On February 19th 2003, a band called The Postal Service released an album called Give Up. It was the product of a curious union between vocalist Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and the producer Jimmy Tamborello, known as Dntel. The pair had been exchanging CD-Rs through the post and working on their glitchy, introspective electro-pop independently in their bedrooms. Their record label, Sub Pop, were supportive but realistically expected it to shift maybe 20,000 copies.

By September 1st 2010, Give Up had sold 1,012,135 copies in the US alone, making it only the second Sub Pop release after Nirvana’s Bleach to go platinum. Something about this sweet, ethereal record struck a chord that surprised even those who made it. They thought they were putting together something niche, a labour of love, but Give Up was the album for its time and place. It brought electronic music in from the clubs and made it something quiet and personal: a romantic, digitised sound for a digitised world in need of romance.

I’ve found myself coming back to Give Up more often than almost any other record in the last decade. It’s been the soundtrack to countless flights, train-journeys, tube-rides and evenings spent lit by the glow of a computer. As the album nears its tenth anniversary, and with it likely that the duo will mark the occasion by reforming at least for a handful of festival dates, I wanted to track down some of the people involved in the record to see if they could help me to better understand this beautiful freak.

“I agree with you, there’s something mysterious about the record as a whole,” says Jen Wood, who dueted with Gibbard on ‘Nothing Better’. “I think that a lot of the songs have a dream-like theme and there is a dark, romantic cloud that looms around inside every song. I think the lyrics are so poetic that it leaves you in an imaginative state… it just allows you to be transported to a different place in your mind.”

That place is hard to pin down from the beguilingly rootless music, but in reality the story of Give Up starts in L.A. in 1993, a decade before its release, at a small college radio station called KXLU. Here, Jimmy Tamborello was working as the Music Director while playing bass in a band called Strictly Ballroom with Chris Gunst. Through KXLU they met Tony Kiewel and Jeff Antebi, who later managed Danger Mouse, and the pair of them teamed up to release Strictly Ballroom’s album. Looking back now, Kiewel says: “Strictly Ballroom didn’t really get out of California much but they were a fairly influential part of the local music scene while they were around. Suffice to say, there’s an odd crew of folks who were all really close and involved in this little scene who all went on to do relatively interesting stuff.”

The interesting stuff Tamborello was working on was an album of music that he would release under the name Dntel in 2001, Life is Full of Possibilities. “Jimmy had been quietly churning out tons of music from his bedroom for years,” says Kiewel, “but that album was a whole new venture for him.” It featured a host of guest vocals, including his old bandmate Gunst, but the track that Kiewel calls “a special bit of alchemy” was his first collaboration with Gibbard: ‘(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan’.

The track was a product of chance, one of those possibilities that life is indeed full of. Kiewel and Tamborello both shared a house with Pedro Benito, whose band The Jealous Sound landed a tour with Death Cab for Cutie. It was through Benito that Tamborello was introduced to Gibbard and given the opportunity to invite him to sing on his album.

Following Death Cab’s tour, Gibbard ended up back in Seattle where Kiewel was now working in A&R for Sub Pop. One evening, when Tamborello and Benito came to visit them, Gibbard and Tamborello fell into reminiscing about their collaboration. “Those guys started talking about how much fun making that one song was and how great it would be to bust out an EP,” says Kiewel. “I suggested that if they were going to make an EP they might as well make an album and said if they did I was pretty sure Sub Pop would be into putting it out.”

It was his job to sell the idea to the label: “When I pitched the project to the A&R group at Sub Pop I brought in ‘The Dream of Evan and Chan’ and played it and basically explained that they wanted to make a whole album like that. There wasn’t a single voice of dissention. Everyone was totally into the idea. Plus the guys said they didn’t need much of a recording budget. That record literally cost a couple thousand to make and most of that was spent on FedEx and hard drives. They made pretty much the whole thing in their bedrooms.”

Gibbard invited Death Cab’s Chris Walla to get involved and also asked singer-songwriter Jen Wood to add her vocals into the mix. “It all was a little out of the blue,” she remembers. “I had no idea that Ben was working on this project. I just got an email asking if I’d wanna sing on his new project. Ben then mailed me a CD of rough mixes. I remember playing it for the first time and being so stunned. It was nothing like Death Cab. It was a cool surprise! I cranked up the volume to the max and literally started jumping and dancing around in my room. Obviously, then, my answer was ‘Yes! I will sing on these songs!’ At the time, I didn’t know anyone who was making a record via mailing CDs back and forth. It was a new idea to me. I remember just thinking how rad it was that they were doing that, such a creative and yet kind of endearing way of making music together. There’s something special about receiving packages of music back and forth between two friends. It creates a sentimental kind of feeling.”

The critic Robert Christgau called ‘Nothing Better’ “the album’s centerpiece” and argued that Gibbard needs his female principle “too much to mince metaphors”. The song owes a debt to The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me?’, but Wood says that, for her at least, it wasn’t a conscious homage. “Honestly, I don’t recall Ben ever telling me that about the song. Not at first at least. When I was recording my vocals, I had no idea that that was an influence. I basically was just thrilled to do something totally brand new. I was already getting bored with playing acoustic guitar and the Postal Service songs allowed me to embody something fresh and energizing.”

While Wood recorded her parts in Seattle, Jenny Lewis added her vocals in L.A. “They’re all very different people,” remembers Kiewel, “but they’re all incredibly grounded, ridiculously sweet and frustratingly talented.” In total, he says the whole recording process probably only took three months. “Every couple of weeks Jimmy would send up two CD-Rs to my office with two or three songs and Ben would pop over and pick them up. Then he’d track some vocals and guitars on top and bring the CD-R’s back in a few days to a week. It just went like clockwork.”

Squirreled away in his studio, Tamborello was busily absorbing sounds from across the globe. Looking back, the producer says: “There were a lot of Morr Music influences, the German label. People like Lali Puna. It was light-hearted, but I guess it was kind of indietronica. When we started making the record I figured it would be a little more experimental but we ended up just having more fun and making straight-forward pop songs.”

Kiewel had total confidence in the album as the release approached: “Around the time they finished we were experiencing a bit of a renaissance at Sub Pop. The Shins and David Cross were selling really well and the Hot Hot Heat debut was about to take off. I just remember thinking, ‘Wait ‘til people get a load of this Postal Service album!’ So, I was really confident about the project at pretty much every step. I also knew I was totally biased. I loved the people involved on a personal level and this music was tailor-made to hit all my pop sweet spots.”

It turned out he wasn’t the only one it seemed tailor-made for. “I always thought there was a better than average chance it would do a lot better than we’d predicted, but I knew for sure when they went on tour immediately following the release of the album and show after show started to sell out. Second shows were being added everywhere. The year that followed was really bizarre. The record continued to find fans all on its own. We were giving away ‘Such Great Heights’ on our website and we were seeing over a hundred thousand downloads a week, sometimes a lot more.”

For his part, Tamborello was completely caught off guard. “Yeah! It was pretty surprising,” he tells me. “It was slightly gradual, the way it got big, so there wasn’t a big moment of shock. When we made it it was really one of the most casual recording situations I’ve been in. We were just really having fun and doing exactly what we wanted to do, and when it was done I couldn’t really figure out who it was made for.”

In August 2003, the band received a cease and desist letter from the U.S. Postal Service citing their trademark of their name. The resulting publicity, which saw the dispute appear on the cover of the New York Times, didn’t hurt the record one bit. Indeed, in a novel settlement the band agreed to let their music be used in adverts for the Postal Service and played a show at their National Executive Conference. In return, the postmen started selling Give Up on their website. Meanwhile, ‘Such Great Heights’ was becoming a radio hit across California, although it wasn’t given such a warm welcome elsewhere: “At least one music director told me that it was ‘too gay’,” says Kiewel, “and I suspect that pretty much summed up the macho bullshit attitude we were up against from most places east and north of California.”

Regardless of the ‘macho bullshit’ the album took on a life of its own, almost despite the efforts of the band members who were keen to get back to their day-jobs. “The plan was for The Postal Service to record a new album after that next Death Cab album but between the busy Death Cab schedule and a short stretch of writers block on Jimmy’s part early on, that record has still never come to pass,” says Kiewel. No matter, the music was out there now. Napoleon Dynamitedirectors Jared and Jerusha Hess directed a video for ‘We Will Become Silhouettes’ and ‘Such Great Heights’ found an even wider audience after it appeared in the trailer for Garden State – apparently suggested by the video editor who happened to be another alumni of KXLU.

Nearly ten years after Gibbard and Tamborello first collaborated on ‘(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan’, Give Up continues to sell over 500 copies every week. Jen Wood still feels “super shocked and super thrilled” by the album’s success: “Ben and Jimmy were making these songs purely because they enjoyed it and it was fun for both of them. I think I didn’t realise that it was going so big-time until it was in full-force. I remember being on tour at the time with a Seattle band, Aveo, and every single venue we played at across the US was playing the Postal Service in the bar. It was insane! I remember feeling totally baffled yet so happy that everyone was listening to the Postal Service. Then, when it was being covered and used in movies and commercials, it really hit me that it was taking over! The icing on the cake was when I got a call from Tony Kiewel telling me had a gold record for me! In my mind I was thinking ‘Holy crap! This is crazy!’”

There’s now a platinum record to go with that gold one but in truth the unexpected commercial success and pop cultural appearances make no difference at all to the blissful forty-five minutes when Give Up holds you in its reverie. “I think it has to do with its effortlessness and the incredible talent of the people who made it,” says Kiewel. “That album was never meant to be anything other than a labour of love. They had no expectations and no ambitions as a band. They wanted to make something for the sheer joy of it that paid respect to some of their favorite 80s influences. That they transcended that one modest goal is a testament to their rare abilities.”

Originally published by Drowned in Sound.

Jimmy Tamborello is a bedroom producer. At least he was until a couple of years ago, when he finally moved his studio out into its own room at his home in LA. Still, the man better known as Dntel didn’t do too badly out of that bedchamber. It was, as they used to perpetually say on MTV Cribs, “where the magic happened.”

A pioneer of glitch and the sort of understated electronica that’s become increasingly popular over the last decade, his 2001 album Life Is Full Of Possibilities still sounds fresh and vital today. There are plenty of exquisite moments on that record, but the track which was to prove most fruitful was his collaboration with Death Cab For Cutie singer Ben Gibbard, ‘(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan’. The pair liked the track so much that they decided to make an album together as The Postal Service. The result, Give Up, was released on Sub Pop in 2003 and went on to become the label’s biggest-selling album since Nirvana’s Bleach.

Tamborello returned to the name Dntel for 2007’s Dumb Luck, which featured collaborations with Conor Oberst and Jenny Lewis among others, but when he started work on new album Aimlessness he initially decided he wanted to move away from vocalists altogether. “I made most of this album instrumentally and at one point planned on it all being instrumental,” he says, “but then in the last couple of months we decided to add little bits of vocals. Nite Jewel is friends with my girlfriend, so that’s kind of how that collaboration happened! She’s someone that I hadn’t worked with before and I really like her voice. I thought it could work for a song. I gave her almost the whole album as instrumentals and had her tell me what she wanted to sing on.”

The track she plumped for, ‘Santa Ana Winds’, is one of the highlights of a gorgeous, understated ramble through sweet electronic soundscapes. “I tend to turn on instrumental electronic music more than other music these days,” Tamborello explains. “I have this thing of just liking music on in the house that’s not super-aggressive and forcing you to pay attention all the time. Stuff that elevates the mood but you can choose how much to pay attention to it. You can take different things from it.”

Given that he’s inspired by the sort of music fills people’s lives almost without them realising, does he consider how people will be listening to his songs when he makes them? “I don’t think about it too much,” he says. “I rarely know what sort of song I’m making while I’m making it, so to think about the audience for it too would be really hard. I was making a lot of these songs as I was preparing to go on tour, so I pictured them being in clubs. I guess I started making these big dance hits, but then when they get finished they’re not that at all! A lot of the electronic music I like is club music, so I want to be like that but it doesn’t come out that way.”

Listening to his intricate production work, and considering the five year gap since Dumb Luck, it seems easy to imagine that Tamborello has a painstaking perfectionist streak. I ask if it feels like starting over from his beginnings each time he makes a new record, and he pauses for a while before saying: “It’s a little bit like starting from scratch. I never mean for it to take so long between albums.” He sighs. “I really like the idea of putting out a lot of albums and taking chances and not really worrying about what people think. Just building up the albums, but I haven’t really done that because each one has taken me so long.”

For this record, though, there was a conscious attempt to go back to his roots: “I was looking back at my older music from before Life Is Full Of Possibilities, at what I was doing in the 90s which was more electronic and melancholy. I tried to recapture some of that energy and that mood, which is also there on Life Is Full Of Possibilities. I felt like ‘Dumb Luck’ was going in a direction that, by the time it was done, was barely to my tastes. I like the album, but if I put it up against other records that are like it I probably wouldn’t like those other records! I needed to re-figure out where I was going.”

The direction he’s found himself heading in can perhaps best be summed up by the instrumental ‘Bright Night’, which marks something like the centre point of the album and which he describes as perhaps his favourite moment on the record. “It’s a real visual song for me,” he says, “It makes me picture things in my head.”

