110. Sugarcubes - Coldsweat (One Little Indian)

Three weeks at number one from 6th February 1988

Sometimes releasing a unique, spellbinding single as your debut can be disadvantageous; it can end up defining a group or an artist beyond reasonable bounds. In the case of The Sugarcubes, “Birthday” may have dominated the indie charts for months and caused Cocteau Twins fans to have spasms, but anyone who bought the twelve inch version will also have heard the extra track “Cat” on side two – a different beast, with hip-wiggling yet irregular grooves revving towards a chorus which consisted of Bjork singing “Cat cat cat” delightedly.

It indicated to anyone paying attention that there were clearly two ways The Sugarcubes could go next – the wobbling, anxious balladry of “Birthday”, which seemed to be what critics expected, or something which was more straightforward, while still not being common-or-garden pop music. “Coldsweat” was the group’s answer, a single which Bjork later vaguely referred to as a “mickey-take” of love songs.

That’s something of an understatement. Ballads typically either represent uncertainty and devastation or celebrate a couple slowly being pulled into their own divine, magnetic forcefield (albeit one which might be peppered with a few complications if the songwriter is interesting enough). “Coldsweat” is having none of this. It presents love as a war, a battle, a conquest – and if you’re smiling knowingly and reaching towards the comments box to mention Pat Benatar’s mainstream hit “Love Is A Battlefield”, it far outguns that. If Pat Benatar presents romance as the theme to an action chase in a Hollywood film, “Cold Sweat” is closer to snuff porn.

The opening lines are “Meat meat blood blood sweat sweat meat”, uttered by the group’s dependable backing growler Einar, before Bjork eventually elaborates “This is hot meat/ This is metallic blood/ This is hot meat/ This is open sweat” and later on warns (or teasingly promises?) “With your own breath/ I’ll tear your lungs” and “I will not finish/ Til I’m fully satisfied”. It makes Depeche Mode’s “Master And Servant” seem delicate; sex and romance here aren’t presented coyly, or even necessarily as (conventionally) fun. Instead, it compares that desire to an almost comical animalistic hunger, where bodies are used like the produce of butcher’s shops, and Bjork is cast not as a fantasy figure or a femme fatale, but a black widow spider devouring her partner once the copulation is over.

The arrangement underneath bares close to no relationship to “Birthday”, unless of course we consider its occasional proclivity to tilt and judder like a vehicle with a warped wheel. Nor, really, is it entirely akin to “Cat”, though its nearer to that song on the spectrum. Instead, almost funky guitar-work and throbbing basslines combine with Bjork’s vocals, which on occasion resembles an almost feline wailing and on others a full-bodied, threatening human snarl.

Her voice dominates Sugarcubes tracks so much that there’s a tendency to overlook what the band are doing, and critics frequently wrote glib lines about The B52s and Talking Heads. Both are clear influences, but is it just me who can also hear the off-kilter funk of Happy Mondays here too? That hesitant, sinister groove belongs to the ill-at-ease likes of “Tart Tart”. Here it’s less spindly and more defined, a harder-edged performance, but the instrumental breaks contain a kind of sinister indie-funk we’ve heard before, just not in this particular context. The paranoid, uneasy romance of Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Broken Ice” is another possible reference point here.

“Coldsweat” is no more commercial a single than “Birthday”, and in its own way, no less disturbing – it’s just that while the former sounded like a colourful and strangely decorated cry for help, the latter casts Bjork as the threat, the wild animal on the prowl, the hunter, not the quarry. 

105. Sugarcubes - Birthday (One Little Indian)

Two weeks at number one from 31st October 1987

As a kid, I developed a strange fascination for the furthest flung bits of the globe – the sparse, underpopulated areas which contained people I’d never met, whose beliefs and customs I’d never been exposed to. Living in London, I’d been introduced to all kinds of non-British people, even if they were just being irritating tourists in the street, but some places felt deeply enigmatic. I’d nag my Mum about this, initially in seriousness, then eventually just to be an annoying, repetitive arsehole.

“Mum, can we go to Greenland on holiday?” I asked.

