Spit and Snot: Björk’s early days as an anarcho-punk singer
You can never be too sure what you’ll get from a Björk record. Sometimes she can be a purveyor of upbeat dance-pop, which was most prevalent on her earliest releases; sometimes it’s a soothing lovesick ambience, such as on Vespertine, and sometimes it can be a harrowing and abrasive mix of sounds that look towards the future collapse of our beloved planet, such as on Homogenic. To say that Björk is an artist containing multitudes would be a gross understatement.
While she’s rarely ever shied away from doing what she wants to do artistically, there are certain genres it might be hard to picture her ever delving into. For example, the Icelandic singer is probably not cut out for a rap album, and a country album from her might well be fantastic, but it would be a stretch too far for her own personal ambitions.
That being said, she’s ticked a fair few things off her list in the past, and that includes her work prior to becoming the lauded solo artist she is today. In the late 1980s, she spent time as the lead vocalist and keyboard player with new wave group The Sugarcubes, who, while stylistically a little removed from her later output, saw her introduce her blistering vocal abilities to the world on songs like ‘Birthday’ and ‘Hit’.
What may come as a surprise, however, is the fact that she spent some time fronting a hardcore anarcho-punk band in Iceland at the tender age of 13. A distant cry from the shimmering splendour of some of her later work, it’s difficult to picture a teenage Björk howling down the microphone about the state of politics. While her own progressive stances have come into her lyrical output much later in life, she’s presented them in a much more elegant fashion than she did during her adolescence.
Spit and Snot was the name of her first band, and Björk recalls having fallen in love with punk around this time, not long after she’d recorded her self-titled debut album of bubblegum pop at 11 years old. It’s clear that her appetite for discovering a wealth of music was present from a young age, but the love of this heavier sound was largely due to how prevalent it was in her hometown at the time.
In an interview with Q magazine in 1993, while she was promoting her label debut, conveniently titled Debut, she revealed that punk took a hold of her from a young age. “That was a big scene in Reykjavík,” she explained, “I think we hold the world record of how many people lived in Iceland, and how many punk bands there were.” As for who her main influences were, they were bands from further afield that were exciting her rather than those closer to home. “I wasn’t into the new wave scene when they started to put chords to punk. It was not pure any more. That’s why I liked Discharge, and really respected Crass too.”
There aren’t any known surviving recordings of her band, although her comments in the interview suggest that her talents weren’t as exceptional as they went on to be later in her career. “We definitely got over the problem of not knowing how to play,” she joked. “That was mind over matter”.
Björk would eventually soften her stance on post-punk, forming the short-lived and crudely-named Tappi Tíkarrass (‘cork the bitch’s arse’, in English) in 1981, which is perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to knowing how this era of her work sounded. While she’d go on to dabble with many more genres during her youth, such as the jazz band Exodus and goth group Kukl, it has always been her time with Spit and Snot that fascinates Björk fans the most, for how radically different the idea is to hearing her later output.
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