Björk was never exactly a restrained performer, moving from the anarcho-punk of Kukl to The Sugarcubes’ oddball funk in the ‘80s. But to put it all together into 48 minutes of effervescent pop music that you can enjoy from start to finish is evidence of a sublime talent and vast musical imagination. To even envisage such a fusion is impressive. Writing in The Face, Mandi James called ‘Debut’ “a delightful fusion of thrash metal, jazz, funk and opera, with the odd dash of exotica thrown in for good measure,” while The New York Times found the influence of “early ‘70s jazz-fusion of bands like Weather Report.” But ‘Debut’’s versatility is such that you can see in it anything from hip hop to handbag house, depending on the way you cut it. Dig further into ‘Debut’ and you will also find trip-hop producer Howie B, Jhelisa Anderson on backing vocals, a sample from Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim (on ‘Human Behaviour’) and the indelible presence of Talvin Singh, who adds tabla beats to the Bollywood swoon of ‘Venus as a Boy’. Björk has a solo writing credit on five of the album’s 11 songs, she co-wrote five more with producer Nellee Hooper, and she has production credits on ‘The Anchor Song’ and ‘Like Someone in Love’, a 1940s jazz standard that is the album’s only cover version.ījörk was the driving force behind ‘Debut’, the creative genius who saw fit to bring together a rave icon (Massey), the producer behind albums from Soul II Soul, Sinéad O’Connor and Massive Attack (Hooper), a jazz harpist (Corky Hale), a jazz saxophonist (Oliver Lake) and a modish studio programmer (Marcus de Vries, who was apparently responsible for many of the synths and keyboards on ‘Debut’). This is emphatically not the case on ‘Debut’. There has long been a tendency to think of the singer in the singer-plus-producer equation as being nothing more than a voice, the glittery sheen to the producer’s graft.
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And yet ‘Debut’ really came to life when Björk started to assemble her team of crack collaborators, starting with Graham Massey, who she had previously worked with on 808 State’s third album, ‘ex:el’.Īt this point DJ Mag should be entirely clear.
She had penned the delightful ‘Human Behaviour’ as a teenager, while ‘The Anchor Song’ and ‘Aeroplane’ appeared on a demo that she gave to Ásmundur Jónsson of Bad Taste and Derek Birkett of One Little Indian Records in the early ‘90s. Many of the songs on ‘Debut’ had been in Björk’s mind for years by the time it came to record the album. But you can see why Björk would want to call her 1993 album ‘Debut’, as it marked a radical departure from the work of the Sugarcubes, a kind of creative re-birth that wiped the slate clean for Björk’s solo career. Nor was it her solo debut that honor went to ‘Björk’, a mixture of covers and originals that the singer released back in 1977. ‘Debut’ was not, in fact, Björk’s debut album in 1993 she was a relatively well-known indie star, the singer of the curiously alluring Icelandic pop band The Sugarcubes.
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Of course, the concept of solo singer plus dance beats was hardly new back in 1993 when ‘Debut’ made its bow - Donna Summer would attest to that - but on ‘Debut’, Björk pioneered the idea of artist as auteur that would later be so integral to the success of Drake and Kanye West, to name but two. If the world Björk inhabits on ‘Debut’ sounds a little every-day for such an extraordinary star, its because Björk made it so.
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