“No. There’s nothing there,” she sighed. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
“There can’t just be nothing there.”
“It’s as close to nothing as you can get, it’s expensive, and we’re not paying all that money to go there and sit surrounded by snow and ice. If you want to go to Greenland, you’re going to have to pay for it when you get older.”

I still haven’t been to Greenland (largely because my wife isn't up for it either). I have, however, been to Iceland a few times, a country which was similarly at the forefront of my childhood obsessions. It’s not a cheap place to visit by anyone’s standards, but it is halfway to Canada, which has on occasion made it a handy stopping off point for those long trips to see my in-laws. You can pause, mood-bathe in the sheer weirdness of eternal daylight or constant nighttime, get scalped by a couple of Arctic Terns, eat some Puffin (or actually, don’t), wander around the wild coastline, or just walk the brightly coloured streets and feel as if you’re somewhere which has still clung on to its own distinct identity; which hasn’t been Big Macced up to its eyeballs. Aside from the hot thermal springs, a Penis Museum and the rugged landscape, there are no huge tourist attractions in Iceland as such, just the comforting sense that you’re somewhere which prides itself on its differences.

When “Birthday” was released, most of the music press seemed to focus on the country of Iceland rather than the group themselves – as if the entire population, rather than a single group, had released a new record. Smash Hits just listed some facts about the country in their “Mutterings” section and The Chart Show’s info boxes barely mentioned the group at all. Strange behaviour indeed, especially as The Sugarcubes weren’t even the first Icelandic group to get exposure in the UK; Mezzoforte had a sizeable jazz funk hit with “Garden Party” some years before (which we’ve covered in passing) and their parent Steinar label even had a British arm for a time, pumping out other Icelandic records to the British public by artists such as Puzzle, You And I and Joe Ericson.

The reason the music press seem to have suddenly become Icelandphiles became apparent when I finally saw One Little Indian’s original press release for “Birthday” - the vast bulk of it was covered in Iceland facts; proof if it were needed that many music journalists are idle buggers who, when faced with an inexplicable and leftfield record, would rather just copy the contents of the press release into their word processors.

Because “Birthday” is, even by the standards of 2026, a deeply strange record. The guitars whine and weep, bells ring as if struck by stray poltergeists, ponderous percussive elements wobble down stairs, then Bjork's echoing, sky-reaching howling seeps in to create something actually really very creepy. The word "beautiful" has been occasionally used to describe the single, but it's not a well sounding record to my ears; it reaches, it surges, it staggers, it collapses like a yearning ballad being played from a vinyl record on a boat at choppy seas. In fact, chances are if you investigated the noise, you would find an empty boat bereft of a crew, and a turntable inexplicably playing this – Bjork’s screech being answered by gulls.

Comparisons were made to the Cocteau Twins at the time, but while that group could stab discords and abrupt handbrake turns into their work, they were, for the most part, following fairly predictable melodic paths. “Birthday” see-saws uncomfortably, not wanting the listener to get too settled.

The video, screened on "The Chart Show" more times than I can sensibly count, adds to the sense of unease. The background picture is Bjork dancing and singing in an empty room with a darkened window. The foreground shot zooms in and out of Bjork's face, and as it zooms in she becomes pixellated like a Crimewatch video of a witness talking about a heinous murder. It's cheap and basic, but it again gives the impression of something slightly more sinister afoot.

Bjork later referred to this as a "tasteless pop song", clarifying: "It’s a story about a love affair between a five year old girl, a secret and a man who lives next door. The song’s called Birthday because it’s his fiftieth birthday... I was always changing my mind about what the lyrics should be about. I had the atmosphere right from the start but not the facts. It finally ended up concentrating on this experience I remembered having as a little girl, among many other little girls’ experiences. It’s like huge men, about fifty or so, affect little girls very erotically but nothing happens . . . nothing is done, just this very strong feeling. I picked on this subject to show that anything can affect you erotically; material, a tree, anything.”

Which doesn't really clarify anything concretely, except to say that from the foundations up (the premise, the overall sound, the delivery) "Birthday" is consciously awkward, naive and confused, reaching for past emotions it can't get to or properly explain, and seems to want to unnerve the listener with its ideas.