It’s that alchemy, the way Tamborello’s music can draw pictures using the most minimal of palettes, that makes a Dntel record so rewarding. He just wishes he knew how he does it: “It’s not always visual but I like sounds that feel physical, like they have a texture or shape to them. I never really know how to get that. It just kind of happens accidentally. Sometimes a song comes out sounding kind of flat, which can be okay too, but sometimes they kind of turn 3D.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

“If you love music, this is the place to come,” said Mikolaj Ziolkowski, the chief organiser of Heineken Open’er. We were sat backstage in a tent on the disused military airport in Gdynia, northern Poland, where his festival takes place. “Our audience prepare for the festival,” he continued. “They listen to the music and care about who’s playing. There are not too many drunk people, as you can see. It’s not a holiday, it’s a music festival.”

I smiled and nodded, but inside I was thinking: “I’m not sure this will play well in Britain.” Do people who go to festivals want to be told to take things more seriously? I’ve been to British festivals and we’re just inefficient machines for converting gallons of booze and fistfuls of drugs into piss and shouting.

At Open’er, they only serve Heineken. Aside from a couple of stalls offering Desperados as an alternative beer, it’s the only alcohol on site. As a branding exercise it seems utterly self-defeating. After four days of nothing but Heineken you don’t want to taste another drop. It’s hard to get raving, stumbling drunk without hard liquor, but naturally we in the British Music Press Corps gave it a damn good try. Must be all that Olympic spirit. Inspire a generation.

Still, Mikolaj had a point. Open’er’s unusually attentive 65,000-strong audience and thoughtfully curated line-up combined to produce some jaw-dropping moments. They served up everything from Björk firing up her overhead Tesla coil to an epic six-hour production of Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels In America’ in the theatre tent. They also provided one of the most brilliant, unique and aggressively weird things I’ve ever seen on a festival stage: the hour-long orchestra performance of work by both legendary radical Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, his devoted acolyte.

We had landed in Poland early on the Wednesday at Gdansk’s airport, which is named in honour of Lech Walesa. The baggage handlers all seemed to wear approximations of his walrus moustache, hairy personal tributes to the shipyard union leader who in 1990 became the first Polish President elected by popular vote and oversaw the country’s transition out of communism. I had a hunch that meeting Penderecki would help me to understand how music and culture had interacted with the country’s historical realities, but first there were bands to be seen.

We arrived on site in time to witness The Kills in indomitable form. Every eyeball on site seemed to be trained on Alison Mosshart, her hair dip-dyed like a tequila sunrise, as she elegantly stalked the stage. The band were backed by four extra drummers, wearing red bandanas, and their contribution made tracks like ‘Heart Is A Beating Drum’, ‘Fuck The People’ and ‘Monkey 23’ sound imposingly huge. They’re not shy about their influences, with ‘DNA’ sounding uncannily like The Rolling Stones’s ‘We Love You’, but nobody cares. When everyone else leaves the stage to let Mosshart and Jamie Hince tiptoe through ‘The Last Goodbye’ the crowd is rapt. The only bum note is Hince’s Polish, which needs a polish. “Cheers!” he shouts at one point, “What do they say in Poland?… Cheers!”

Björk’s Polish is better, and she thanked the crowd regularly: “Dziekuje!” She’s played here before, in 2007, and seemed to be welcomed back as a returning hero and kindred artistic spirit. She was very much in Biophilia mode, with exactly half of her 16-song set drawn from that most recent record. The Tesla coil suspended above her sparked into action for ‘Thunderbolt’, while both ‘Crystalline’ and closer ‘Declare Independence’ turned into onstage raves as she was joined in losing the plot by her army of backing singers.

New Order opened by saying sorry. “This is our first time in Poland,” Bernard Sumner announced. “We can only apologise for not coming here in the last 30 years. It wasn’t our fault.” No matter, they still manage to somehow sound ahead of their time despite Sumner’s ragged vocals. Tracks like ‘Regret’ still sound transcendent, and ‘Transmission’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ aren’t a bad couple of songs to keep up your sleeve for the encore.

We arrived the next day to discover that things start late at Open’er. At least we had plenty of time to explore the site. I ate some perogies, which were delicious but so greasy I worried my lips had turned translucent. I visited the fashion tent, where a catwalk jutted out of a hillside bunker. Young Polish designers displayed punk knitwear in garish colours and t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Fuck My Polish Life”. Mainly the airport’s old runway was lined with the sort of international hippy tat stalls that you find at every festival in Europe, but the Muzeum, a modern art gallery, is more unusual. Housed in another bunker, it had short art films playing on a loop inside wooden containers. “My ambition is to do art on a high level,” Mikolaj had told me, explaining why Open’er avoids workaday fancy dress festivities. “Usually at other festivals it’s just street theatre as decoration.”

When 5pm rolled around the first bands came on and I went to check out one of the locals. Iza Lach is a much-hyped young singer who’s just been signed by the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg. There wasn’t much evidence of his rap influence, or indeed his new reggae incarnation, in her spikily confident keyboard-led set.

By the time I left the tent 45 minutes later a thick fog had descended which made it impossible to even see the main stage from the press area. With stage lights streaming through the fog as people wandered back and forth the whole scene could have been lifted straight out of ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’. Through the mist drifted the sound of Kapela Ze Wsi Warszawa (The Warsaw Village Band) playing extended versions of traditional Polish folk songs.

Open’er does a pretty great job of balancing intriguing Polish acts with high-end headliners. Justice topped the bill on Thursday night and ruthlessly got every soul moving, while the following night Franz Ferdinand’s dazzlingly tight set was followed by the reformed Cardigans. Everyone fell for the wonderful Nina Persson just as hard as we had done for Mosshart. Away from the main stage, Public Enemy and Janelle Monáe delivered very different but equally energy-packed and rapturously-received sets on consecutive nights. The Mars Voltaand The xx closed the final night, both confidently justifying the fact that they played higher up the bill than you’d see them in the UK.

As a booking philosophy, Mikolaj had explained with a laugh that: “Our ambition is to be an interesting festival. We don’t book bands who are very popular but not very interesting.” He’s achieved that goal this year, although out of politeness I didn’t bring up the inevitable Mumford & Sons performance. The Polish summer proved to be just as changeable as the British, and in four days we got everything from sweltering heat to thick fog. The only time the heavens really opened was for a spectacular thunderstorm which delayed the Mumfords. Maybe God was trying to send Mikolaj a message.

By contrast, that remarkable Penderecki // Greenwood performance was fittingly cloaked in mysterious fog. I had to get up close just to see the full string orchestra assembled onstage. The show had been performed just twice before, at the Congress of Culture in Wroclaw, and at the Barbican in London. As Mikolaj explained: “It crosses borders. It’s been performed for classical music fans but it’s never been performed for regular people. It’s never been at a festival. It was an experiment, but it worked! I know that 99% of people won’t be listening to his CD in their cars, but they came with open minds. People who come to this festival should know that this kind of music exists and it’s very important. Penderecki is a big star in Poland, so for him to come here means a lot. He was very enthusiastic to do it.”

The format is that first Penderecki’s startling 1960 composition ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ is performed, followed by Jonny Greenwood’s ‘Popcorn Superhet Receiver’, which was heavily inspired by it. Then we hear Penderecki’s ‘Polymorphia’ and Greenwood’s ‘48 Responses to Polymorphia’, which includes echoes of Bach and Messiaen.

It’s strange and unfamiliar music to hear in a festival setting. Many of the audience will have heard Penderecki’s work before, though, even if only in films. He’s appeared on soundtracks including The Shining and a couple of David Lynch movies, while parts of ‘Polymorphia’ feature in The Exorcist. ‘Popcorn Superhet Receiver’, meanwhile, formed the basis of Greenwood’s famous There Will Be Blood score.

Penderecki’s avant garde work came about through his early experiments with electronic music, and he asks the orchestra to do things with their instruments that they’d never usually do. String instruments are transformed into percussion, which lends their whole performance an unusual physicality that complements the often jarring and unbearably tense music. Greenwood goes even further in ‘48 Responses’, and towards the end the violinists swap their bows for pacay tree branches that look like toy swords. At the finale they shake their branches over their heads, creating a sound like massed armies of rattlesnakes. For the entire performance, which lasted over an hour, the audience were flawlessly attentive, something I have to confess to Mikolaj would surely never have happened at a UK festival of comparable size.

Penderecki conducted his own pieces, while Marek Mos conducted Greenwood’s, who wasn’t actually there. He didn’t need to be. This was Penderecki’s rock star moment. At the end of ‘Polymorphia’ he walked offstage and than returned to yet more whooped applause. He lifted both arms above his head and punched the sky.

“It’s not easy music,” Penderecki admitted when I tracked him down backstage, “but it is music that these young people have never heard before. Those two pieces, ‘Threnody’ and ‘Polymorphia’, I wrote 52 years ago. I was young and enthusiastic. Actually at that time, only young people liked my music. Now it’s finding a new generation.”

I asked him what made ‘Threnody’ so radical, and he replied: “It’s unusual because of this new way of using string instruments, playing behind the bridge or on the tail-piece, different types of vibrato, and so on and so forth. Also, of course, treating the instrument as a percussion instrument. I remember, 50 years ago many orchestras went on strike and refused to play this music, but I believed that I was right. Of course, the string instrument is not built for such music but it can produce a sound that it had not done before. I was happy to be a radical.”

If ‘Threnody’ was radical, then the strange genesis of ‘Polymorphia’ is something else entirely. As Penderecki explained: “I was interested to know the reaction of people to my music. My friend was a psychiatrist, so we played ‘Threnody’ for the sick people, and recorded electroencephalograms. I used the results of this in ‘Polymorphia’. It doesn’t look like a piece of music.”

He opened his book of sheet music to show me. Black lines zigzagged across the page like the medical charts of a particularly unstable patient. Which is precisely what they are. Penderecki chuckled to himself. “You can imagine that 52 years ago, for musicians who had only studied music in a conservatory, looking at this score and the music that I asked them to play was a shock! Even now if somebody wants to play ‘Polymorphia’ or ‘Threnody’ I ask for one specific rehearsal for an explanation of the symbols I have used. Otherwise, you can’t play it.”

Penderecki’s musical experiments seem all the more remarkable when placed in the context of a Poland still living under communism. I asked the composer how his country has changed in his lifetime. He replied: “It’s a different country now to the one that I remember. I grew up under communism. You can compare it maybe to the situation in Cambodia… I’m exaggerating perhaps, but it was a very poor country in Europe and that’s completely changed now. The economy is very good. It is the only country without a crisis. People are working. Everything is possible. There is freedom. When I grew up, sacred music and avant garde music was forbidden because it was the music of the bourgeois. We were very lucky to have the Warsaw Autumn festival, which was the only place where this music was played. Then I started, with other composers, to fight for freedom in art. Poland was a unique country in the socialist bloc where avant garde music was possible. It was not in Russia, not in Czechoslovakia, not in other countries, only in Poland.”

His fight was not just an artistic one but a fight for political freedom. “I wrote a lot of sacred music,” he continued. “At that time it was forbidden but because it was a success in the West they started to play my music in Poland as well. It could not be performed when I wrote it. We had to find private choirs to practice the music. It was 10 years before I saw it in Poland. We did it, really. Artists, not only me, of course, but my colleagues, people like Wajda for movies and Tadeusz Kantor for the theatre. We changed Poland.”

The country Penderecki helped shape is one that embraces the musically adventurous, and there’s no better place to experience that than at Open’er. The crowd are also wilder than Mikolaj made out. On the final night after leaving the site we in the British Music Press Corps ended up in the nearby town of Sopot. Hundreds of Polish teenagers leaving the festival were celebrating their last night, and their freedom from Heineken, by sitting on the beach and mixing litre bottles of vodka and apple juice. I could see many, many drunk people. We were treated to the sight of one of my fellow journalists stripping stark naked and wading out into the water. He splashed around like a wet seal as the sun came up, but even that wasn’t quite as weird or unforgettable as what a 78-year-old Polish composer had just done with a string orchestra, an awed crowd and a head full of twisted, revolutionary ideas.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

“To take seven years off and see all the bands who came up after us, I think there were times when I did sit at home and think: ‘I don’t understand why I never felt I was good enough because I could smoke 99.9% of this bunch.’”

Shirley Manson remains very much a shrinking violet.

Shirley and I are sat in some sort of ersatz library at The Langham, a grand, swanky hotel opposite BBC Broadcasting House in central London and thus a prime location for anyone wishing to launch an assault on the nation’s airwaves. Shirley is “fantastic” because she’s just drunk half a bottle of wine over lunch and apparently ate three or four contemporary pop acts for breakfast. She seems to be rather enjoying being back in the saddle of this record-promoting lark. She’s brilliant company, with a glint in her eye and her tongue in her cheek. The seven year gap since the last record doesn’t seem to have mellowed her.

“Don’t be fooled!” she laughs wickedly, “I’ve completely mellowed! I’m a pussycat!”

The rest of Garbage: Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and Butch Vig are nowhere to be seen. It seems hard to believe now but there was a time when it was the trio of male producers, most notably Butch “That bloke who produced Nevermind” Vig who were perceived as running the show, with their red-headed front-woman cast as the eye-candy who should be grateful to have been plucked from the relative obscurity of goth-pop combo Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie. Hence Shirley’s aforementioned feelings of inadequacy:

“I spent my entire career feeling that I was coming from a position of lack. When you’re a young woman who gets into business with a renowned and revered producer, the way the world views that can be complicated and diminishing for a less experienced, younger, unproven talent. I constantly felt, because I would read it everyday in the press, that I wasn’t worthy of such a relationship. Even though I am a bolshie, feisty person it did eventually wear me down, if the truth be told.”

