Veröffentlicht
Jun 1, 2024
- We relaunch RA's retrospective review series with the album that introduced the world to Björk's true genius—and made her a fixture of dance music.
- Rewind is RA's retrospective review series, where we take a weekly trip through the highlights of electronic music's past to better understand our present.
It was 1990 when Björk's phone rang. The young artist was waving goodbye to her London friends, suitcase in hand, ready to board a plane back to her native Iceland. 808 State had other plans. The Manchester electronic group was down the other end of the line, asking her to come up North to work on music with them. "In five minutes, I called the air company and said, 'You just have to change my ticket! It's a question of life or death!'" she later laughed in an interview from the time.
This impulsive decision not only proved to be creatively fruitful, but arguably forged Björk's true artistic path. The very next day, she flew to Manchester, where she and 808 State recorded two tracks in as many days: "Qmart" and "Ooops." The songs ended up on 808 State's highest-charting album, ex:el—a record that would go on to influence generational artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Though 808 State had already been riding the acid house wave with 1989 hit "Pacific State," they owed part of ex:el's mass appeal to Björk. The singer's distinctive, guttural voice as frontwoman for alt rock band The Sugarcubes was already prized internationally, but it wasn't until ex:el that her melismatic moans were paired with propulsive beats. Clubland officially embraced Björk—and the feeling was mutual.
By the time The Sugarcubes broke up in 1992, Björk was done with rock. By her telling, the scene was full of "sad rock clubs with a lot of beer drinking, bad smells and people playing music with absolutely no hope in it." While on tour with the band, she kept occupied and inspired by "treasure hunting" for the finest underground beats in each city. She devoured Chicago house and Detroit techno by the likes of Larry Heard and the Belleville Three, telling The Face in 1993 that she still hadn't "heard anything better than that." Björk began to view raving as a positive force propelling youth culture. This epiphany spurred her to return to London to record her first solo album, Debut, eager to incorporate sounds from the dance music community she longed to be a part of.
Björk and 808 State
The early Debut demos didn't entirely match the ravey vision Björk had in mind, though. Unsure if she could convince a label to pick up the album, she was upfront with early collaborators, telling them, "Listen, there's no budget yet. If you're interested, you have to be interested for yourself, and if it goes on record, you will get paid." Given that her partners in crime included an Icelandic brass quartet, this could have proved a sore point. Luckily, Derek Birkett, founder of anarcho-punk label One Little Independent (then called One Little Indian), heard material Björk recorded in Los Angeles and agreed to invest in it. He didn't love it—in fact, he hated "Violently Happy"—but still granted her licence to do as she pleased.
And she did. Debut's motley assortment of larger-than-life house, whimsical orchestration and chill trip-hop tapped into a sound that was at once seductive and playful. Her secret weapon was London-based producer Nellee Hooper, who had gained attention for his work with British groups like Soul II Soul and Massive Attack. The dramatic strings, spacious drums and guitar gurgles of the latter's 1991 album, Blue Lines, share the slow-motion mystique of Debut tracks "One Day" and "Come To Me."
"Crying," "Big Time Sensuality" and "There's More to Life Than This," on the other hand, highlighted Hooper's talent for creating soulful, percussive grooves and irresistible hooks for Soul II Soul (who, at the time, were brilliantly capturing elements of hip-hop, R&B and rare groove rising out of the late '80s UK club circuit). Listening back to Debut today, it's hard to imagine a time when orchestration and club beats were considered oil and water. It's a testament to how seamlessly the two styles cohered under Björk and Hooper's careful eyes and ears.
When Björk first heard Soul II Soul on the radio, she was initially suspicious of Hooper. "I like to go out and dance to hardcore or industrial techno. I thought Nellee was too 'good taste' for my liking," she admitted to The Face. But when she heard Hooper's "fabulous" ideas, her hesitation dissipated. Björk played the keyboard, producing about 90 percent of the music, while Hooper injected her melodies with gangly beats that galloped, coasted and soared miles beyond the club.
Hooper and Björk's creative understanding gave Björk critical room and confidence to experiment. In her efforts to channel the life bursting from London clubs, Björk went as far as to record audio for "There's More to Life Than This" at the now-defunct Soho haunt Milk Bar. On the track, dance floor chatter rises above bouncy house and Björk's voice intimately close as she suggests various post-club activities: leaping between boats at the harbour, watching the sunrise, buying the first loaf of the day from the town's best baker. Listeners get the sense they're trailing behind an antsy Björk as the music fades—which is then interrupted by a heavy door slam. She seemingly whispers into a mic in the venue's bathroom stalls, muffled kicks permeating the walls. By the song's close, she breezes over to the street, where drunken babble meets the quiet tide of passing cars.
For all that Björk drew from dance music, she made sure to give back to the club ecosystem. The Fluke Minimix accompanying the "Big Time Sensuality" music video still remains a set favourite, opening with cinematic synths that signal a momentous new beginning, before dropping into slinky progressive house. The Best Mixes from the Album-Debut For All the People Who Don't Buy White-Labels, a puckishly titled limited-edition white-label remix series released during the album's promo cycle, shook up dance floors worldwide.
