20 Geeky Facts You Might Not Know About Björk

Bjork’s name means ‘birch-tree’ in Icelandic, and is properly pronounced ‘Beyerk’. Most people will stick with the common mispronunciation ‘Bee-york’, though. It’s like Josh Homme – if you say it properly, you just sound like a tool.

2004’s ‘Medulla”s title comes from the Latin word for ‘marrow’, chosen because of its bodily, squishy nature. Björk wanted the album to move away from the brain and rationality into a more intuitive, bodily way of doing things.

Björk’s vocals for ‘Post”s ‘Cover Me’ were recorded in a bat-infested cave in Nassau, the Bahamas.

Björk’s favourite album as a child was Spark’s ‘Kimono My House’ – its theatrical pop partly a reaction against her mother’s hippyish taste.

Her favourite book is George Bataille’s surreal, sexually explicit ‘Story Of The Eye’, to which she’s made frequent reference, for example in the egg-fondling scenes in the Venus As A Boy video.

In 1992, Björk was asked to write a song for Madonna. The resulting single ‘Bedtime Story’ was heavily adapted from the Björk demo ‘Let’s Get Unconscious’.

Three years before ‘Debut’ was released, Björk put out an album of jazz standards with Icelandic jazz outfit trio Gudmundur Ingolfssonar, including their takes on ‘Ruby Baby’ and ‘Dance With Me’.

Though many people wanted to collaborate with Björk at the 1994 Brit Awards after the success of ‘Debut’, Björk herself requested only one: PJ Harvey. The pair collaborated on a stark cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’

Michel Gondry’s video for ‘Army Of Me’ was banned by MTV in 1995 following the Oklahoma City bombing the same year, owing to a scene in which she places a bomb to wake her sleeping lover who is fast asleep inside an art museum.

Some of Björk’s punk-era friends and associates, including former Sugarcubes singer Einar Orn and one-time punk poet and comedian Jon Gnarr are now involved in running the city with the Best Party, a joke that turned serious following the Icelandic banking crash.

Before joining the Sugarcubes, Björk had been involved in a number of other punk or post-punk bands, namely Spit And Snot, Exodus, Tappi Tikarass (which translates as Cork The Bitch’s Arse) and Kukl, who experienced some success abroad, releasing records through Crass’ label.

Dancer In The Dark wasn’t Björk’s first film role. In 1986 she recorded a part in independent director Netzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree, an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that premiered at the 1991 Sundance Festival.