For me it had similarities. I also read a lot of letters between Charles Darwin and his wife, and his ideas about society and how people worked made him seem really… human.
He was a humanist and had very controversial ideas about what a human is and the way he and his wife looked upon family, it puts perspective on what life is today. It was interesting in so many different ways to study these concepts, and something quite rare for a group of musicians to do. Does the music serve as a mask for some of the raw feelings to hide behind? I think people are very lonely. As a feminist, everything is about gender construction, and then you meet people from these mothers healthcare institutions, and they deeply believe that all female humans are born just to raise and breastfeed children!
All these well-educated women all of a sudden lose half their identity, and that was really frightening for me. Well, yes, a little bit.
I was there for the first time this summer, to lecture about electro composition. It was fantastic. It was so hard when I was little — I still hate going into music shops, guitar shops, whatever. All these men just stare and stare at you and you feel like an idiot. You get really fed up with yourself. The things we did before, we had done modifications — I started off with a painted face and in a very shamanic or pagan sort of dress, then I turned into something that was more gothic. Still I was very human, I think.
Sounds good, I love it! I really want to create something, to capture the whole room, to make the music more intense, and that goes for us on stage as well. I was so tired of this whole environment and all of this.
I couldn't think of any way I wanted to be out there among people who make music and work with music, because I was so burnt-out by how it had been before.
But then The Knife became one big performance. Like, to have a visual, the visual part of the storytelling was film, and it was also robots, dolls, machines that were singing and synchronised with the music. Then we became more of a performance. We were just actors in this performance, which also took away focus from us, which made it much easier. To have a character to play onstage makes much more sense.
There are now four mothers in Fever Ray. It is very common that we are asked, 'Okay, so you're touring, but what do you do with your kids?
Like, when I started in bands, I was like, 'Girl bands are a cool thing. But now I think we're pretty alone as an all-woman band. I think I've been afraid a long time in my life. When, like five, six years ago, I decided that it was time to break up my marriage, that was a very scary time, because it's a difficult thing.
Even the title suggests new beginnings and freedom. Having cleared out the cafe, we talk about To the Moon and Back. In its video, we witness the old Fever Ray character from the first album being shorn of her blond hair in favour of a bald head actually a skull cap.
I raise the point that one of the characters then urinates on her. What does it represent? When is that happening? We just have to take it all back and start again. Fever Ray: on pleasure, patriarchy and political revolution. Muscling in on the action Dreijer bulks up for her album campaign.
Electronic review: Fever Ray, Fever Ray. Read more.
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