"I sent her a letter and thanked her," counters the star. "You should have a sense of humour about yourself. You've got to have a laugh, right?"

It might not have been the answer most were expecting of this quietly spoken, but loudly expressive artist. Then Bjork, one of seven siblings in a large Icelandic family, has gone through life being a little misunderstood.

Ever since she entered UK consciousness with the Sugacubes the pint-sized singer has flirted with our imaginations, teased our airwaves and given critics the slip every time they thought they'd got her sussed.

But her output has rarely been so obscure as to leave her isolated from commercial attention. In a career longer than her child-like features would suggest she has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, one Oscar and two Golden Globes.

Yet Bjork seems largely oblivious to her public perception.

"Do you think I'm eccentric?" says the woman once voted the most eccentric personality in the world on the BBC, then adding: "I don't have to be understood to thrive."

Obviously it helps, but this unusual artist has been served well by music that often flows like extended thought. On one hand she has beguiled with the ethereal beauty of such songs as Venus As A Boy, from her first post-Sugarcubes album Debut, to the energy and rhythm of her, perhaps unlikely, collaborations with Timbaland on recent album Volta, which take her to Sheffield City Hall.

"To me it didn't seem that weird," she says. "I didn't know him, he's not a close friend but there's been a mutual admiration.

"He did sample my song Yorka 11 years ago and made a track out of it and talked a lot about how much he loved Venus. It had Indian strings which he really liked and there's been talk through the years of us doing stuff and I guess I was ready to do a fully uptempo tribal album so this seemed to be the time.

"But as different as we are we do have things in common. It might not be a very big area and it was a very rewarding feeling to be in the studio with someone you don't know that well and find there is, in fact, a place we both own.

"We had this tiny long-distance respect thing for a reason. Even if we didn't know each other we'd been listening to each other's records a lot and there was this small section where both Bjork and Tim can live. Going into the studio and in three hours we had seven songs or something. I've never worked like this."

These days Bjork's association with the States extends to where she calls home. She swapped London for New York and lives with her partner, conceptual artist Matthew Barney and their daughter Isadora.

"New York is not somewhere I've wanted to live all my life or anything like that," she says. "It's different from London in that London was always the big city next to Iceland. With New York it's more like just skyscrapers and an urban extreme.

"I really did love London but there was a time when I had the paparazzi always hanging outside.

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