While she’s now more confident in herself than ever, she’s not even close to forgetting the struggle she went through as a woman to be taken seriously as an artist. When I bring up feminism, she raises her concern that the types of roles women are allowed to play in mainstream music have become increasing circumscribed: “I feel that in the Nineties when we first came out there were a lot of different types of women being heard in the mainstream. In the last ten years all it has been is women singing pretty ditties and showing their titties. There’s not been really many records that have been played on mainstream radio of any depth, or have indeed even been penned by women. That disturbs me a little. Plenty of pop music. Plenty of catchy, all-singing, all-dancing girls out there, but there’s not really many agitators or provocateurs or women in disagreement with what’s going on.”

There’s the odd exception, of course. Shirley’s a big fan of one particular filthy-mouthed New Yorker: “Azealia Banks blows me away. Fucking unbelievable. When I heard ‘212’ it was like hearing ‘Why D’ya Do It?’ by Marianne Faithfull for the first time. It blew me away, and I was jealous because that’s something I can’t do. She does it brilliantly and I’m so grateful that there’s somebody like her out there. But she’s the 1%. Azealia is a phenomenal, fantastic, welcomed force right now, but her challenge will be to have a career that lasts more than two years.”

With the music industry still softly imploding around all of us it’s a tough time for anyone to be thinking about career longevity, but her concerns come from a hard won sense of having climbed a mountain and found few compatriots at the top: “It’s tough for anyone to be in the music industry, but I think what has happened in the last decade is that a lot of women have forgotten what a struggle it was for previous generations to even get a foot in the door in the music scene and so have forgotten how tenuous their holding is. As a result I haven’t seen much effort into trying to redefine the way women have historically been viewed as solely visual treats and playthings. Make no mistake, there is still an incredible struggle for women to be treated as equal around the world and in the music industry. I’ve always felt a responsibility to conduct myself a certain way. Before I broke into the music scene there weren’t that many empowered women getting played on the radio. There are still very few women who have managed to navigate a career of any length or are considered of any worth and that bothers me.”

Seventeen years separate Garbage’s debut self-titled record and the spanking new aggression of Not Your Kind Of People. She thinks she’s better at her job now than she was back then: “I can’t speak for everyone else in the band but I definitely found it easier to make this record than the earlier ones. We’ve maybe stopped giving a shit about everything aside from making music together as a band and trying to ensure that we engineer our own happiness. That sounds really trite, but actually it’s harder than one might think.”

So why reform now? “Why not?”, she shoots back, without missing a beat. “There’s a lot of different reasons. A lot of things have happened to us. A lot of things have happened to those we love. A lot of time has changed. A lot of time has passed, but we’ve got to the point where we’re gasping to communicate and gasping for contact.”

Needless to say, plenty has changed since Garbage were last treading the boards of publicity. Not least the advent of the age of social media. Shirley is relishing it. The band’s twitter account is staffed by: “Mostly me. Not always, but mostly. At first I railed against it and thought it was awful. Now I see it as remarkably effective tool to inform our following.” There are also new connections to be made: “There’s something really exciting for me to get a glimpse into our fans’ lives. I find it fascinating, and thrilling and sometimes touching. When you realise someone’s spent their entire wage to buy a ticket to your show and travel there and buy the T-shirt… that makes me want to burst into tears, quite frankly. I’ve railed against it, but now I realise that what once was is gone. The mysteriousness and the allure of rock’n’roll as we knew it when we were growing up is gone, but that doesn’t mean that other great things can’t move into its place.”

In some ways, she says, the things she’s proudest of herself for are the things she didn’t do. She was never lured by the carrot of a pop solo career. She “didn’t take my clothes off for a million dollars.” She’s still every inch her own woman, but knows now that the temptations of fame and fortune are “hard things to resist. It looks easier on paper.”

The greatest joy of having Garbage back together again is being back on stage. That’s where she’s happiest: “I didn’t have a flutter of nerves even on day one. I feel more comfortable onstage than I do anywhere else in the world in my life. I feel completely uninhibited. I just don’t feel self-conscious, in any way, shape or form, and yet in my day-to-day life even now I feel self-conscious.”

That sounds like the mirror image of stage fright, I venture.

“Exactly. I don’t know why that is and I’m sure it’s not healthy. I don’t feel that the audience is judging me in a negative way, at all. I feel that they’ve come because they love our music, and I’m just a vessel for that. I don’t feel that I’m being scrutinised and judged and criticised, whereas in the rest of my life I do. I feel that people are constantly looking at me and judging me and making assumptions about me. It’s nothing to do with being famous. My whole life I’ve felt that way….”

She pauses as she realises we’re drifting into the realm of therapy. She laughs at herself loudly and then pouts at me: “Can you explain it, doctor? Can you cure me?”

I’m not sure what to say to that, so I tell I can’t: “But then I wouldn’t want to.”

“Good answer,” she smiles. “Smooth.”

I appear to be accidentally trying it on with Shirley Manson. I’m saved from further embarrassing myself because she’s due any minute over at Broadcasting House. As we get up to leave I tell her that I hope the album does well.

“I’m sure it won’t,” she grins, not giving a fuck. “But that’s life.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

The War On Drugs were about halfway through their set in the sweaty confines of Corsica Studios last year when band leader Adam Granduciel announced that they were about to play ‘Brothers’, arguably the centrepiece of their stunning last record Slave Ambient. “We usually invite someone from the audience up to play guitar on this one, but I don’t think there’s room,” he continued, glancing around the tiny stage. “Ah, fuck it! Who wants to play guitar?” The guy who cheered loudest was invited up, but his tentative strumming made it quickly apparent that he wasn’t as confident as he first sounded. There was just a trace of consternation in Granduciel’s voice when he told him: “Erm… this is a big show for us, dude.”

Moments later the singer turned back to face the audience. “Hey, that’s what rock’n’roll is all about,” he announced. “It doesn’t matter whether he can play or not. He said he wanted to play and now he’s up here. Fuck it.” No matter. As the band launched into the song the new guy’s tentative strumming became just a drop in their squalling ocean of sound.

Months later, when I remind Granduciel of that moment he recalls it instantly, and with a chuckle: “I think that might have been the last time we’re going to do that! It’s funny because it’s such an easy song to play that normally we’d been lucky. People who wanted to come up and play with the band in front of a lot of people would be pretty confident in their playing ability. We’d never had an issue, but on that night I remember the guy… well, he was left-handed to start with, and we obviously didn’t have any left-handed guitars. The whole thing was pretty amusing. I still give the guy credit for getting up there! He’d definitely had a couple of drinks but he didn’t let not having a left-handed guitar stop him! For me, it’s one of those things that takes the energy of the room to a different place. It changes the mood in a good way, whether or not the person coming up is capable, it’s more about the fact that they wanted to be up there… it’s more about just having a good time. At the end of the day, it’s just rock music!”

The War On Drugs bring their rock music back to the UK this week, and the widely-acknowledged brilliance of Slave Ambient means they’re playing bigger rooms than ever. As well as the pleasure of playing to larger audiences, for someone as obsessive about the way his music sounds as Granduciel there’s also a sonic reward: “When you start playing bigger rooms the music just sounds better. The show at Corsica Studios was awesome but it’s definitely not the best environment for a lot of the War On Drugs music. Also, as a band we really like to play for a while, so hopefully the more people who come and the more our catalogue expands will mean that we can play big rooms and just keep going for two-and-a-half hours! It’s a blessing to play these gorgeous rooms, and to hear our music there is a really big pay-off.”

It’s a pay-off Granduciel’s earned after spending years carefully honing and shaping his music. In 2003 he moved to Philadelphia where he met and started making music with Kurt Vile, who played in an early incarnation of The War On Drugs. To support himself, Granduciel was working for a property management company. His job was to clear out apartments when people, mostly college students, moved on and left detritus in their wake. It was the sort of job that allowed him to concentrate his energy on his music. “There was a lot to do, but there was a lot of down time as well,” he remembers. “In the main office there was a computer on the third floor and I would come in in the morning and work for an hour and then disappear up to the third floor to work on the album art for the first record. I’d come down at like five in the afternoon and they’d be like: “You were here today?” and I’d make up some excuse about what I’d been working on up there. That’s the time when you really find out for yourself the extent to which you’re committed to something. I was working all the time to pay the rent, and also to buy musical equipment and records. I’d work all day and then come home and jam all night. I was playing shows, recording, manipulating sounds, partying and fucking around. We’d go on tour and then get back and have to go to work the next day. It was all because we just loved what we were doing. We put a lot of time into it, and really focused on just being better musicians. I still spend all my time working on new music and just fucking around with sounds. I think it taught me a certain working method that I feel comfortable with and get great results from. It would have been easier to not work as hard as I did all the time, but I feel like it was worth it.”

You can hear the results of that work in the densely-layered music on Slave Ambient, which Granduciel spent weeks and months fine-tuning. He’s been making music this way for so long that things like lyric-writing have become almost instinctive: “A lot of the stuff that I’m really proud of on the record was stuff that just came out in the moment while I was working on the song. Lines that would just pop into my head when I was writing it or recording a vocal. A lot of times I’d go into the studio with just the music and take a couple of hours to improvise and take notes. I got some real gems out of just zoning in to what I was hearing in the music. In ‘I Was There’ there’s a line: “I was there to catch a man, I thought I had him by the hand, I only had him by the glove,” which just came out at the spur of the moment and I still can’t believe I got something like that.”

He raves about seeing his heroes play live, people like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but he thinks it’s reductive for critics to peg his band as “throwback Americana”. It’s not a throwback, he says, because: “we’re trying to do something new with what we love.”

When the band had a little time off from touring recently, Granduciel predictably couldn’t be kept out of the studio for long. He read Thomas McGuane’s short story collection Gallatin Canyon and cooked his signature chicken soup, but mostly he just recorded and recorded. “I was writing a lot,” he says. “I booked some studio time and went in with the band. It’s nice to have some new stuff to listen to and to put into the set. By the time it comes to record ‘for real’, when we put together the next record, it’ll be nice to have stuff that we’ve been playing live as a band for a while.”

He’s taking his band across Europe this month, and recently he celebrated his birthday with a show at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. He describes it as coming “full circle”, having spent countless hours listening to Spacemen 3’s classic live album Performance, recorded at the Dutch venue in 1988. He’s enjoying the challenge of living up to the music he loves: “In terms of making the records I try to make them as interesting and as much of a work of art as possible, but then live we take those big ideas and turn it into music for a full-fledged rock band.”

Granduciel is a man doing what he loves, on his own terms, which might be what makes his records and his shows so utterly and purely exhilarating. “From the moment I started playing I knew it was something I really, really loved. I never hunted down a record deal. I was really just enjoying what I was doing and it fell into place. I was aware of having to make sure that I was ready for it. I just focused on writing and recording and amazingly it got around to the people who wanted to put it out.” Listening to him talk, I keep thinking back to what he said to that audience in the sweaty confines of Corsica Studios. Hey, this is what rock’n’roll is all about. “Since I was young,” he tells me matter-of-factly, “I’ve always known that all I wanted to do was play guitar my whole life.”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

“God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
Next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61””

I stepped off the plane into the dry heat of the desert morning a little over twelve hours earlier than planned. My trip to Abu Dhabi, at the invitation and expense of the Aloft hotel chain, had been moved forward at the last moment when the Islamic authorities sighted the new moon and declared Eid al-Adha for the following Saturday. The religious holiday, which commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son at God’s command – Christian and Qur’anic traditions differ over whether that son was Isaac or Ishmael – necessitates that the preceding night the sale of alcohol is prohibited. This is to ensure that believers approach Abe’s obedience in a spirit of sober contemplation. Aloft had been planning to host ‘Turning Up The Spotlight’, their Battle of the Bands competition, on the Friday. However, after apparently being caught unawares by the annual holiday they obviously realised that a spirit of sober contemplation would be wholly unsuited to a Battle of the Bands and scrambled to rearrange the show for Thursday evening.

Hence the earlier flights, for myself and for the eclectic batch of judges: Charlatans guitarist Mark Collins, Grammy award-winning producers Kevin Bacon and Jonathan Quarmby, Facebook competition winner Karen Newby, and Radio One’s Huw Stephens. That, at least, was the plan. The change of date meant that Huw Stephens who, with scant regard for the timing of Islamic religious festivals, hosts a weekly radio show on a Thursday, was unable to make it. This meant some immediate changes for me. “We’d like you to step in as a judge”, one of the organisers told me shortly after I arrived at the Aloft Abu Dhabi, “Don’t worry, it won’t be anything like X Factor.”

Later that evening, after the stifling heat of the day had given way to the pleasant warmth of the night, I joined the rest of the judges by the hotel’s rooftop pool. The stage behind the pool didn’t have a lot of space in front of it to begin with, but now most of that space had been taken up by another stage with a long desk and a row of chairs. It looked unmistakably like the set of X Factor.

The three bands: Nikotin, Beat Antenna and Tim Hassall, were all milling around, and it was already obvious that they were taking things seriously. For them, the prize was a golden ticket to come and play a show in London at the opening of Aloft’s newest outpost. In between sound-checking they spoke about life in the United Arab Emirates. They had all earlier made the two hour drive down the coast from Dubai, where much of UAE’s cultural innovation happens. Indeed, the organisers admitted that the bands had been chosen for the show after they’d found it impossible to find suitable bands playing original music in Abu Dhabi.

