(smartshanghai.com)
Updated: 2008-02-21 17:26

You live in the USA now, why did you choose to move to New York?

A mix of things. It's not somewhere I've wanted to live all my life or anything like that. It’s different from London in that London was always the big city next to Iceland and I remember going to London for the first time when I was 16 with all my pocket money and going to Virgin Megastore and being in there for hours wondering what albums I was going to buy and putting them back on the rack and going, "No, I’m going to get his one." Having to sit down because I was dizzy. It was like heaven. I always had that relationship with London that it was this place where everyone was playing music, where all the DJs were and there were amazing record shops. With New York it's more like just skyscrapers and an urban extreme. It was a mixture. I really did love London but there was a time when I had the paparazzi always hanging around. I'm not judging people who thrive on that sort of attention but I don't. I can't write music. That's my reaction and that's one of the reasons I ended up in New York because it is a cosmopolitan city. But I don't get followed around here which is amazing. And my boyfriend's from here, it's a mix of things. I still spend half my time in Iceland and it's just a five-hour flight from New York, which is not bad.

In Iceland I heard everyone knows you personally.

Well, there are only one hundred thousand people in Reykjavik. I'm sure you'd bump into everyone at some point.

Has it changed you? Have you had to curb your eccentric side living in America?

I probably couldn't live anywhere else [in America] other than New York, but not really. I'm used to not being understood. In Iceland the media didn't like our band and thought we were really weird until Melody Maker made our song record of the week. It wasn't until England said we were great that people in Iceland said, "Well, actually they’re not that bad." I'm not that huge in the States but people like Robert De Niro can walk around and unless you go into SoHo, where there's a little paparazzi scene going on, especially on Saturdays... but if you don't go there you're fine.

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