The Habits Of History’s Most Creative Musicians.

On the face of it, there is little that unites Björk, Mr Nick Cave, Mr Leonard Cohen, Mr Bryan Ferry and Mr Kanye West. Their work is wildly different. Björk’s artistic output is impossible to second-guess; in the 24 years since the Icelandic musician released Debut, she has confounded expectations. For almost 40 years, Mr Cave, first with The Birthday Party and later with his band The Bad Seeds, has been making music of savage beauty and originality. It is nigh-on impossible to locate a dip in his discography. The late Mr Cohen could labour for years over a single verse, but the results seemed effortless in their empathic perceptiveness about humankind. During Mr Ferry’s most deeply purple patch in the 1970s, as both leader of Roxy Music and solo artist, the man dubbed a “taste tarantula” by his friend, the designer Mr Anthony Price, redefined art-pop with a succession of dazzling, artistically audacious releases. And Mr Kanye West, challenging though he undoubtedly is as an artist (and, some would say, as a human being), has produced work of breathtaking boldness and chutzpah.

Yet there is an obvious thread that links these five musicians: not once in their work can you detect any hint of compromise. On the contrary. Their music conveys an impression of stubborn single-mindedness, as if they are saying: “I had an idea. This is what I did with it. Whether you like it is a matter for you, but that is not why I made it.” In all honesty, how many musicians can you say that about?

As an experiment, try tracing a line between the multiple projects – music, video, visual art, film acting – that Björk has put her name to since emerging as an international solo artist in 1993. Exactly: it doesn’t follow a path, does it? It leaps, jerks, vaults all over the place. In person, she is the same, her words falling over themselves, her thoughts colliding with each other. A mere five minutes in Björk’s company and you realise: this is what’s going on in her head, all the time. Be it a dance album, an interactive album designed for apps, a movie, a soundtrack, a work for chamber orchestra, a record whose textures – including percussion – are entirely vocal: they are all reflections of her endlessly questing mind. Don’t make the mistake of concluding that she does all of this only for herself. She intends her work to communicate truths – about emotion, honesty, human nature, the environment. But on her own deeply, admirably individualistic terms. Which is, when you think about it, perhaps the definition of art.

Each of the various homes the Canadian lived in during a career spanning almost five decades was furnished sparsely, to the point of parsimony. In that sense, Mr Cohen’s living conditions were monk-like even before he moved, in 2004, to a Buddhist monastery in California, where he was ordained. As he told me when I interviewed him shortly before his death last year, “My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn’t be able to make it from room to room.” In such surroundings, the singer, poet and novelist illuminated the human condition, over the course of 14 studio albums, perhaps more piercingly than any other lyricist bar Mr Bob Dylan. Decluttering has rarely yielded such rich and spiritually profound results.

Always carry a notebook, for you never know where or when inspiration may strike. “Rants and screeds, embarrassing digressions, photographs, drawings and scribbles that in a sane world should never see the light of day,” was the Australian singer, author, screenwriter and artist’s own verdict on his compulsive jotting – in notebooks that, since 2007, have been made specially for him by a Sydney bookbinder. That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that the 21 studio albums he has made, with The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, teem with such blood-curdling Biblical imagery and unblinking reflections on love, mortality, sex and vengeance precisely because Mr Cave, like a fly-trap, captures such thoughts the moment they occur to him, and then hones them on paper. Skeleton Tree, his most recent album with The Bad Seeds, recorded as he was attempting to come to terms with the death of his teenage son, offers unbearably poignant evidence that it is a habit Mr Cave cannot break.

Long overshadowed by Mr David Bowie, Mr Ferry’s work in the 1970s is nowadays justly regarded as hugely influential on 21st-century pop culture, blurring the lines between music, art, fashion and design in a way we now take for granted. If the early Roxy Music albums were a riot of sound, colour and shock value, mid- and late-period Roxy reflected the singer’s move into high society, and the apparently effortless elan of his solo albums: a white tux, a casual croon, the snap of a cigarette lighter, the revving of a covetable sports car. His home in west London, where I interviewed him several years ago, is meticulously arranged, filled with works of art. You can hear a similar attention to detail in Mr Ferry’s recordings. A notorious perfectionist, creatively, Mr Ferry occupies his own time capsule, rejecting the temptation of quick fixes and easy results, instead painstakingly, even obsessively, fine-tuning music where a single note can transform a song, and lyrics that capture heartache and ennui so sharply, you'd swear he was documenting your own life.

I have met and interviewed Mr West three times, and he is undoubtedly a tricky customer: wary, chippy, gnomic, brittle. But he is also warm and tactile, though noticeably shy (which is surely telling), and possessed of an impish sense of humour. Every one of these attributes and flaws does battle in his brain – a brain constantly bursting with ideas, but addled through lack of sleep. His habit of working through the night and often deep into the following one is one explanation for the absurd levels of I’m-the-new-Picasso bombast he can come out with during media appearances. Who do you think you are, his detractors snipe: Jesus? Well, no, he doesn’t (despite calling his last-but-one album Yeezus). But he does think that his work is visionary, and game-changing. Seven studio albums that rewrote the rap rulebook, and one very nearly great one – last year’s The Life of Pablo – suggest he’s right. So, forget Kim if you kan. Forget, too, the self-hyping and the chest-pumping braggadocio. There is a reason Mr West works through the night; a reason, too, why he believes he’s a genius (and, ever the Mr Chippy, needs to remind us of the fact all the time). He is one. And genius don’t sleep, right?