Like the overwhelming majority of the UAE’s population, all of the musicians are essentially expats. Only 1 in 6 people living in the UAE are local Emirati, the rest are transient workers drawn here by the almost non-existent tax system but subject to strict immigration controls: lose your job, and you lose your visa and face deportation. Even people born here, like the musicians in Nikotin, do not automatically receive citizenship. Another result of making visas dependent on employment is that it’s a tough country in which to play music for a living. Writing ‘struggling artist’ on your visa application won’t impress anybody.

Beat Antenna, who are all from England, told me a little about the lifestyle here: “It’s a weird place to live, because you feel like you’re constantly on holiday. You go from hotel to hotel, your car is valeted, and there’s an Americanised feel, but the culture is completely different – as you see from Friday being a ‘dry day’. There’s a culture grind between the Westernised elements and the local culture, where you have the call to prayer five times a day.”

The attitude to alcohol is a good example of this uncomfortable juxtaposition of cultures. Drinking is theoretically frowned upon and is subject to heavy taxation and strict restrictions on where it can be sold. The only bars are in hotels, and although a pint of beer can cost you £8 the local workforce who pay so little income tax are happy to take the hit. The hotel dance-floors are packed with drunk people dancing to pop music. They could be anywhere in the world.

At that moment, however, the price of alcohol was of no concern to me. At the Aloft, judges drank for free. Before long we were ushered into our seats at the long X Factor desk while an enthusiastic radio DJ from Dubai burbled excitedly. He told us he worked for a station called Radio One, which made me think wistfully of Huw Stephens and how I wished he was there to play the role of indie Simon Cowell instead of me.

The first band up were Nikotin, a metal band whose prior claims to fame included opening shows for Nickelback and Maxïmo Park. Although their nationalities split them between India, Pakistan, Iran and Canada their sound was an MTV-friendly take on heavy rock. At the end of the set, when we judges were immediately asked for our verdict – the attempts to distance the night from X Factor seemed to fall at every hurdle – several picked out their track ‘Overloaded’ as possessing the sort of instantly memorable riff which Metallica fans in bedrooms all over the world search for.

The second act, Beat Antenna, were unashamedly ‘lad rock’ – their sound ran the gamut from Hard Fi, on ‘Coming Around’, to Oasis, on ‘Love Never Lands’ – and they had recently supported Beady Eye. Their singer Neil Harrison accurately summed up the weirdness of this particular gig set-up when he told the crowd: “If you guys don’t come further forward, we’re gonna feel like we’re in a job interview, and that’s not good.” One of the judges described them as “muscular guys playing muscular rock”, but the more introspective ‘Cloud Suits’ was maybe their strongest track.

The final act, Tim Hassall, told us early on that he wrote a couple of his songs when he was “down in Louisiana”, a much mythologised place he seems to permanently inhabit in his music. There were lots of lyrical references to “Lafayette” and old friends going “down to the Bayou”. His duet with singer Gayathri Krishnan on ‘Christmas Eve’ stood out, even after judge Mark Collins picked him up for making the “classic rock and roll mistake” of declaring how happy he is to be “back in Dubai” while stood onstage in Abu Dhabi.

After the show we were bundled backstage to pick a winner, where we all spoke about how international the bands sounded, and how little life in the UAE seemed to be reflected in their music. We eventually settled on Nikotin, and soon the band were popping champagne corks and raving about the promise of their first visit to London.

The next day I met Nikotin’s singer Cruize, and asked him about how he felt about the local music scene. “It’s quite restrictive,” he told me, “Because of local rules and regulations you have to be over 21 to play in a bar, because they’ll be drinks. It’s restrictive for young musicians who want to get out there, because they have no place to play, other than all-ages shows. This country is all about making money, so promoters really don’t go for all-ages gigs because they don’t get bar sales. That’s a restriction which causes trouble for bands in this part of the region. We do have a few promoters who try and promote local bands, although most people play covers. There is a music scene growing though.”

There don’t seem to be any purpose-built gig venues in the entire country: it’s either hotel bars or stadiums. Cruize said: “We don’t have any actual ‘venues’. Most of the places we play are in hotels, because they have bars with alcohol licenses so they can do this. They’re supposed to be opening a new Hard Rock Café, which I guess will be open to bands. Other than that, there are very few places where most of the local music scene play.”

Even if going to watch a local band remains a niche pastime, people will flock to see big names. Cruize added: “Abu Dhabi have been bringing huge acts down to the Yass Arena, which is where Metallica played recently. I think there were about 45,000 people there on a week day. Abu Dhabi have the F1 track so there’s going to be a series of big shows: Britney Spears, The Cult, Incubus and Paul McCartney. You can’t miss them.”

One of the things to remember about the UAE is that it’s still so young: it only recently turned 40. Bands like Nikotin are among the first generations that have lived their whole lives there. “Most of us were born and grew up in Dubai,” Cruize told me. “We’ve had the Dubai experience. Growing up, the music scene has been underplayed. Being a Muslim country, really heavy music is not really approved of but slowly it seems to be coming out in Dubai because Dubai is opening up. That’s something that we welcome.”

‘The Dubai experience’ is a hard thing to pin down, but the journalist and author Jim Krane gets close to it in his book ‘City of Gold’. Towards the end of it he writes: “Given everything I’ve written about this fascinating place, one must understand that Dubai is not a genuine city. Yet. It’s still an unfinished collection of buildings where the atmosphere is transitory, like an airport or a hotel. The population consists of flows of people rather than permanent residents. Life is superficial.”

The same goes for Abu Dhabi, a place where it often feels like life is taking place within a bar room scene from Lost in Translation. Before I left I visited one of the city’s landmarks, the Emirates Palace Hotel. Inside this sprawling Xanadu, which contains a vending machine which sells gold bars along with various luxury goods shops, there is an exhibition about Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’s planned quarter of museums and art galleries. Designed as the new centrepiece of the city’s cultural life, it will have branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. Just as with the promoters looking to fill stadiums, there is an attitude that when it comes to culture the UAE can afford to buy in the best of what the world has to offer. The local arts scene feels neglected by comparison.

Several weeks later, back in London, I got the news that Nikotin were not granted visas in time to make the gig. After the show goes on without them, I get an email from Cruize: “It was tragic that we couldn’t make it due to the delay in getting our visas in time for the show. A lot of our fans in the UK were quite excited to hear that we were making our debut appearance in the UK, but alas we could not make it,” he wrote, before adding: “Winning the Abu Dhabi leg of the Aloft competition, on the other hand, did bring in a lot of interest and renewed exposure to the band.”

I hope winning the competition helps Nikotin get themselves heard, but I fear that they, just like Beat Antenna and Tim Hassall and every other musician in the UAE, are trying to climb a ladder which is missing all of its middle rungs. Hotel bars are as high as they can climb in a country willing to sacrifice its own homegrown potential for glamorous imports. There’s plenty of money in Abu Dhabi, but there are some things it can’t buy.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

Part 1: Beginnings

I was watching Björk play the Other Stage at Glastonbury in 2007 when the dreadlocked man in front of me took a live snake out of his backpack. “Jesus!” I said, “Is that a live snake?” The serpent danced slowly in his hands, flicking out its tongue inquisitively as Björk’s rhythms filled the air. The man looked back at me with a distant smile: “He loves the vibrations.”

Well, don’t we all? Over the last two decades Björk’s vibrations have established her as pop music’s preeminent innovator, a fearless and restless proponent of the avant-garde whose discography defies the staid categorisation of genre. When I meet her on a summer afternoon in West London her enthusiasm for her work is infectious and the ebullient conversation as eclectic as you’d expect. We talk about education, about feminism and Lady Gaga’s outfits, about why she’s like ‘carrot soup and tequila’ and Coldplay are like ‘chips and sausages’, about political activism and aluminium mining and even about the lack of punk spirit in proprietary software, a topic she acknowledges she probably shouldn’t talk about.

Fittingly for someone who can make even reptiles shimmy, she also talks about the passion for nature which informed her latest wildly ambitious project, which shares its name with the hypothesis that humans have an innate affinity with the natural world: Biophilia.

It’s an idea she relates to. We’re in Little Venice, where she has kept a house since the time of Debut, and she tells me that the canals here are her surrogate for the sea: “Yeah, when I came here in ’93 I looked first for places by the Thames, but I didn’t really find anything I liked. Maybe it was a bit industrial, too. I guess I settled for the canals, I just like walking…”

This is a nicer place to walk than down by the river. “Yeah, I have a routine where I will go for walks and I can work on my melodies. I actually use the canals, but then I discovered because I go to the swimming pool in Westbourne Grove that I can walk through – there’s all these tunnels underneath the motorway. They’re quite good for working on my melodies actually. They’ve got a really nice echo. I sort of have to go somewhere where no one is, or they’ll arrest me and put me away.” She giggles. “In Iceland, even though you’re in the capital you can always walk for five minutes and you’re on your own. That’s kinda how I’ve worked on my melodies since I was a kid.”

The evidence for this is there in her songs: she says they’re all 83 BPM because that’s the speed she walks at. “Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic!” she laughs, “I’m actually trying to push one of the songs on the album now above 100 BPM but it’s proving hard!”

When Björk says she’s been working on melodies since she was a kid, she means it. She first became a star in Iceland at the age of 11 after one of her music teachers sent a recording of her singing a cover of ‘I Love to Love’ by Tina Charles to RÚV, at the time Iceland’s only radio station. When the recording was broadcast Björk was offered her first contract by local label Fálkinn, and with the help of her stepfather released a self-titled album in 1977. Björk has since said that she felt strange receiving praise for songs she had only sung, not written, although she did contribute one track which showcased her precocious talent and her maverick aspirations: an instrumental piece for flute named after Icelandic painter Jóhannes Kjarval.

She didn’t remain that cherubic child for long. As a teenager she shaved her eyebrows and joined a series of punk bands: she drummed for an all-girl group called Spit & Snot, was flautist for the proggier Exodus and then joined Tappi Tikarrass, whose name translates as ‘Cork the Bitch’s Ass’. Her next band, KUKL, recorded a couple of albums for Crass Records before spawning The Sugarcubes, whose 1988 single ‘Birthday’ and subsequent album Life’s Too Good gave Björk her first real taste of global acclaim.

After three albums The Sugarcubes split in 1992 and Björk moved to London to establish herself as a solo artist. She made it look effortless. The album she recorded with producer Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul, Debut, won her ‘Best Newcomer’ and ‘Best International Female’ at the Brits in 1994, while her music videos were already beginning to make her an icon: the Michel Gondry-directed video for ‘Human Behavior’ was nominated for a Grammy.

For 1995’s follow-up Post she worked with an assortment of producers drawn from jungle and trip hop, including Tricky and Graham Massey of 808 State, to create an album she described as “musically promiscuous”. 1997’s Homogenic reacted against this, setting out to explore her Icelandic identity against a backdrop of explosive, distorted beats. Her next album Vespertine was another about turn. When it was released in 2001 she told Simon Reynolds that she wanted it to be “a love affair to the home, about creating paradise under the kitchen table. It’s about creating peaks without outside stimulants… The kind of peaks you reach reading a book.”

Looking back at her career, Björk acknowledges that the clearest pattern is her stubborn refusal to repeat herself. She offers by way of explanation the fact that she adores a challenge, which often manifests itself in her choosing to take on genres she ordinarily dislikes. She wasn’t sure about a cappella music, she says, so she made Medúlla. She wasn’t excited by protest music, so she made Volta . “I guess with each project I have some sort of personal taboo I have to break,” she continues. “I don’t know why. It’s some sort of a kick I get out of it. I mean, obviously I’m also embracing a lot of things that I like, like nature, electronic music, vocals, choirs…”

For Biophilia, which will be simultaneously released as a series of musical and educational games built into an app for iPad and iPhone, part of the challenge was to take the idea of generative music, music created by a system, and use it to actually write great music: “I guess I’ve been going to galleries and museums – not often, but once in a while – and I’ve always thought it was such a strange brand of music. A lot of it is such a good idea, an amazing concept, and you walk through it and it’s interactive in space – but would you be able to then go home and listen to that song on your stereo, without knowing that, and it still be a good song? Or hear it on the radio? In most cases, that’s not the case. I don’t blame it; because of course it’s still good. Certain music is good in films, certain music is good in porn movies, certain music is good in clubs… that’s the good thing about music, it’s everywhere. I guess my challenge with this project was to do generative music but that it was still ‘songs’. I gave it my best shot that if in ten years somebody listens to the CD, or whatever format is going on then, and they don’t know anything about it… it would be just like my other CDs. It wouldn’t be that you needed the apps to get it. So in that way I wanted to unite those two worlds, you know?”

Part 2: Biophilia

Björk‘s new project Biophilia does not want for ambition. It has been billed as the first ‘app album’: Each of its ten tracks are being released alongside a corresponding app version for iPad and iPhone. These apps can be bought and accessed through the central Biophilia app, which appears as a galaxy waiting to be explored and navigated, with the songs as stars in its constellation. Zeroing in on a star enables you to hear the song as Björk recorded it, or to play a game which will involve you manipulating the music in some thematically-appropriate way. For example, on ‘Virus’ you play the part of a cell defending itself from viral attack, while on ‘Thunderbolt’ you draw Tesla coil charges which alter the bass lines you hear.

