Bjork is just back from Banda Aceh in Indonesia, the closest major city to the epicenter of the 2004 tsunami. She was taken there by UNICEF as a goodwill ambassador, although she likes to think that it is as "a mother from Iceland" and, more generally, "a human being" that she has the most to offer. In UNICEF's London headquarters the dim, late afternoon light pools on her face. "I'm trying to find words for what I saw," she says. "I think it'll take another month. It hasn't quite sunk in yet."
There has always been a big gap between how Bjork seems to see herself and how she is seen by the rest of the world. When she emerged on the music scene in the mid-1980s it was hard to tell if she was wildly eccentric or if it was just that she was from Iceland. Did her fellow Icelanders think that she was eccentric when she was starting out? "Yeah, pretty much," she says. She stood out from the crowd as much in Reykjavik as she did in London.
"Most people in Iceland are blonde and blue-eyed. I was nicknamed `China girl' in school 'cos they thought I looked Asian. And most people in Iceland didn't like what me and my mates were doing. It took the English to discover it."
What she and her mates were doing was making music, first in a band called the Sugar Cubes, then solo as Bjork, by which time she had learned that there were certain advantages to being different.
After the success of the band's album Life's Too Good in 1988, Bjork had her first major solo hit with her 1993 single, Human Behavior.
Although she places herself in the folk tradition -- her parents were both "hippies" she says and "most of my relatives are tradesmen. I guess they look at [what I do] in a similar way, like craftsmanship" -- she came of age at the tail end of the punk era and it has influenced her outlook on almost everything, including charity work.
`Weird like that'
Before her involvement with UNICEF, Bjork was suspicious of organized fund-raising in the same way that she disdained organized politics, or organized anything which required more people than could fit in one room.
"I'm really weird like that. I blame it on the punk background. We were so ... what's the right word for it? I guess a bad word for it would be `holistic.' You know, this idea that you make your own poster and you glue it up and you carry your equipment. And even though it's a long time since I put a poster on the wall, I have to tell you, I have that background and I'm still working with the same people I've been working with since I was 16. I have a feeling for the whole picture."
UNICEF's choice of Bjork is interesting; since Geri Halliwell's widely derided stint as a UN ambassador, charities have been forced to give more thought to the suitability of their celebrity backers.
Bjork's eccentricity is, despite its eye-rolling silliness, generally perceived as a sign of her sincerity rather than the grim "wackiness" contrived by duller musicians. At the Oscars five years ago she wore a dress, a costume really, designed by Marjan Pejoski in the shape of a swan, and left eggs all down the red carpet. She wasn't rebelling; she just liked the dress.
"They didn't get it. They actually thought that I was trying to look like Jennifer Aniston but got it wrong."
She had in mind a playful, Busby Berkeley look, inspired by his aerial shots of synchronized swimmers, but it didn't quite work out. "I probably wore a more eccentric dress for Cannes (in 2000), but nobody noticed. I think Europeans can stomach things like that more easily. I think Michael Jackson should settle in Switzerland or something. He'd be fine."
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