100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s #55 Bjork – Venus As A Boy

Released: 1993

The beginning of the 1990’s presented some kind of never to be repeated wormhole, a portal through which self identifying weirdos who were formerly on the outer ring of popular culture slipped through and began to pull at the edges of what was perceived as normal.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir had been waiting for the world to gravitate to her, rather than the other more traditional way round, seemingly forever. A child star in her native Iceland who released her first album domestically in 1977, she the graduated through punk (Initially via a band called Spit And Snot) before going on to front The Sugarcubes in the following decade.

Then the wormhole. Bjork’s first solo album (At least since puberty) was a revelation, a dazzling Phantasia of conceptual thinking and unfiltered ideas that Nelle Hooper’s production gave enough steerage to without blunting their vibrancy. Venus As A Boy took the sound of a broken bottle and Bollywood strings, whilst the singer delivered an opening couple of lines steeped in elfin mischief ‘His wicked sense of humour/Suggests exciting sex’. All of a sudden it was Bjork’s astoundingly odd but beautiful world – and we were just living in it.