I’d been playing with the apps before we met and while they all seemed intuitive at the time, my notebook ended up covered in a bewildering cobweb of ideas: something about ‘continental drift’, something else about ‘seduction’, something about ‘DNA’, something else about ‘piano keys’. I look at Björk helplessly. Can she put it into words? “In a way, every app is a visualisation of the song. You are inside the song,” she explains eagerly. “I think when you listen to music on headphones and you close your eyes it’s very… internal. I wanted it to be that you could see the sounds, you know?”

Her career has already given us a series of beautiful and intensely original music videos, so I ask whether that experience of working with directors helped to inform her design work with the app developers? One immediate obvious difference is that she’s not onscreen for the apps: “With all the video directors I’ve worked with in the past I’ve always had just a couple of clues about each song: ‘This one is about walking on roofs’ or ‘This one is confrontational’ or ‘No, it’s not pink’. I’ll have a few clues about each song, and then I will try and work with them and try and bridge that gap between the image and the sound. But I mean I think this is even better, for me. For me it was never really about the way I look.”

I have to stop her there. This is a woman who wore a swan to the Oscars, whose dress at the Olympics in 2004 unwrapped itself to reveal a 10,000 square foot map of the world, and who, more immediately, is currently sat opposite me beneath a copper dome of hair that blossoms around her ears in the shape of a bell. She’s one of the most iconic pop stars in the world. It must, I suggest, have been a little bit about the way she looked. She laughs. “Yeah, of course it is, but it’s really about the core, and the core of it to me is the song. I guess I learned after being in bands for fifteen years before I did my solo stuff, and we were punks and we were like: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how things look it’s all about how they sound’ and then somebody would just take a picture of us and put us in the papers and you would be upset – not that it was ugly, nothing to do with vanity – just that it didn’t fit the music. So I guess I had fifteen years of kinda…” she shrugs indifferently, “and then once every few years I would meet somebody who totally got it. So I learned, almost like I was a pupil. So for fifteen years I learned that if you match the right image to the right sound it makes my life a lot easier! But I think it has changed as I get older and become more idiosyncratic with the music – like, I used to collaborate more but now in the studio I make all the decisions!”

You’re an auteur now? “Yeah, yeah, yeah! I’m bossy! I’m a bossy-boots!” She laughs. “Well to be honest it’s mostly me and the engineer so there’s no one to boss around anyway, but I’ve kinda managed to develop more so I know more what I want there, so by the time I work with the visual people, or the app people, or the photographers, it’s like I’m back in a band. It’s like ‘Oh!’ You all sit in a circle and say: ‘How about crystals?’ ‘How about this?’ So it’s more like being in a band. So I enjoy the process, in that way.”

What struck me when I played with the apps was how immersed you become in the music and in the myriad ways that your actions could affect it. In an age where music seems to have been devalued by its sheer ubiquity, these apps demand your full attention. Was that the aim? “Hmm… that’s a good question.” She pauses to think, and when Björk is thinking she does this thing where she rotates her jaw as if chewing distractedly. “To be honest, I wasn’t focused on that but maybe unconsciously! I can’t promise you totally… my focus was kinda more on the fact that we had the touch-screen. We were performing on it on the Voltatour from 2006 to 2008 and all I could see was opportunities. The thing I was more conscious about was how I was unsatisfied with my music education in school. I mean obviously there were a lot of amazing things. I was there for ten years and I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but I felt it wasn’t tactile enough. It was more ‘booksy’ or, I don’t know what you say in English? Like ‘academic’?”

‘Didactic’, I suggest? “Yeah! So because I had such strong feelings about musicology, and about how I see rhythms.” She laughs. “Well, I said it there, didn’t I? How I see rhythms, and how I see different chords and different scales and different speeds, and what I feel like at the beginning of a song, when I go inside and when I come out the other end. I wanted to include that somehow, and I kept thinking: ‘For kids’. I guess because I spent three years on trying to get it as true to how I feel about music as possible, I could say ‘yes’ to your question and say I wanted other people to be able to see it too. But to be honest I wasn’t so much thinking of that because two years into the project I didn’t know that it would come out on touch-screens because they hadn’t even made iPads! I was mostly writing it for our touch-screens, we had Laniers. I was making programs: ‘The structure of this song is crystals, so it’s this shape. Let’s write a program that’s like that.’ Then I’d sing about it and put the emotion in there as well, so for me it was trying to connect things which very often are not connected and I feel they should be, you know?”

She’s overflowing with excitement about the project now: “In my mind I was trying to simplify something but I guess it comes across as being the most complicated project I’ve ever done! I think it is in print, but I think once you sit down and play with the apps it’s something like… ‘Oh! You go three times round the galaxy and then you tap on something and then lightning comes at you’… it’s very hard to describe in print, because basically then you’re making it didactic again, when you write about it! Basically this project, to cut a really long story short, is about making things that I feel have been too didactic into a 3D tactile experience. You know, you take up the spoon and you get to turn it in circles.” She picks up an empty coffee mug and whisks a tea spoon inside it. “The other idea is to do with electronic music, because I love electronic music. I’ve been doing it for a very long time, but it had its limitations and one of the criticisms I’ve heard for twenty years from people who prefer indie music or classical music or jazz or whatever is that they’ll be like: ‘Yes, but it has no soul’ and I’ve been doing that debate for twenty years now!” She laughs. “It’s like, well, it’s because nobody put it there!”

So this album is not just about bringing together music, technology and nature, it’s also about putting the soul into electronic music? “Yeah, and with the touch screens now you’re not stuck with a grid. That’s why the songs are like they are. The grid is water. The grid is a pendulum. The grid is DNA multiplying. It’s not 4/4. It’s not TCK-CH, TCK-CH, TCK-CH, TCK-CH. It’s basically liberating you from the grid, but it’s still electronic music.”

Björk’s quest to give electronic music a soul reminds me of a contrary attempt by Coldplay to use a machine to help their drummer sound less like a machine. In a recent New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger about a study into time perception by neuroscientist David Eagleman, Coldplay’s Will Champion describes how the band had been using a click track when playing live to keep time but then, having found that playing to it made them sound too rigid, the band decided not to do away with it but to speed it up and slow it down in places to artificially recreate the mood of a live gig. Coldplay now use elaborate “tempo maps” for their live shows and, as Champion told the magazine: “It re-creates the excitement of a track that’s not so rigid.”

As I describe how uncomfortable the idea of Coldplay’s tempo map makes me, Björk is nodding furiously: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” It seems strange to me, I tell her, that a machine is actually helping them to sound human. “It’s a really interesting point, because obviously I’ve been doing gigs since Debut and I’ve tried to solve this riddle ten times! It’s like the tenth time I’ve tried to solve this same riddle, in a way, but I just get better tools now! I mean, I personally would not have gone about it that way, because I feel you should let the tools be good at what they are good at. It’s not that the tools are pretending to be human or that the humans are pretending to be tools. Then again, I’m a very different musician to Coldplay. I like extremes. I think they probably like the middle a bit better than I do.”

Björk: queen of the understatement. She smiles. “I’m not saying that as a bad thing, you know? I quite enjoy a fierce techno beat with a pipe organ, do you know what I mean? I like that contrast, you know? Some people don’t. It’s kinda like having carrot soup and tequila, not just chips and sausages.” She laughs. “So I quite enjoy that. I mean the way I’ve done it in the past, what I’ve found really helpful, is if you solve this riddle in a few different ways in each concert, and then you never have songs back-to-back that are solved the same way. That puts the musicians on their toes. Say for example, on the Post tour: I had an accordion player who could play like Beethoven, he was a virtuoso accordion player and he played all the string arrangements but he was playing on a grid… so you had something very human, that no machine could do, and then you had something that only a machine could do. The next song, it would be electronic samples, very techno or whatever, played by a drummer not on a grid. He would be playing that and then I would be singing on top of that, you know?”

So varying the use of click-tracks or grids is your way of keeping things fresh? “Yeah. On one song the accordion player would just press ‘play’ on a computer and you’ll have a beat that doesn’t vary in speed. It’s just like a grid. Then you have a virtuoso musician do something that only a human can do. The next song would be a totally different approach, where again you would have electronic sounds that are very electronic – they’re not pretending to be acoustic – but they’d be played by a drummer so they wouldn’t be on a grid, or on a clock, and then you have musicians playing along with that. Then the next song would be just me and a keyboard, and then the next song would be everything on a grid. In that way, things can be dynamic. It keeps people on their toes. I’ve been in bands where nothing is on a grid and that can also, funnily enough, become stagnated. It brings different things out in people if you do that, but I think life is like that, anyway, and nature is like that. You can have something very grid-like such as your calendar, or your heartbeat, but you have to work around it. Aging, for example. It’s not dynamic. You’re not 10, and then you’re 50, and then 5. It’s a grid that you have to work around. You might as well just let it be very ‘griddy’ and then bring something that’s the opposite and… spunk it up!” She collapses into a fit of giggles. “I don’t know what word to use!”

Another example of throwing opposites together is the fact that the electronic sounds the Biophilia apps make are based on a series of acoustic instruments, many of which she had built specifically for this project: “Basically, I kept thinking of the kids. So, I wanted them to have a touch-screen, to have access to an algorithm from nature, to be able to play it with one finger and then for it to be connected with either a pipe-organ, or gamaleste, or pendulum, or sharpsichord. It’s sort of like ‘Where is the electric?’ and ‘Where is the acoustic?’ You make the machine do what the machine is best at doing, which is those algorithms that nobody could do live without it and then you can make impulsive decisions depending on your feelings at the time, or your emotions, and react to that – but then that’s plugged with acoustic sounds. I kept thinking about how kids sometimes get too stuck into computer games and I wanted it to not just be this virtual world where everything’s perfect. I wanted to be connected with things which are more like the skin or oxygen. So basically the pipe-organ is like wind, and the gamaleste is like bronze and the pendulum is like gravity. I just think that age between five and seven is magical. You can learn new languages, you can learn to read and write, you’re just a sponge. So whatever you grasp on the world in those years usually stays with you for the rest of your life.”

Was it important then that there was a element of composition built into the app, as well as creating a new way to present your own music? “Very much so, but I understood that it would just be an introduction. I call it ‘semi-educational’ because if you wanted to take the ‘semi-’ off you’d have to do a lot of work and a proper program. But it’s sort of an introduction, the 101 of musicology, but obviously this is my point of view: how I see musicology, so the songs will sound a little bit like my songs. Hopefully it will inspire people to go off and do their own songs.”

Part 3: Bootlegs

As intriguing as Björk’s Biophilia project is, there’s something about it that makes me feel slightly uneasy. I think it’s to do with the number of times the names ‘iPad’ and ‘iPhone’ appear on my press release and particularly with the fact that the Biophilia apps will not be made available on any other format. For someone as fiercely independent as Björk, who has spent her entire career on indie labels, this seems out of character. I hate to think of Björk as a corporate shill, but as we all know deep down in the depths of our iSouls, Apple have now unquestionably become The Man.

So this is what I ask her: ‘You’ve talked about the iPad feeling like a return to a punk ethos, where anyone can use it to make their own music. At the same time, iPads are expensive and elitist gadgets. Do you think there is a discord between the technology and the spirit of what you’re trying to do?’

“Yeah, for sure, there’s definitely another polarity there, a conflict,” she replies. “The only solution for me was to somehow be some sort of a ‘Kofi Annan’ and try and make these two worlds speak to each other.”

She pauses and coyly drums her fingers on the table.

“I’m not supposed to say this, probably, but I’m trusting that the pirates out there won’t tie their hands behind their back.”

‘So you’d quite like to see Biophilia end up on other operating systems?’

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in Africa in the last few years, and Indonesia. There are people there who have cardboard houses but they have mobile phones. Everybody’s texting. It’s just a question of time before touch screens are cheap. That’s why we really made sure when we wrote all the programs that they will transfer to other systems. I mean, I don’t totally understand technologically what it is that makes that possible.”

Björk, as she mentioned, should probably not have said that. It seemed to me at the time that she was being disarmingly honest, and also perhaps a little knowingly provocative, so I quoted her in the news story we ran when the interview took place in July. The story was quickly picked up by Wired, then Pitchfork and NME and then pretty much every other music magazine with a net connection. Unfortunately but inevitably the time-worn journalistic credo of “simplify and exaggerate” kicked in a little more with each new article, with the result that by the time her thoughts had made it to, say, Billboard, they had become simply a reductive instruction: ‘Björk: Hack My Apps!’

In the interests of clarity then, here’s the message that appeared on Björk’s Facebook page the following day: “been doing scrillions of interviews , most has gone well except, i noticed a misunderstanding online when asked in an interview if i thought hackers would get into the app box i answered something along the lines that that was to be expected . that you could trust that they wouldnt have their hands tied behind their backs . i have seen this then juxtaposed against other things i said later to make it look like i am encouraging them. this is not how i feel.”

Interestingly, that message itself disappeared a day after it was posted without explanation. It’s understandable, of course, that she does not want to see a project she’s invested so much time and energy in being bootlegged. This is without mentioning the huge amount of her own money that she’s poured into Biophilia, of which more later. Ultimately it’s likely that the point is moot anyway: transferring an iPhone app to another operating system presents significantly more technological hurdles than pirating an MP3.

