Björk is one of the few artists to have been there from the start, from the moment my obsession with music truly took hold. It was 1993, the year I started reading the NME and Melody Maker every week and listening to the Evening Session on Radio 1 every night. Her debut album, appropriately titled Debut, was released and was voted album if the year in the NME. I liked it I heard enough that I went out and bought the album on cassette, back when each album felt like a big investment. It was a bit of an outlier in my collection, which consisted of mainly alt-rock and indie, but an outlier in a good way. I liked the album, and listened to it a lot, but I wouldn’t have called it one of my absolute favourites, and it didn’t have that one special song that I could become obssessed with, and play over and over again.

For that I had to wait for the follow up Post, and the song Hyperballad. Like all the best Björk songs it expressed a universal sentiment in a completely unique way. At its heart the song is about the need for time alone, to be able to work through your anger and emotions so that they don’t explode around other people. We can probably all relate to that. However, the way Björk expresses this is by spinning a tale of sneaking off early before her partner is awake, going up to a cliff top and throwing off “car parts, bottles and cutlery, whatever I find lying around” before returning to the safety of home.

This tale is matched to typically gorgeous melody, and a string and electronics laden backing track that builds and builds in intensity, somehow both bleak and joyous. The song had been named Hyperballad for good reason. I bought the CD single, having moved up in the audio world, and played it repeatedly, remixes and all. Whilst Björk would match this song in her later career with the likes of Joga and Unravel, I’m not sure she ever surpassed it.

One of the people who Björk had wanted to work on Post was Mark Bell, of LFO (coincidentally formed in my home city of Leeds), and he would go on to work on every following Björk album over the next decade or so. I knew little of his work at that time, with LFO’s biggest tracks predating my interest in music, and my knowledge of electronic music mainly limited to those acts that were popular with the indie kids, The Prodigy, Orbital, Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and the like. But in the very late nineties, for reasons that I’m not keen to mention in a public forum, although you may be able to guess, I discovered the joy of techno clubs, and electronic music became a much bigger part of my life.

Instead of (or as well as) the NME and Melody Maker I was reading Mixmag and Jockey Slut, and one of those magazines featured a new track by LFO, named Freak, as their single of the month. This was in the early days of stealing music from the internet, so I went and found a file of the track to download (side note – I’m not proud of my piracy, but I was spending an awful lot of money on legal music as well). Behold, Freak’ was as good as they said, techno at its most visceral and intense. None of the melody or faux strings of some of the more tatseful Detroit techno, just bleeps and impeccably programmed drums and the repeated sample of “This is going to make you freak”. There is no song I wanted to hear more in a club, but curiously enough I never did. It would have made a perfect climax to a techno set, but none of the DJs played it, at least not the ones I went to see. It seemed I would never hear it in its natural habitat.

Flash forward to 2008 and my first opportunity to see Björk live, despite her having been one my favourite artists for so long. At the Manchester Apollo, one of my favourite venues, no less. Her set was impeccable and eclectic, including songs from her then current album Volta, but also hidden gems from throughout her career, such as Cocoon from Vespertine and The Anchor Song from Debut. As we approached the end of the set though, we still hadn’t heard any of my very favourite songs of hers, no Joga, no Unravel no Hyperballad. Then the unmistakable opening of the latter track began, and I was in heaven.

I was taken back to my teenage self, falling in love with this track for the first time, listening over and over again in my bedroom, transported to another world by this wonderful artist. As the song reached its climax, some extremely familiar drums burst through the arrangement, followed by that vocal sample “this is going to make you freak”. And freak I did. I danced wildly without abandon, transcended to another plane. It’s the closest I’ve been in my life to an out of body experience. Something about that combination of one of the most emotionally intense tracks I’ve ever known mixed with one of the most physically intense tracks I’ve heard, at that volume, in that setting, as the crowd went wild, pretty much fried my brain.

I’d never had a moment like that at a gig before, and never have since. I’ve seen Björk live a couple more times, and although always great, nothing has matched that moment. As for Mark Bell, Freak was his last big success as LFO, but he continued to contribute to all Björk’s albums, and had even been part of her live band that night in Manchester, unbeknownst to me. Then in 2014 came the news he died from complications in surgery at the age of just 43, younger than I am now. Underappreciated, but mourned by those who love electronic music, and remembered forever, by me at least, for his part in one of the greatest musical moments of my life.