Further deepening Debut's connection to rave culture, Bjork tapped British electronic acts Underworld, Andrew Weatherall's The Sabres of Paradise and The Black Dog to reimagine songs for both living room heads and swarms of sweaty clubbers. The Sabres Of Paradise's "Come To Me" remix slows and delays the original's lush instrumentation, while Underworld's 12-minute rework of "Human Behaviour" eschews vocals for nearly three minutes before unleashing them above walloping drums.
To realise her expansive vision of pop music, Björk looked for inspiration in as many places as possible. Her band comprised musicians from Iran, Cyprus and Barbados. The foxtrotting bassline on lead single "Human Behaviour" is taken from Quincy Jones and Ray Brown Orchestra's swaggering jazz funk song "Go Down Dying." On "Like Someone in Love," she covers the jazz standard with harpist Corky Hale, then a tough, cigar-smoking 80-year-old known to perform from her New York high rise balcony. The serenity of "The Anchor Song" transports listeners to Björk's old Reykjavík flat overlooking the harbour. When she croons "I live by the oc-eaaan," a fleet of melancholy saxophone trails behind her, resembling foghorns alerting boats drifting in and out.
Björk believed in pop and electronic music's shared ability to interact with a spectrum of styles and emotional registers. "I think not sticking to any particular musical style makes the album real," she told i-D in 1993. "Life isn't always the same. You don't live in the same style from day to day, unexpected things happen that are beyond your control. That's this record. One song is about the mood you're in walking to the corner shop, another is about being drunk and out of it on drugs in a club, and the next one is about feeling romantic and making love." Her voice, at times airy and childlike, others thunderous, often helps convey her fluctuating inner world—sometimes in just a single word. On the gorgeous, tabla-fortified single "Venus as a Boy," she sings, "He believes in a beauty and gentle," effortlessly squeezing more syllables out of the final word: "ge-eh-eh-en-tle."
Debut immediately made Björk a cult icon, and laid the groundwork for her leap into international superstardom. (Her next two records, Post and Homogenic, only strengthened the cause.) It seems everyone understood the hype except, perhaps, Björk herself. "It's as if you started cooking at this restaurant and everybody heard about it and started coming, but you'd still only learned how to fry eggs," she sheepishly admitted at the time. But Debut's commitment to experimentation—to frivolity and fun—not only left a lasting impression on the early '90s musical landscape, but served as a cultural glue. Discerning British ravers, bright pop enthusiasts and sample-worshipping hip-hop fans united under Debut's unique patchwork of sound. And to think how much worse modern music might be without that one little call that set it all into motion.
Tracklist01. Human Behaviour
02. Crying
03. Venus As A Boy
04. There's More To Life Than This
05. Like Someone In Love
06. Big Time Sensuality
07. One Day
08. Aeroplane
09. Come To Me
10. Violently Happy
12. The Anchor Song
To realise her expansive vision of pop music, Björk looked for inspiration in as many places as possible. Her band comprised musicians from Iran, Cyprus and Barbados. The foxtrotting bassline on lead single "Human Behaviour" is taken from Quincy Jones and Ray Brown Orchestra's swaggering jazz funk song "Go Down Dying." On "Like Someone in Love," she covers the jazz standard with harpist Corky Hale, then a tough, cigar-smoking 80-year-old known to perform from her New York high rise balcony. The serenity of "The Anchor Song" transports listeners to Björk's old Reykjavík flat overlooking the harbour. When she croons "I live by the oc-eaaan," a fleet of melancholy saxophone trails behind her, resembling foghorns alerting boats drifting in and out. Björk believed in pop and electronic music's shared ability to interact with a spectrum of styles and emotional registers. "I think not sticking to any particular musical style makes the album real," she told i-D in 1993. "Life isn't always the same. You don't live in the same style from day to day, unexpected things happen that are beyond your control. That's this record. One song is about the mood you're in walking to the corner shop, another is about being drunk and out of it on drugs in a club, and the next one is about feeling romantic and making love." Her voice, at times airy and childlike, others thunderous, often helps convey her fluctuating inner world—sometimes in just a single word. On the gorgeous, tabla-fortified single "Venus as a Boy," she sings, "He believes in a beauty and gentle," effortlessly squeezing more syllables out of the final word: "ge-eh-eh-en-tle." Debut immediately made Björk a cult icon, and laid the groundwork for her leap into international superstardom. (Her next two records, Post and Homogenic, only strengthened the cause.) It seems everyone understood the hype except, perhaps, Björk herself. "It's as if you started cooking at this restaurant and everybody heard about it and started coming, but you'd still only learned how to fry eggs," she sheepishly admitted at the time. But Debut's commitment to experimentation—to frivolity and fun—not only left a lasting impression on the early '90s musical landscape, but served as a cultural glue. Discerning British ravers, bright pop enthusiasts and sample-worshipping hip-hop fans united under Debut's unique patchwork of sound. And to think how much worse modern music might be without that one little call that set it all into motion.