The seven artists a 23-year-old Björk listed among her “favourites”
Unlike a lot of music-obsessed teenagers growing up in the 1980s, Björk Guðmundsdóttir didn’t have 24/7 MTV and loads of rock radio stations to occupy her attention. “We only had one TV station, which was on three hours a day,” she told the Valley Advocate newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts back in 1989, sounding more like a wistful grandpa than the 23-year-old frontwoman of Iceland’s finest indie rock outfit, the Sugarcubes.
Björk did excitedly inform the reporter that a second Icelandic TV network had recently started, “and we have five radio stations now; we only had one before.”
Björk, of course, didn’t let those limited resources hinder her insatiable desire to find any and all music from all over the world. With the encouragement of her mother and stepfather, she enrolled in a Reykjavík art school at age six, becoming a genuine musical wunderkind in very short order. After one of her songs was broadcast on that aforementioned lone radio station in Iceland, she was invited to record her first studio album, which came out in 1977, when she was 11.
As would remain the case throughout her career, pretty much up to the present day, Björk was interested in so many different styles of music, and influenced by such a wide spectrum of artists, that she found it fairly impossible to stick to a sound—even if doing so might have ensured her of considerably more commercial success, particularly after her solo breakthrough in the ‘90s.
Speaking back in 1989, just as the Sugarcubes were breaking through to a larger audience, Björk discussed Icelandic pop culture as operating in a similar way to her own constantly shifting tastes.
“Because the country is so small,” she said, “everyone becomes involved. We go through crazes. There was a poetry craze. Four years ago everyone was writing poetry. For two years there was a TV program with an hour of poetry every week. Then it just stopped.”
Within a few years, the Sugarcubes would stop, too, going their separate ways after three studio albums. Björk had hinted at this potential for a creative falling out in her chat with the Valley Advocate. “We have a problem,” she admitted. “We have very different tastes. When the band is together, if someone puts something on the stereo, someone will take it off in five minutes.”
Björk was then asked what she personally enjoyed putting on the stereo at this stage in her career, which we can now say was midway between her debut as a child star and the incredible 2001 album Vespertine.
As you can probably easily picture, a bubbly 23-year-old Björk doesn’t hesitate when asked about her favourite music, nor is she limited to any single genre or century. The seven artists she mentioned, in order, are as follows . . .
Sugarcubes-era Björk’s favourite artists:
- Johann Sebastian Bach – 18th-century German composer, master of the fugue
- Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – 19th-century Russian composer, master of orchestration
- Benjamin Britten – 20th-century English composer, master of the middle-class opera
- Run-DMC – 1980s American hip-hop group, the first to go multi-platinum
- Swans – Late 20th century New York band, the bridge from post-punk to post-rock
- Sinead O’Connor – Late 20th century Irish singer/songwriter; an all-time great who hadn’t yet had her breakout mega-hit, but Björk already knew what was up
- Ella Fitzgerald – 20th-century American jazz singer, “The First Lady of Song”
