The lights go down. There is a low, excited, hum from the ranks of seating around the dais at the centre of the radically reconfigured Alexandra Palace. Something – it’s hard to see what, through the darkness, and the two dozen silent figures taking their places around the stage – is descending from the ceiling. Then, a stentorian voice: “Thunderbolt. Lightning. Arpeggios.” Was that… David Attenborough? And then there’s Björk, in a shimmering dress through which organic forms seem to be pushing, excoriating herself in a low voice for “craving miracles”, while from the Tesla coil in the middle of the stage, purplish electricity spits and crackles, while the 24-piece choir sings harmonies. This is magical stuff: it’s not just the heightened static charge in the air that’s putting the hairs on the back of my neck on end.
You wouldn’t see Bono bunny-hopping around a stage, wearing glittery stack heels and a fluffy, multi-hued, Oort cloud-like hairpiece, in the service of his earnest heal-the-world rhetoric
These days, Björk makes music that’s easy to admire, harder to love. While none of her recent work has been quite as conceptually rigid as 2004’s Medúlla, on which almost every sound is a human vocal, from beatboxing to throatsinging (my diary of the time notes I found it “wonderful at times but also incredibly irritating”, a judgment a decade hasn’t softened), she has long since left behind instant “pop” approachability. Her latest LP, Biophilia (2010), is an unabashedly high-minded exploration of inner and outer space, science and myth, the stars over our heads and the earth beneath our feet. It’s also Björk’s manifesto for saving the world. If only it featured a few more hummable tunes.
She’s surrounded, nonetheless, by an adoring crowd for her final Biophilia show at London’s Alexandra Palace. At this venue – like the others this tour has visited over the past three years – Björk performs in the round, reworking the usual large scale gig format where a crush for the front few rows leaves those towards the back feeling they may as well be listening to it on the radio at home. Instead, with the focus at the centre of the room, Björk directs songs to different quarters of the audience in turn. (As she turns, she sparks, Van de Graaff-like, adoring shouts from the crowd: “Love ya, Björk!”) It’s a very democratic arrangement, meaning there is always something to look at, most often the 24-piece Icelandic girl choir Graduale Nobili who accompany her on almost all songs.
Björk at Alexandra Palace, September 2013, by Saga Sig
Her mainstream popularity may have dropped away with each perceived step further into the avant-garde (though her biggest hit in the UK remains her 1994 cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet”, hardly representative of what she was doing at the time – yet, being at once joyous and thoroughly exasperating, oddly prophetic of how her music would develop over the next two decades) but Björk has remained at the forefront – maybe hovering in some sense above the forefront – of a particular strand of artistic innovation. Whether it’s in selecting John Kricfalusi, Spike Jonze and Nick Knight to direct her videos (the latter featuring a dress by Alexander McQueen); art direction in collaboration with M/M Paris (and an accompanying, infamous, swan dress by Marjan Pejoski); or working with artist Andrew Thomas Huang on a groundbreaking 2012 3-D video piece commissioned for the L.A. MOCA by Jeffrey Deitch, Björk has for two decades collaborated with artists in an almost casual way that makes certain arriviste pop tiddlers’ anodyne, heavily PR-directed, ArtPop campaigns seem not just crass, but quaintly irrelevant.
Furthermore, Biophilia has pushed Björk in new conceptual directions. Aside from the album’s initial release, song by individual song, as an “App album” for iPad, iPhone, et al – itself merely the latest stage in Björk’s notorious project to release and re-release every song in her back catalogue on as many formats and in as many different mixes as her admittedly obsessive public will take – the Biophilia project is also an educational programme. David Attenborough’s involvement – even at voiceover level, though the pair have made a documentary together – underlines the project’s environmental angle, and its engagement with natural science (songs are titled “Dark Matter” and “Virus”, as well as “Cosmogony”, which treats the Big Bang theory and universal creation myths as equals, not rivals). The apps allow users to play around with the elements of the tracks, remixing them and learning about musicology thereby. She even worked with various New York schools and taught children directly. The scope of the project is beyond reproach; it posits a Gaia-like system in which music is fundamental to education, which is fundamental to big-scale “green” issues, in turn fostering communication and collaboration at the human level. If there’s a hint of Pollyanna-ism in this – “Music can heal the world!” – the fact it comes from an artist who retains her sense of modesty and fun makes it impossible to mock. You wouldn’t see Bono bunny-hopping around a stage, wearing glittery stack heels and a fluffy, multi-hued, Oort cloud-like hairpiece, in the service of his earnest heal-the-world rhetoric. Nor would anyone – including the choir, who get to throw themselves around joyously to “Mutual Core”, and a concluding one-two of “Náttúra” and “Declare Independence” (a song Björk wants, evidently, to become a new national anthem but which, to this pro-union Scot, I can’t quite put my weight behind) – be having quite so much fun.
The problem, somewhat, is that there is only so far one can deviate from the pop-concert model before an event stops being a pop concert entirely. Earlier this year, The Knife attracted vitriol for a show in which the stage was mostly occupied by dancers miming to tracks from their Shaking the Habitual album: a cute idea, but unsatisfying either as pop performance or as contemporary dance. For Björk, the eschewing of “traditional” instruments means placing at one corner of the stage an extraordinary instrument, something between a gibbet and what I imagine one might see at a county fair for the weighing of livestock. Two vast weights depend from either “arm” of this device; at one point in the evening, these are set swinging, dual pendulums. Other than that, their function seems purely decorative. C