Sparks fly at Björk's new show Biophilia

As the lights dimmed and we waited for Björk to mount the stage of the Victorian market hall, the last thing I expected to hear was a recording of the dulcet tones of David Attenborough, waxing lyrical about nature, music and technology.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, though. The show does, after all, take its name, Biophilia, from Edward O. Wilson's theory about the instinctive bond between humankind and nature, which he claims is a necessary consequence of our evolutionary origins. And the Icelandic singer has made it clear that she is a life-long fan of the British naturalist. "When I was a kid, my rock star was David Attenborough," she recently told Rolling Stone. "I've always been interested in science."

And boy, did she manage to pack a dizzying amount of it into the show. There were songs about plate tectonics, galaxy formation, crystallisation, DNA and heredity, equilibrium, gravity and dark matter. Then there were the novel instruments, including four harps driven by 10-foot pendulums and a gigantic Tesla coil that sparked in time to the music. We're told that the structures of her compositions, too, were inspired by scientific ideas - the beats to some of the songs were based on prime number sequences, for example.