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biography / portrait

“You cannot stop this. You cannot escape it and you cannot turn it off. So, I’d appreciate your kind consideration in this matter, Sir or Mam, would you please turn it the FUCK UP. I present to you: the queen of queen bees, phoenix from the ashes risen. World record holder with a score of 2 GAZILLION in Tetris, two time recipient of the Nobel prize for Super-Foxiest female EVER, and wartime consigliore to the Costa Nostra. She’s the founder and CEO of Konichiwa Records. The most decorated professional on the streets, with a perfect track record since kindergarten when she used to whup schoolboy ass. In this world of tension, pressure and pain, she’s known for her wisdom, compassion and relentless determination in the quest to GET PAID.” audio communiqué from Konichiwa Records Headquarters. She is Robyn. The most killingest pop star on the planet. A pint-sized atom bomb dosed to the tits on electric and dispensing wisdom in three-minute modernist pop bulletins on the post-adolescent condition. ‘Robyn’ is also a collection of ultra-concise pop moments – that rarest of things, a classic pop album. It’s a sad-eyed, super-strong battery of nuclear-powered pop. It’s the best weapon she’s got. It was a tiny, low-key gig at the Mark Ronson-affiliated YoYo night in Notting Hill , November 2006, that introduced Robyn to the UK popscene. Although the urban hipster club proved a similar springboard for the youngling careers of hopefuls from Santogold to Lily Allen, it’s impossible to imagine the likes of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera mounting a showcase for their latest album in a venue this tiny - no dancers, visuals or pizzazz, just a man trying to play all of the music on guitar and drum at the same time, Robyn, and a whole lot of spunk. Yet historically Robyn has more in common with these starlets than YoYo regulars like Plastic Little. A star in Sweden from the age of 16, she was the favourite daughter in Max Martin’s transcontinental girl gang (a fraternity that boasts the membership of everyone from Avril Lavigne and Pink to Britney and Kelis). The success of sweet, soulful single ‘Show Me Love’ in 1997, and the swaggering, anthemic ‘Keep This Fire Burning’ established Robyn both as a global contender and Sweden’s biggest pop star of the Nineties. Onstage in Notting Hill, the tiny blonde woman unloads a can of hip-thrusting fuck-you cool, a unique confidence projection from someone who convincingly feels equally at home commanding stadiums. The music, meanwhile, is kinetic, cute but bare-boned – an arse-kicking subtraction of the pop song formula down to a percussive shudder. Over the coming months, these gigs become a welcome regularity in the capital. Often appearing with no promotion at all, other than sacred word of mouth, with each iteration the show’s presentation is subtly revised and expanded, until by the time Robyn headlines a triumphant gig at Cargo, she’s accompanied by two drummers and a keyboardist; herself thrashing heroically in a gold puffa jacket and handling extra percussion and a giant lazer gun. Live, the music is almost post-punk-pop, like if Robyn’s beloved Neneh Cherry had travelled back to Rip, Rig & Panic armed with everything she’d learnt from ‘Buffalo Stance’. A series of releases had primed the audience for each transition in sound. The ‘Rakamonie EP’ was an eclectic puree of styles, crunching Robyn’s owning of ‘Cobrastyle’ (a plutonium-grade anthem popularised by her co-conspirator Klas Åhlund’s group Teddybears) with her signature tune, ‘Konichiwa Bitches’. Over pixellated hip-pop beats, Robyn unloads like a manga Missy Elliott. ‘Konichiwa Bitches’ biggest inspiration was Bugs Bunny, and the way he’d totally front on Yosemite Sam with big-ass ACME boxing gloves. Robyn describes it as “a concentrate of attitude. It’s like a baby ninja! Like really dangerous but really small and cute! It’s like a child with a huge machine gun.” A spooked-out carnival-tune collaboration with Basement Jaxx, ‘Hey U’, showed that Robyn could do sad and summertime in the same song. But it was a song that came from the fuck out of leftfield, written and completed at the eleventh hour of the album’s release, that had Robyn chain