The subtext here is the broader question of how musicians are going to get paid for the work they do, now that we have apparently decided, as a society, that we’re cool with getting our music for free, either through streaming services like Spotify or through illegal means. The result is that making a great album is no longer enough: musicians are having to find new ways to persuade us to actually part with our cash. There have been missteps. Indeed, Björk herself started to get a reputation for unnecessarily repackaging and reissuing her music around the time of 2006’s Surrounded box set, and she’s currently selling something called Biophilia: The Ultimate Edition from her website which will set you back a cool £500. There doesn’t seem to be room for egalitarianism in the brave new world that the internet has created, but at least with the apps she has created something original and of real value.

However, I get the impression from talking to Björk that her work on Biophilia is not born out of a desire to sell a gimmick, but out of a genuine desire to create something innovative despite the baffled state of the music industry. Unfortunately for her, and for her fans, being in the technological vanguard tends to come with an accompanying high startup cost. Hence her involvement with Apple and the grim shop-front reality that as influential as Björk is, she couldn’t have even dreamed of getting something like this off the ground without being certain that she could count on the support of the iTunes Store. What her comments really tell us is that Björk is still struggling with the same dilemma being faced by countless contemporary artists across a whole range of mediums: do you want your art to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, or do you want to earn a living?

For Björk, it was her work with cutting-edge app developers which really recalled her punk days: “I guess when I was talking about ‘punk’ I was more talking about the way the app team worked together. By then we had no money, we’d run out of budget. It’s like two years since we ran out of budget. The app team said ‘We wanna do this so much that we’ll do it for free, but then we’ll split the profit 50/50. That’s kinda how we used to do things, the indie companies back in the punk days. Everyone makes the posters and glues them up and hand-makes the covers and then if there’s profit you just split it 50/50. That’s kinda what I meant by ‘punk’.”

The flexibility offered by the apps opens up the possibility of releasing further songs into the Biophilia universe: “I’m hoping I can do that. I’m at least thinking ‘double album’. We’ve got ten songs, maybe I can keep adding another ten. I don’t know, I’m just going to improvise. The good thing about the internet, or should be, is that it’s more spontaneous. I feel like if we’re making a new model it should be more flexible. But I mean, I wrote almost all of the songs on this album on touch-screens. That was a really new thing to me. The first time I’m not writing songs by walking outside and singing, because I had it in my lap and could faff about and improvise. A couple of songs were written on Nintendo games controllers. The chords we made on the touch-screens I would put on so that we could control the chords and the speeds and the time-signatures like a computer game. Both because I was trying to think of something that kids know, and also after programming with a mouse for ten years… it’s not really helpful for making quick decisions. I haven’t even tried it because I know it’s not a turn-on for me, to be singing like ‘dner-dner-d-ner-ner’ and then going on the mouse,” she mimes clicking and dragging, “clicking and opening up new boxes. It’s just not… it’s good for… is it the left-side of your brain? The more sort-of essay-writing side… but if you’re writing a song it needs to be more tactile. So far, with computers or electronic stuff, this is the most… you can grab it…” she mimes moulding clay, “or act really quickly and be more impulsive, so that’s kinda why we’ve be doing stuff with that.”

Björk believes children will respond instinctively to this tactile world: “I’ve wanted to do a music school since I was a kid, and so I was thinking well maybe it wasn’t that literal. I always imagined myself on some farm in Iceland, an elderly lady, and all the kids with recorders or whatever coming for a few weeks. I was always thinking about those few years, between five and seven, when it was more of an introduction to music, and for this to be an inspiring and enabling thing. For me to see the touch-screens and realise how everybody’s downloading the ocarina, so that this could mean that a kid in India could learn the difference between scales or time signatures, and not by reading this thick book but just through feeling, just by playing with it for a bit. I saw my own daughter, who’s eight now, playing with an app called ‘The Elements’ which is basically the element table. There’s also another one called ‘Solar System’. The teams that made those two apps actually did a couple of things for me. But with ‘Solar System’, she’d just been playing and scrolling with the solar system, and I think she gets more what the solar system is from that than I did from five years of lessons! I think these things are meant to be known more like that. They’re not like Latin or something, where you have to spend years and years over details and grammar. It’s more of a feeling.”

So you want to teach the world to sing? “I don’t know. I think everybody, once in their lifetime, wants to have a go at sharing what helped you… I was laughing about it with my friends. ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ This project is about the universe and everything! It’s vast! But I think it’s something I’ve noticed with people my age, because obviously I take care of my kids, but now I’m just about getting to that age where I’m starting to take care of my parents as well. It’s sort of a debate. ‘When will I start having the Christmas parties?’ It’s not yet kicked in, but give it five years. It’s a really strange feeling, because I’ve always thought of myself as the one who attends the Christmas parties. It’s interesting that age, about 50 or something, that you are in the middle, so you take care of both sides.”

The album also seems to reflect an almost spiritual awe that comes from contemplating the intricacies of our universe, recalling the work of the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Is she becoming more spiritual as she gets older? “I think so! I never thought I would… When I was a teenager, or in my twenties, I thought stuff like that was really pretentious, but now if I can teach you something…” She laughs. “Now that I’m not twenty any more, I think it’s natural for each individual, at least once in their life, to want to put out their version of how they see the world and how it could function. For me, obviously, I’m obsessed with music, so my musicology… nature is my religion, in a way, and I see sound as celebration of that. It’s a bit…” She pauses as she searches for the right phrase, “a bit ‘over-the-top’ to say that!” She smiles indulgently, “But I do! I do. I think everybody has their own private religion. I guess what bothers me is when millions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…” she screws her face up incredulously, “…what?”

Part 4: Business

One of the things you realise pretty quickly around Björk is that for all her colourful flamboyance, her eccentricity and her sometimes child-like awe and wonder, she is not naïve. She is fiercely intelligent and hard-working and despite spending the better part of her life trapped inside the distorted mirror ball of her own celebrity, her engagement with the world around her is honest and clear-sighted. In particular, the passion for nature which she espouses so readily on Biophilia would be easy to dismiss as abstract whimsy if it were not for the fact that she has proved herself unafraid to engage wholeheartedly with grassroots environmental activism and to take on big business without ever displaying a pop star’s sense of entitlement.

She described her radicalisation in a 2008 op-ed for The Times, in which she wrote about how she’d been forced to stop living “happily in the land of music-making” when she realised that “politicians seem bent on ruining Iceland’s natural environment”.

As activist groups like Saving Iceland have identified, Iceland’s bankrupt government is currently scrambling to cash in their few remaining chips by granting permission for huge tracts of land to be torn up for aluminium plants while simultaneously signing a secretive and ludicrous contract to sell off Icelandic energy producer HS Orka to Canada’s Magma Energy Corp in a deal which grants the corporation exclusive access to some of the country’s largest geothermal reserves for the next 130 years.

Björk first got involved in the protests in 2004, when she played at the Hætta concert in Reykjavík which had been organised in opposition to a new Alcoa aluminium smelter. She then founded an organisation called Náttúra and has taken up campaigning in a way that was new to her: “It was another thing I thought I’d never get into, funnily enough,” she laughs. “I’m breaking all my own taboos!”

Although Náttúra faces a huge struggle to protect Iceland’s landscape, there are echoes of similar battles being fought across the world. We talk about the Dongria Kondh tribe in Orissa, India, where I used to live, who recently won a historic battle against Vedanta Resources to save their forest lands and stop their sacred Niyamgiri mountain being turned into an open-pit bauxite mine. “It’s great,” she says, “I’ve been following this since about a year ago.”

She says she never intended to become involved in this sort of activism: “I always felt music was better if it wasn’t political, but I live on an island which I guess is about the same size as England – without Wales and Scotland – but it’s only got 350,000 people. It’s the biggest untouched area in Europe. You can imagine how we felt: not just me, but the majority of Icelanders, when we found out that behind the scenes for 20 years the right-wing rednecks had been planning to harness all of its energy. I mean, already we’re over the pollution mark that the Kyoto agreement set, so that would just be gone! I just had to do something about it.”

She says that at first she had been complacent: “We had two huge aluminium smelters and they were going to build a third one. I thought ‘that’s not going to happen’. There was a lot of protest, everybody went bonkers, people came from all over the world… and it still got built!”

After that, she could no longer content herself with just turning up for benefit concerts: “That was 2005-6, and after that I was just like…” She mimes rolling up her sleeves. “It’s about my children or my grandchildren. I had believed it would be stopped. There were a lot of people in government who were against it, but it still didn’t get stopped. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, when I’m old and looking at my grandchildren, unless I at least gave it a whack.”

With the lack of alternative employment opportunities being cited as the critical factor, Björk decided to get creative: “In the autumn of 2008 I spent four months on it full time. It sounds maybe odd, but it seemed to me and my friends that the best way to do it was to go to the rural areas and ask ‘Why aren’t you thinking of starting other companies?’ We figured out very quickly that legally it was impossible for these people to start start-up companies. If you had a village of 500 or 1,000 people, and 20 people are unemployed, then if they could start three little companies they’d be fine. Basically they wanted to build an aluminium smelter there and then the people who were unemployed from ten villages would all come and get jobs. But if instead you could start one company that would grow their own vegetables… I mean, it doesn’t all have to be hippy, green things… you could start a data centre or an online company!”

“We basically went and wrote out lists of 500 companies that were possible to inspire people and so we basically ended up with 150 people who were cherry-picked, and we had a brain-storming weekend, and then we had a lot of really influential people in Iceland but also a lot of people who started start-up companies which nobody thought would work: like gaming companies that hire now 2,000 people but were set up by two guys who are half my age. So these kind of people. We wrote a manifesto, not a thick one but just a functional manifesto and took it to the Prime Minister and said ‘These are laws that you can change now and they’d make things easier for little start-up companies.’ It was silly things. For example, fish is under a monopoly, so you can’t have fish markets in the villages. Which is insane when they’re catching these fish right there. You can’t have sushi restaurants. It was a collection of stuff like this, you know? So that did something, not much, and then was the privatisation of access to Iceland’s energy sources. After the bank crash, it was sneaked through, so then started a year-long fight to try to raise awareness. We did a petition online, I don’t know if you saw it?”

I tell her I did see the petition, which called for a referendum to decide whether the country’s natural resources should be publicly owned. Then I tell her I also saw the remarkable series of open letters that went back and forth between her and Magma Energy CEO Ross Beaty last year, in which he at one point offered to sell her a 25% stake in the Icelandic energy company HS Orka. She eloquently rebuffed him, writing back: “you totally miss my point. i feel this company should not be privatized , it should be given back to the people. therefore i am not interested in shares.”

When I mention the letters she laughs loudly and scowls in pantomime disapproval.

“He is so cocky! So cocky! So anyway, to cut a long story short we got 47,000 people to sign a petition to give to the government to not privatise access to our energy resources. That’s like 25% of voters! But like what you were saying about India, it’s a cobweb. For three years, half of my time went into this and then in January I realised that if I didn’t go full time on my project it would never, never happen. So in January 2011 I organised the karaoke marathon and then I took the next plane out and said; ‘Now I have to focus on my project.’ I think with my project I can be proactive, do you know what I mean?”

After hosting a three-day karaoke marathon in January this year to attract attention to her calls for a referendum, Björk decided that making her own music was the best way to get people talking and engage them with environmental issues.

“That was actually one of the driving points, emotionally, for Biophilia. Instead of standing on a chair and criticising and going ‘Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner’ why didn’t I come up with solutions? I ended up being… touch-screens… internet… ok… solutions. After the bank crash and seeing all the people who lost their houses and lost their pensions because of what 20 crazy venture-capitalists did, my problems were superficial. After trying to encourage people who’ve got nothing, to tell them: ‘Come on!’” She claps emphatically. “‘You could start your own fishing company! You could grow mussels! Harness the tide! You can do it!’ Then when you come back to your home, to your studio… you cannot be lazy. It’s like karma. If you’re saying to other people that it’s no big deal, then you have to give it a go yourself. You have to practise what you preach, you know?”

It wasn’t just witnessing other people in trouble that spurred her on, she had her own problems as well: “There are so many things that used to work that don’t work anymore. Not only with the music industry, but I lost my voice… I got nodules on my voice and had to learn a totally new technique. I didn’t know if I could sing again. So on so many different levels it seemed like all the old systems were off the table, and it was a case of: ‘Let’s just do simple stuff that works’. It’s an interesting irony that this project maybe comes across as being pretentious and complicated, but for me, how I experienced it for three years was very DIY. We’d run out of budget. It was as if all these old systems, these palaces, had tumbled down and it’s like: ‘Ok. Here’s a spoon. Here’s a cup.’” She picks them up off the table and mimes a pestle and mortar: a picture of single-minded determination.

You felt like you could rip it up and start again?

“Yeah. That’s how it felt to me to do it really.”

Having spoken about the failings of the music industry in general, and about running out of budget herself, I’m intrigued as to how she manages to fund a project as singular and ambitious as Biophilia. The live show alone is reported to be a vastly expensive undertaking. Is she actually making any money?

“Well I’ve always felt that because I’ve got money from my albums that I should use them to make the next project. It’s been one of the reasons that every project has been so different, because I felt that somebody was rewarding me for being brave! If I stopped being brave it would stop! If I started being stingy, the project would be stingy. So far in my career, I’ve usually used the money from each project to pay for the next one. So for this project, I could pay for the making of the album, that is the music. I got the Polar Music Prize, from Sweden, a year ago, and that’s quite a generous prize, so I paid for the instruments with that, but I couldn’t pay for the apps.”

