Slipknot fans seated at balcony tables for The Nine's first ever UK show at the Astoria in London on December 13, 1999 were more than a little surprised to find Icelandic pop star Björk Gudmundsdottir in their midst. But perhaps they shouldn't have been, for the Reykjavík-born musician had been playing in furiously noisy punk bands before Corey Taylor was enrolled at elementary school, years before she first began to attract international recognition as the singer of acclaimed alt. rock group The Sugarcubes.
Something of a child prodigy, the singer recorded her self-titled début album Björk when she was just 11-years-old, but by the time it was released, in December 1977, the teenage Bjork had fallen in love with punk rock. “That was a big scene in Reykjavík,” she recalled in a 1993 interview with Q magazine. “I think we hold the world record of how many people lived in Iceland, and how many punk bands there were... We definitely got over the problem of not knowing how to play – that was mind over matter.”
Björk's first band, when she was 13, was an all-girl anarcho-punk band, Spit and Snot.
“It was four girls, and we hadn't really been in a band before, and I wanted to be the drummer,” she recalled in a 2017 interview with BBC 6Music DJ and former music journalist Mary Anne Hobbs. “When we started rehearsals and stuff, I think nobody kinda wanted to sing, and I kinda ended up singing. I think it was an idea, more than anything, I can't actually remember that many rehearsals.”