herself to our hearts. Live henchman Kleerup had invited her to contribute vocals to one of his own tracks – a sumptuous piece of pop-dance melodrama, with gorgeous, billowing strings and a spiralling techno arpeggio that corkscrews through your stomach like a DNA helix of butterflys. In ‘With Every Heartbeat’, Robyn simply drags words out of the primary colour emotion-blocks of Kleerup's synth and strings. Robyn moulded her contribution to her friend’s song around his break-up, a beautiful loveletter from a friend. The empathy resonates powerfully, enough so for ‘With Every Heartbeat’ to flutter its way up the Top 40 and hook itself, gleaming, into the number one spot. The kissing cousin to ‘With Every Heartbeat’ was Åhlund’s ‘Be Mine!’, a single depicting intense unrequited love, that Robyn would colour in with every kind of craving. 'Be Mine!' is just beautiful. Every word that Robyn sings – “It's a good thing tears never show in the pouring rain/As if a good thing ever can make up for all the pain” - sounds like it's being crumpled up and clutched to her chest. In the middle-eight the 'song' just falls clean away, leaving a spoken word Polaroid that chews at your heart: "I saw you at the station. You had your arm around whatsername. She had on that scarf I gave you, and you got down to tie her laces. You looked happy - and that's great. I just miss you, that's all." "I wanted to feel like I was 15 or 16 again, and big emotions were REALLY BIG. Y'know, if you were in love you were IN LOVE and if you were heartbroken you were HEARTBROKEN! "Cos that's what people want music to be for them," explains Robyn. "I know I do when I listen to music." The sparse production to 'Be Mine!' makes its simplicity all the more brutal. Just strings that slice in, all gasps and sighs, and a flutter of drum machine that emulates a racing pulse. Rounded out by two more chart hits, the no-bullshit/deal-with-it soul woman declaration ‘Handle Me’, and ‘Who’s That Girl’, Robyn’s stunning avant-pop collaboration with Swedish electro-art-terrorists The Knife, the ‘Robyn’ album wiped the floor with any pop release in 2007, proving that the pop music of this century could be hard, sparse and experimental and not just delicious confectionary fun. Originally a self-released statement of intent and a solar flare of individuality in the face of an industry that still clings to production line schematics, Robyn is using Island in the UK and Interscope in the US to facilitate the album and her own Konichiwa Records label. “They’re so big and mighty.” Robyn teases, of her new allies. “They know stuff we don’t, and they have lots of money. But you have to keep them in check. And that’s what Konichiwa is for.” Robyn is currently conquering the US, thanks to introductions via her much-loved duet with one of her heroes, Snoop Dogg (“He called it retarded!” she giggles), and a surprise reprise of a demo vocal she cut with Åhlund two years ago on Britney’s ‘Piece Of Me’ single (“A favour for a friend, and then they ended up keeping the vocals on there… I didn’t even know about it until I was paid like a backing vocal fee. Like fifty pounds or something.”), there’s a further brace of UK dates before knuckling down to the sequel to ‘Robyn’. With Åhlund set to reprise production duties, and further collaborations with long time cohort Kleerup, this should be an album that reconciles Robyn, the heart-baring future-pop warrior with the effervescent FM soul of her megastardom youth. “I think one thing that’s still amazing about the UK,” ponders Robyn, “is that you’ve embraced this album really well. Y’know, I haven’t had to change anything, I feel like I could do whatever I wanted.” Reciprocally, over the past year Robyn has come to represent something singular and precious to pop fans in the UK. No other pop star in this country has the brazen level of ‘sameness’ and accessibility that Robyn has with her fans. She almost feels like the kind of pop star we could have just “made up”, out of bits of odd pop we remember, and distorted and amplified in the remembering. We feel so attached to her because we feel like we’ve invested a lot of ourselves in this stuff. It really feels like one of our team got through, that the good guys won for a change. (source: www.robyn.com)