The Polar Music Prize is worth one million Swedish kronor, just under £100,000, which paid for the unique instruments she showcased at her summer residency at the Manchester International Festival.

“The concert in Manchester, we just about made it on zero. I mean, that’s success, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got a house in England, I’ve got a house in New York, I’ve got a house in Iceland, I don’t need anything more, you know? I’m fine. Once I stop making music… once I stop making money from music, I’ll sell one house! So after I stop making money from music… I can make albums for a few years, at least the next ten years, from selling the houses I’ve got! I’m not trying to be rich; it’s more that I want to solve riddles. For example, with the music industry: it tumbled ten years ago, and I felt that I wasn’t doing anything about it, really. Probably I was having it too good or something! But now I can say ‘I postponed it too long’. Also maybe because I come from this punk background where there was only 80,000 people in the village I was brought up in – the capital, you know? – and there was a big company there already that sold Abba and Beethoven or whatever, put out the commercial Icelandic musicians. We didn’t want to be part of that. We knew that it’s no big deal putting out an album. I think a lot of musicians think it’s this kinda thing where you have to send your music to all the big labels. It’s more of a psychological, confidence thing: ‘If I’m good enough, they will like my demo.’ But I mean I did it all for ten years. I’ve done it: making the album in somebody’s bedroom, making the poster yourself.”

Do you think that’s what you’d be doing if you were just starting out now?

“I think so. I think because I had that background, I knew when the music industry started tumbling that it wasn’t a big deal. I knew it from experience. I haven’t always been able to just hand out my demo and get a response. I’ve done it myself. Taking buses around Reykjavik and putting the posters up myself. Now, with the internet, that’s exactly what you do. What I’m trying to say… in a really complicated way, I’m sorry!… is that I felt that if somebody would know what could be possible it would be somebody of my generation. I’ve had it quite good for a decade, so that I can take this kind of risk, you know? But I think it was also very driven by the stuff I was doing in Iceland.”

Part 5: Boundlessness

Björk was never going to be happy with an ordinary, workaday world tour for Biophilia. Instead, she plans to spend the next three years visiting just eight international cities for a series of six-week residencies. She will spend around a month and a half in each location, and her venues will be carefully chosen with science museums more likely to be selected than arenas. She plans to perform twice a week to relatively intimate audiences of fewer than 2,000 people, while the rest of the time the venues will host a series of music-education workshops in collaboration with local schools. At long last, her dream of becoming a music teacher will become a reality, albeit in a fittingly fantastical way.

A conventional tour is unthinkable in part because of how absurdly unwieldy her instruments are. While the high-tech touch screens that her band played on the Volta tour have directly influenced her composition of Biophilia, the machines she will use to play it are the sort of objects which will strike fear into the hearts of roadies everywhere. There is the vast barrel harp known as the Sharpsichord and then there are a further four 10-foot pendulum-harps whose strings are plucked by gravity’s pull. There is a pipe organ controlled by midi files and a celeste which has been re-fitted with bronze gamelan bars to create a hybrid called a Gamaleste. In order to play the bassline on ‘Thunderbolt’ she will have a twin Tesla coil system suspended over the stage. You know, because a single Tesla coil is just never enough, is it?

While she’s already told me how important Iceland is to her, it’s clear Björk relishes the opportunity to travel. Likewise her music has incorporated influences and collaborators from the far reaches of the globe, from Inuit throat singer Tagaq to Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté, and she recently released a series of Biophilia remixes by Syrian maverick Omar Souleyman. As I’ve traveled and worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I’m particularly interested in how she managed to stumble across Congolese dance pioneers Konono Nº1 before inviting them to play on Volta?

“I can’t remember… I guess somebody sent me a link to them – I guess that’s how you find out about new music these days!”

Does she spend a lot of time on the internet? The subject matter of Biophiliasuggests she has the sort of mind that could spend weeks falling down Wikipedia’s rabbit holes.

She laughs: “Yeah! Yeah, I do a little bit! I still haven’t gotten into Twitter and Facebook and all that. I’m trying, with this project, because it has that educational streak so I feel I want to talk about it. In a way it’s not about me. It’s the frustrated music teacher in me that’s gagging to find a platform! I mean obviously I do emails and use it to find music, but I also go to CD shops, so it’s a bit of both.”

Going back to Konono Nº1, she adds:

“I wanted to go to Congo, when I worked with them, but it was exactly when… when was it, it must have been 2005? It was like the week before that this big war had kicked off, and I asked the people who put Konono Nº1 out, who are Belgian, and they said that even they couldn’t go there at the time. So I couldn’t go, although of course I wanted to. I ended up going to Mali and working with Toumani Diabaté. In the end I met Konono Nº1 in Belgium. They were fun! We had a language barrier, but it was all translated. I would have liked to have worked more with them but their schedule and mine was tricky. My original dream was to persuade Timbaland to come with me to Congo. Not just for a short week or something but for a few months, and somehow combine his beats… because he’d been asking me for ten years to work together and I never understood exactly how I was going to enter that world. But I think between me and Timbaland, I would have been the anthropologist! That would have been my role.”

Björk is well cast as a pith-helmeted musical anthropologist, and having recorded in the past with not just the aforementioned musicians but also the likes of Thom Yorke, Antony Hegarty, Mike Patton and Rahzel I ask whether she’s seeking out future collaborations?

“Yeah, for sure,” she replies, “I’m not that greedy though, because to be honest I’ve been doing them for so long that I understand that it’s not just about ‘shopping’, you know? In the end of the day, if you have good chemistry then you have good chemistry. The chemistry is kinda more important than the two individuals. Usually, if you’re lucky, at any given point you might have chemistry with maybe one or two musicians. For example, I became good friends with Antony before we even sang together. It takes a while. I don’t know if you heard what I did with Dirty Projectors? That was one of the most exciting things I’ve done recently.”

As she said earlier, the songs are the core for her. I wonder whether she sees a triumph of style over content in the contemporary pop charts. Is Björk interested in or by Lady Gaga?

Her reply is cautious: “I definitely like some of the outfits she’s worn. I definitely admire her for her courage – it was getting really boring! It was like everybody was just really conservative, and nobody was taking any risks. I love theatrical stuff. I think all of us have a theatrical side and a not-so-theatrical side. The music? It’s not my thing. I mean, I don’t judge it. One thing good about music is that you can have all sorts of music. You can have… easy-listening new age music…which actually is even bigger than Gaga! Classical music. You can have billions…”

There’s room for everything.

“There is room for everything. Something that is quite common though, and I’ve noticed it even though things have changed a lot, is that there always seems to be room for a lot of male singers, and they don’t get asked to duel. You have Jay-Z and Kanye West being best mates. There’s always room for many male characters.”

Whereas women tend to be pitted against one another?

“Yeah, still it’s like ‘Christina vs. Britney’. Why? I don’t want to be put in a position where I have to attack her. I thought it was really weird and unfair when M.I.A. and Joanna Newsom were asked about Gaga and then because they didn’t like her music, it was immediately big news online and they had to shoot each other down. It’s like the three new, most happening female pop girls, the same kind of age, and they had to shoot each other down! Guys are never asked to do that. It’s just ‘the more, the merrier’, you know?”

I ask her whether she thinks of herself as a feminist and she draws a deep breath:

“In the same way as religion… I am very spiritual, but I don’t belong to any… ‘party’. The same with feminism. I get really scared and worried and run the other way the minute it becomes a dogma, or a doctrine. My mum’s generation, the hippies, were quite radical when it came to those things and I felt that for my generation the best thing we could do for women was just to go and get things done instead of pointing your finger forever. I think it’s better for me to focus my energy on just getting things done. Especially as you get older, because there seems to be this kind of invisible line that you’re just supposed to go home and stop doing things, which is odd. My idols have often been authors, because we have so many in Iceland.”

Who do you idolise?

“So many! In Iceland we are the nation that writes most books, reads most books and buys most books per person in the world. Our heroes are always authors and they always did their best work between 50 and 60. You’d do your angry, hardcore, ‘pose-y’ poetry book when you’re 21, when you’re an arrogant youth and you beat people up and all this kind of stuff! People will say: ‘Let’s see… when she’s 40 or 50, then she’ll do her mature work…’”

Björk, despite not appearing to abide by what she would call the ‘grid-like’ nature of aging, is now 45. The eclectic, ecstatic music she has made her life has at times been angry, hardcore and even ‘pose-y’. Is Biophilia her mature work?

“I don’t know! I definitely feel like I personally broke through some old, stagnated habits on this project which might enable me, for the next ten years or so, to do better music.”

For a moment she is lost in thought, rotating her jaw. She is still as driven as she always has been, still as exacting in the demands she places on herself as she scampers ceaselessly into uncharted territory: pop music’s most fearless explorer. She smiles ruminatively:

“I still feel I’m just as far away from what I want to do… but, you know? That’s just the way it is, right?”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

I arrived at the Grosvenor House Hotel just in time to be reminded that I should refer to tonight’s Mercury Prize as the ‘Barclaycard Mercury Prize’, which of course I’m only too happy to do. I would have thought that Barclays might like to lay low for a while, what with it having emerged earlier in the day that they’re being sued by the US government for “routinely breaching their own mortgage-lending rules” and bullying supposedly independent appraisers so that they “feared for their livelihoods, and therefore cherry picked data” to support home loans which should never have been granted. But hey, if the Mercury Prize wants to be associated with the “liar loans” lawsuits then so be it: the Barclaycard Mercury Prize it is.

Speaking of reckless gambling, I rang my man Rupert Adams at the bookies, William Hill, shortly before proceedings began and he assured me that PJ Harvey remained the firm favourite at 6/4 on, but that King Creosote and Jon Hopkins had enjoyed a late flurry of bets. “Over the weekend we have seen significant gambles on King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, who our punters think could be the dark horse this year,” he said, which I took under advisement given that last year Mr Adams told The Guardian that Paul Weller had been at the centre of the “biggest turnaround in music betting for 40 years” just hours before he lost to long-term favourites The xx.

I collected my press credentials and entered the Art Deco opulence of Grosvenor House’s Great Room, complete with extravagantly ostentatious chandeliers. The room was originally built as an ice rink, so it had been designed with a broad balcony running around the outside of the open central space. This is as far as I got, as heavily-built men in ill-fitting suits stepped in to bar my way downstairs. Below me, on what used to be ice, eighty tables full of music industry suits and Barclays bankers chilled out in places which reportedly cost £2,000 a head. Meanwhile I was swiftly escorted towards the press enclosure, where the only bar sold bottles of beer for £8 and a bottle of wine for over £30. Not being a banker, I reached for the bottle of whiskey I’d secreted about my person but was soon distracted by the distant sound of a man mumbling mournfully into a wind tunnel. Further investigation revealed that it was Jools Holland saying something about a music prize. The time had come.

Tinie Tempah and Anna Calvi were first up, but I was distracted by bumping into Metronomy. Bassist Gbenga Adelekan, looking as dapper as ever, said the band were feeling relaxed but slightly weirded out by the fact that they’d been asked to leave the venue earlier so that they could re-enter on the red carpet for the benefit of the cameras. Never trust anything you see on TV. I drew an ill-advised parallel with the practice of war-reporters setting up cameras inside buildings so that they could be filmed kicking down doors from the inside, which Gbenga kindly and patiently ignored.

I wished Joseph Mount luck, and mentioned that like him I had spent my own adolescence on the English Riviera. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he smiled. I thanked him for making Torbay seem like a tropical paradise, both in song and in music videos. He said that he occasionally gets complaints from people who think he’s misrepresenting it, which seems to be missing the point somewhat. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that musicians should never read the comments under their own YouTube videos; a world of mad opinions and bad spelling awaits.

On stage, Gwilym Simcock played ‘These Are The Good Days’, starting off by using the piano keys in the time-honoured manner but then progressing to reaching inside and playing the strings, which was a pretty neat trick. PJ Harvey was next up, and played ‘The Words That Maketh Murder’ dressed in a flowing white robe and matching headdress. Aside from the outfit, the performance was pretty low-key but this only served to underscore the strength of the source material. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins gave a similarly understated but beguiling performance, and after those two performances Metronomy’s chest lights alone seemed frighteningly futuristic, never mind the gorgeous pop of ‘The Bay’.

In an interval break I got chatting to a man from Barclays. “I don’t know much about music,” he said, which I’m not sure would have disqualified him from being on the judging panel. “I liked that King Creosote though, that was nice, and Metronomy were charming.” He’s looking forward to dinner, and to Elbow, in that order, which probably tells you most of what you need to know about the sort of night this is. He’s surprised when I tell him that the journalists don’t get served dinner, and seems a little confused as to why we’d have bothered coming.

Katy B’s performance was full of confidence and swagger, James Blake’s wasn’t. Adele had a bad voice, a doctor’s rather than a critical opinion, so we got a video. Everything Everything were followed by Elbow as the night’s music lurched to a close.

The whiskey was gone. PJ Harvey was declared the winner, and the consensus seemed to be that it was a safe choice only because she has made a truly great album. A swiftly erected dance floor lay depressingly empty. It was time to go home. It was hard not to feel like I’d spent a night at a carefully choreographed advertising function, which of course I had. This isn’t necessarily a negative, the likes of Ghostpoet and King Creosote and Jon Hopkins will have benefitted hugely and deservingly from their time in the spotlight. However, something about making exciting and talented artists perform for suited and seated bankers and label bosses makes the experience of the awards show vaguely uncomfortable. This is supposed to be a celebration of great art, but the art is elsewhere. The muse has been left weeping gently at home, and as I walk home I’m reminded of Nick Cave’s letter to MTV when he withdrew from their award show in 1996 and bridled against the very concept of making musicians compete for a prize: “My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel – this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!”

