The Sugarcubes put Iceland on the music map and introduced us to the unique strangeness of Björk with their 1987 single Birthday.

Rarely has a voice been used as an instrument in its own right, rather than a vehicle for lyrics, more than when it belongs to Björk.

Like many others, I first heard that girlish vocal when John Peel played Birthday by The Sugarcubes in late 1987.

Voted top of Peel’s Festive Fifty chart at the end of that year, it is the strangest of songs, and strangely compelling; like most of the songs we would come to associate with Björk, always the strangest of artists.

The lyrics are bizarre, to say the least: about a five-year-old girl who “threads worms on a string (and) keeps spiders in her pocket (and) collects fly wings in a jar.”

Her only friend is her next-door neighbour, a bearded man who celebrates her birthday by sewing a bird in her knickers before they lie in the bath together smoking cigars.

You can’t get much stranger than that. 

Birthday came out on The Sugarcubes’ 1988 debut album, Life’s Too Good. They had formed two years earlier, under the name Kukl, aka “Þukl” in Icelandic, on the day that Björk gave birth to her son Sindri.

She had already recorded her first album – a collection of children’s songs – when she was 11 and two more in her teens with her previous band Tippi Tikarass.

The Sugarcubes made three albums before breaking up at the end of 1992 when Bjork launched what would be a stellar solo career.