paid the airfare for the fifty strong choir to perform at The Shed in New York in 2019.[1]
• In 2024 a newly described species of butterfly was named Pterourus bjorkae in her honour. It is one of several honours outside music, which also include Iceland's Order of the Falcon and membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.[1]
• Björk interviewed her hero Karlheinz Stockhausen for Dazed and Confused magazine in 1996. She described the composer as a man obsessed with the marriage of mystery and science, and in 2008 wrote that he had sparked a sun that would keep glowing for a long time.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.