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.

“I don’t feel like there’s much to be gained by admitting that you’re part of the wallpaper in a capitalist system that you help propagate.” Stephen Malkmus is lying on a sofa in the book-lined lobby of a self-consciously upmarket hotel in Soho. The erstwhile Pavement ringleader is talking about class, about the role of musicians and music fans and about the futility of rebellion, but he’s doing it with characteristic nonchalance. He never quite seems to be taking himself entirely seriously, and as he reclines I realise I’m being offered an irresistible visual metaphor: Stephen Malkmus is so laidback he’s horizontal.

“You can say there is a sort of dilettantism… a sense of saying ‘no’ to this system, just by being a really obsessive music fan, yerkno? Maybe you’re not buying into a lot of what the system and the culture is trying to make you buy into. I say we do that, but that’s still saying it’s ok to be in the system. You’re just on the edge of it; you’re not really outside of it.”

He stretches out on the sofa. He is very tall, or from this angle, very long. His fingers point and weave expressively as he talks and his hands are perpetually in motion, a sort of slow-motion version of hyperactivity. “Not to be, like, a French philosopher or something, but we’ve been co-opted into the bourgeois culture, totally, whatever. We’re like a rough edge. My idea is that the only way that I could be truly avant-garde, or somehow outside the consumption system, is through humour.”

Anybody who is familiar with his song-writing will know that Malkmus possesses a finely tuned sense of the absurd, whether he’s skewering bourgeois culture or the endlessly ridiculous world of rock & roll. Back in 1992, promoting the first Pavement album Slanted and Enchanted, he told Simon Reynolds: “When we play live, we do feel the whole ritual is absurd. Music isn’t life and death for us, and it’s hard for me to believe that art can be like that.”

Of course, despite, or because of, their apparent indifference, Pavement became the sort of band that are talked about in life and death terms. Robert Christgau called them the “finest rockband of the ‘90s”. Chuck Klosterman noted that for fans they were “the apotheosis of indie aesthetics”. Their reunion tour last year, their only performances together in a decade, seemed to sell out almost before it was announced.

It was a tour which finally laid Pavement to rest – a sort of worldwide victory lap. Malkmus confirms that they are now officially over, although he does hesitate slightly before laying the word ‘forever’ on the tomb of perfect sound. “Well, basically we could do a fat guys reunion tour or something in ten more years again, but it’s done as a creative venture. I don’t wanna rule out some kind of fun, or some major charity. If someone wants to offer us a million dollars to play a charity I’m sure everyone would find time to do that.”

With Pavement firmly quarantined in the past, Malkmus is releasing his fifth album with the Jicks, Mirror Traffic, although he points out that his ‘solo’ career isn’t all too different from his song-writing with Pavement. He’s no more or less of an auteur now than he ever was. “In Pavement I had full authoritarian control, for better or worse. It’s no different, really. I write the tunes, the band plays them, and if they don’t play ‘em well, we drop ‘em.” His laconic drawl renders tunes as toons. “It’s still the same thing. They almost always say they like them, or they give me the benefit of the doubt to carry through. If they’re not good, we sorta all agree. They don’t have to say ‘That song’s bad’, they just sorta die on the vine.”

For Mirror Traffic, Malkmus had his old friend Beck in the producer’s chair, fresh from his work on Thurston Moore’s Demolished Thoughts. He says Beck was “a pleasure to work with” although this might have something to do with the fact that it doesn’t sound like Malkmus ceded too much creative control: “He’s in the right zone for people like us. There’s no point in trying to, at this age, change someone like me. I think he heard our demos and he realised what we needed was kind of a performance. A good performance and quick, but not overcooked. There’s so many different ways you could work with somebody. I could come there with no songs…”

I mention that I spoke to Charlotte Gainsbourg when IRM was released and she said that Beck, nominally the producer, had written the whole thing. “Yeah, I think he did. He might not have even known he was going to have to do that…” He laughs. “She’s a different breed to the likes of me or Thurston. We got our toons. We play ‘em. He tries to get the right ambience. He’s very Californian. He doesn’t really say many negative things about anything. That’s pretty nice. If he does he sort of couches it in L.A. speak.”

There’s a parallel here, because Malkmus has only worked with a ‘name’ producer once before, when Nigel Godrich was brought in for the fifth, and as it turned out, final, Pavement album, Terror Twilight. “Yeah. I would give production props to this dude Bryce Goggin who worked on early Pavement albums, and I’ve done different levels of mixing and production with different people who didn’t have enough of a name or the power to call themselves ‘producers’. But yeah, this is where someone else had their name on the line, as it were, as a producer, and I took advantage of that in both cases and did a little bit less and just focused on… on um… doing less…” He laughs again, still lazy after all these years. “No! Focusing on lyrics and playing, yerkno?”

How did working with Beck compare with working with Nigel Godrich? “Well, Nigel at that time was much more of a taskmaster… more British… and coming through the ranks of the producer side. More interested in you hitting the right notes. He definitely added more ‘Nigel’, and now that I went back and listened to the record there’s more ‘Nigel’ on there. He was infatuated with delay pedals and, like, echoplex sounds. I let him, like, do it all over that because I was a little worn out on Pavement, I didn’t put up a fight. There should have been less of that on the album and it probably would have been better.”

He is sat upright now, and warming to his subject. It’s obvious that this is a topic he’s given considerable thought to. “But the good things Nigel did were incredible. He’s a brilliant engineer and some things he added I could never… I mean the sound he gets is unbelievable. I don’t know how he does it, but he definitely is a fucking genius at getting sound. Now Beck also gets a good sound too. His engineer works with Nigel – Darryl, the guy that worked with us, so they know some of those tricks. They’re in the same ballpark without the ‘Nigel’ overload. The difference obviously with Beck is that he’s coming more from an artist’s perspective and he’s a little more sympathetic to what I might want to do. He doesn’t care so much about things being in tune. He doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t bug him. He just kinda hears the whole thing as a fan.”

So Beck is less of a perfectionist than Godrich? “Beck’s a perfectionist definitely sonically, but maybe not tune or tempo. Where Nigel just couldn’t help it, back then. He’d be like ‘That’s out of time’. Once you’ve been down that road with Travis or with Natalie Imbruglia, where things have to be right, it’s hard to say ‘I don’t want that’. I bet he’s changed though, now. I bet he doesn’t care as much about that.”

It’s tempting to wonder whether Malkmus himself, now 45 and naming people like Nick Lowe and Bert Jansch as influences for his new record, is feeling mellow? “I can be. I wouldn’t mind being. Not enough to be played in a coffee shop, unfortunately. I would like to be one of those, like, Sufjan Stevens-type people that is soft and the girls love it, but I haven’t mellowed that much.”

There’s a pause, and then he shrugs. “Not that sensitive, I guess. Not a sensitive boy.” I tell him he’s going to have to be a lot more earnest if he wants that coffee shop airplay. “I’m earnest in my unearnestness. I’m not a ‘let’s talk about our feelings’-type person. I talk about feelings but there’s an undercurrent of darkness in the relationships. I just look for that because I like reading stories by John Updike or Richard Yates. I was always attracted to that. There are a lot of unreliable narrators in these songs. It’s not really me, it’s just a person – it’s like some projection of a dark person. Unreliable narrators are more interesting to me. Some of it is just humour, some feeling. Some unreal, some real. There’s no real answer.”

Updike and Yates are two authors with a clear stamp on his unabashedly literate lyrics, but Malkmus is a writer who has always been more concerned with cadence than literal interpretation. In terms of literary influence he offhandedly remarks that Dostoevsky and F. Scott Fitzgerald are equivalent to The Beatles and The Stones but says he’s more likely to read poetry than novels when writing, particularly post-Beat American poets like Jack Spicer and Lew Welch. “Poetry is something I try to keep in my mind. What would they do? But regardless I know I’m not doing poetry so I’m aware that music is really about that year, so I’ll throw in stuff that’s topical.”

Stephen Malkmus, it seems, still doesn’t see music as life and death. He shrugs, “When music comes out it’s like advertising or a magazine to me. It’s not some big work of art, yerkno?”

I look at him and try to decipher his deadpan delivery. Does he really think music is just ephemera? “I definitely do. I know what turns out to be classic could be… I mean, obviously, some things are more ephemeral than others. It’s like movies which are just total pop because they look really bad thirty years later. You don’t wanna ignore your times or the temporality of it. It’s not some ‘uber-text’. There are some talented poets like Charles Olson who are trying to write for all time, for eternity or something. I like him… even when I don’t understand him… but I wouldn’t try to do that in a pop CD that’s like gonna be in Mojo magazine or something.”

The speed with which he dismisses the ‘pop CD’ makes me wonder whether he thinks Pavement were taken too seriously. He rubs his chin and delivers an answer which suggests that perhaps he’s a little more invested in his work than he’d like to let on: “It’s paradoxical,” he says, “Sometimes you wanna be taken more seriously. You wanna be taken seriously and say that you’re not!”

He laughs. “It’s like Bob Dylan. He’s like [affects Dylanesque whine] ‘You don’t understand, man’, but, yerkno, he’s loving it! Deep in his heart he’s loving the attention. You can see it. He wouldn’t be doing it if he wasn’t getting attention. It’s more important to be loved than ignored. It never got to a point with Pavement where it was so annoying as it did for Bob Dylan, where people are looking through his garbage. Then I would probably be bummed out by it.”

There’s always been a sense, though, that Malkmus has wanted to take a step away from the ritual of rock & roll. “Absolutely,” he agrees, although he knows enough rock iconography to point out my skull ring. “I like your Keith Richards ring,” he says. “He’s one of my favourite guitar players actually. People might not expect that, but he is.”

If making music is just magazines and advertising, what keeps him going? I ask him what his favourite part of the job is: “Probably somewhere in making an album when you’re first listening and you realise you’ve done something that you and your twenty friends think is special, at least. That’s all you can rely on!” he laughs. “It’s in that record producing thing because that’s more final. Shows are really fun, but they’re so temporal. You do it and it was amazing but then it’s gone and there’s no… it could be a sort of a payoff but also you can work so hard on that show and it could be so amazing, more amazing than the album, but you just… no one will ever know, so it’s like this wasted energy. So it’s kinda sad. That’s frustrating and good and just so temporal. So it’s more in that recording time. Also, it’s fun getting positive feedback from people, like: ‘Hey man, I like what you did. We’re friends by proxy because I like your shit and you’d probably like my shit. That’s the most rewarding.” He pauses, then deadpans: “And then the big fat cheque from the music placement in the Guinness ad, that is, like, totally what I’m there for.”

He smiles. “That’s never happened, so I don’t know.” Oh well, I tell him, everybody has to have a dream. Maybe if you knuckle down and fly right you’ll end up in Guinness adverts and get played in coffee shops. “Well, that’s right,” he says. “If I really wanted it I’d probably already have it. I tend to believe that, within reason. That you can get what you really want.”

I get the impression that Malkmus has an uneasy relationship with his success, so it seems worth asking whether he really did ‘want it’? “Not really… on my own terms,” he replies, with just a trace of melancholy. “If I could have done as much work as I did and be Arcade Fire I think I would like it. It’s gotta be fun to be just travelling at that level. Being the headliner, blowing people away and stuff. That must be fun, and I never really did that.”

I think I visibly cringe when he says this. Oh come on, man! Don’t tell me you, Stephen Malkmus, want to be Arcade Fire! For a start, surely the Pavement reunion tour was pretty damn huge? “It was, but it didn’t feel… the moments were of the past, a bit. Maybe sometimes when Pavement was going it felt a little like that, but unfortunately on the rock & roll treadmill once you start doing festivals you’re constantly reminded where your status is…”

I laugh at this, and it turns out that Malkmus has a thing about that classic rock hang-up, the festival hierarchy ego battle: “I was looking at this advert in a magazine for this festival, it looked like a cool festival. It’s one where Björk’s headlining.” Bestival? “Yeah. We’re not playing it this year, but we might next year. I started scanning and I was like ‘we’re gonna be right THERE’,” he jabs the air with his index finger. ‘There’s Graham Coxon, we’re gonna be right… probably two above where his name is, or something, judging by the names… regardless of how good or well-received our album is. That’s where we’re gonna be.’ It’s like, that’s where you stand. It’s pretty funny. Those festival charts are the most incredible class systems. I was thinking about it because there’s this one festival in there that has like James Blunt headlining…” I think he means Guilfest? “Yeah, it’s like… not an elite festival. It’s obviously low money, for the bands. Probably cheap for the punters too, which is good, but it’s definitely like ‘well this festival is in this class, and this one is this way’. There’s enough of them that it’s not like you have just three classes. There are millions of ‘em.”

Stephen Malkmus shakes his head and shrugs in mock amazement. He’s back here on tour in November, and then look out for him on the festival circuit. Spare a thought for where he lands up. He’ll be there somewhere. Right there. Probably two names above Graham Coxon. Not yet a senile genius. No need to reinvent the wheel. Not mellow enough for coffee shops. The rough edge of bourgeois culture. Still finding the whole thing faintly absurd. Still slanted. Still enchanted.

Originally published by Drowned In Sound.