Björk will perform the only Australian shows of her Cornucopia tour exclusively in Western Australia next March, a coup for Perth festival that will mark the Icelandic artist’s first full Australian concert since 2008’s Big Day Out.
Her environmentally themed Cornucopia concerts will be performed inside a purpose-built 5,000 capacity tent in Perth, where she has been invited to meet Indigenous Noongar community members.
Perth festival artistic director Iain Grandage said there had been “a lot of interest and muscle” on Australia’s east coast to have Björk tour the country, but the Icelandic singer-songwriter had been keen to perform in just one place in Australia, with the festival’s pitch that Western Australia was “one of the most biodiverse places on the planet” winning her over.
Björk is “obsessed with stories that come from the Earth, and the fact Iceland in its volcanic and tectonic activity is a land continually being birthed”, Grandage said. “Alongside that, some of … Noongar boodja [country] is 300 million years old, the granite earth from which very old Noongar stories come.”
Grandage said it was a “thrill” to have Björk in the festival. “This is one of those circumstantial moments where her world has been put into such flux through Covid that actually for this to come into our orbit just nine months ago, something of this scale, and for that window to be right for us, is incredibly fortuitous.”
Having just released her 10th album, Fossora, which was conceived during the Covid pandemic, Björk will recreate Cornucopia, which premiered in New York in 2019 and is based on her 2017 album, Utopia, backed by flute players and a local 18-voice choir, across four nights at Perth festival.
Earlier this month music writer Kitty Empire gave Fossora a four-star review, praising Björk’s ongoing “penchant for irrepressible life forms”. The Icelandic composer’s new album recalls her earlier, clubbier hits, combined with deeply emotional, elegiac tracks that pay tribute to her mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018 after a long illness.
Björk told the Guardian in an interview in August that lockdown had been fruitful: “I got really grounded and I really, really loved it.” Fossora was a reaction to Utopia, which itself had been a “survival mechanism out of the heartbreak story” of 2015’s Vulnicura, an album which charted her split from artist Matthew Barney.
Björk’s last full concert in Australia was part of the Big Day Out festival in 2008, although she performed a five-hour DJ set for Sydney’s Vivid Live in 2016. With such a major headliner, the rest of the Perth festival’s international program – announced on 27 October – is expected to be a little lighter than pre-Covid years.
Celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2023, the festival will again lean strongly into Noongar stories. In his second season as associate artist, Noongar actor and dancer Ian Moopa Wilkes will continue the festival’s emphasis on Indigenous language and cultural reclamation, backed by a Noongar advisory circle.
2023 also marks the end of a decades-long partnership between Perth festival and fossil fuel giant Chevron, after high-profile artists including author Tim Winton spoke up about the festival’s “embarrassing” arrangements with the oil and gas company.
• Björk’s Cornucopia concerts will take place at Perth’s Langley park on 3, 6, 9 and 11 March, with presale open at 12pm on 27 October. Perth festival runs from 10 February to 5 March
