“Pass the message to Elon Musk”: Björk wants electric tour buses

Icelandic singer Björk, ever-conscious about the environment, hopes "Elon Musk and his tech friends would make electric tour buses" for her Cornucopia show. “Could you pass the message to Elon Musk? she told AFP. The pop star makes "efforts" to limit the impact of her tours, she who navigates between two shows: a philharmonic, entitled Björk orchestral, and a more avant-garde with more substantial means, Cornucopia. The author of the hit Army of me has thus given up on the three dates of Cornucopia scheduled for the beginning of June in Iceland because her ambitious scenic device would have required additional facilities on her native island.

"It's the first time I couldn't bring one of my shows to Iceland and it made me very sad, but I tried everything," she told AFP by email. an agenda disrupted by this hitch and by her involvement in a day of protest at home against whaling.

To combine tours and ecology, Bjork has no shortage of ideas. She even imagines a new kind of festival "with a festival boat crossing the oceans with no aircraft involved". Despite the difficulties, the singer is optimistic about humanity's ability to meet environmental challenges. “I think that the turn is done very slowly, it would be better if it was done faster, but I remain hopeful, she testifies. I think it's a generational thing. “She even finds reasons for hope in the period of the health crisis. “At least during Covid we had birds singing louder, cleaner air, fewer planes. We know that it is possible, that if we want, we can”.

Bjork is preparing today for the resumption of Cornucopia's European tour, which will take place on September 1 in Portugal, on the 8 in Bercy and on December 5 in Floirac, near Bordeaux). The show concludes with a video message from climate activist Greta Thunberg. Cornucopia, designed around the album Utopia (2017), then swept through the entire repertoire of the artist. "I'm gradually integrating more and more Fossora (latest record, 2022)," says Björk.

The Icelandic also took her Philharmonic show to Coachella in April. In a festival widely relayed on social networks, a simple orchestral version seemed amazing. She graced the performance with more than 860 drones above the stage.

“I didn't want to add musicians or instruments so as not to disturb the stripping of a show with a naked voice and a symphony orchestra. “, she explains. “I was thinking of something epic in the sky. I wanted the drones to follow the arrangements for sound visualizations. It seems to have worked well in the desert” of Indio, the place of the festival.