Pipe dreams

If in the winter of 2021, you had been wandering through downtown Reykjavík, you might have registered the thud-thud-thud-thud of a lockdown house party. Squeezing her “Christmas bubble” of friends into her living room, Iceland’s most famous citizen was throwing her “crazy DJ nights, where 20 people could come and I always ended up DJing just gabber”.

According to Björk, the nails-hard 90s Dutch techno style is the perfect soundtrack to Covid life. “There’s always a BPM in our bodies, you know? Through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we went a little bit mental, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow energy, but then it goes double.” And that, she realised, is “a little bit gabber”.

Iceland’s hardline response protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let this come out like a brag, because we felt for you guys, but we didn’t have that much of a life change,” she says. Besides, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s