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|
| Date |
July 15 2005 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
The Guardian's Friday Review |
| Title |
Sweet little mystery |
| Country |
UK |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Simon Hattenstone / Ross Kirton, Yui Mok |
| Pix |
 |
| Text |
Her name is a byword for glam and vamp, but dark rumours still surround the life of Alison Goldfrapp. She tells Simon Hattenstone the truth about sniffing glue, stealing cars and losing five years of her life to cannabis
There is something shocking about Alison Goldfrapp. She's so tiny and nondescript. She wears no makeup, her legs are stick-thin, her face unremarkable but for the oversized mosquito shades. She carries two plastic bags. If you were told she slept in hostels or in the park you wouldn't be surprised.
Perhaps it's only shocking once you've seen her on stage. Up there she is sexy, voracious Alison Goldfrapp - part vamp, part puddycat, all furs and lingerie, stilettos and lipstick. Whether queen of the glam-rock disco scene or operatic diva, Goldfrapp the performer exudes a louche glamour.
We meet at the railway station in Bath. Goldfrapp had been on the same train as me from London, but of course I hadn't spotted her. Nobody recognises her, she says. Here in Bath is where Goldfrapp the band make their music. She orders a half of bitter, and takes in the sun and the view, and says it's lovely to be home - Goldfrapp has just been travelling around Europe promoting her new album, Supernature. Apparently, there was the dwarf and fat lady in France who were in hysterics when Goldfrapp began to perform; and the French DJ who said to her: "We hear you are very feminine and sexee on ze album, and today we see you are not"; and then there's the piped music they play in bars, and ...
"Oh look, there's Will," she says, cutting herself off mid-flow. Will Gregory is the other half of Goldfrapp the band. On stage, he is the invisible one, trapped behind his bank of synthesisers. Goldfrapp and Gregory were introduced to each other six years ago. They wrote to each other, talked a lot, swapped tastes and got to know each other before deciding to form a professional partnership. They called the band Goldfrapp because she was always going to be the frontwoman and, well, it's a pretty good name for a band.
Their first album, Felt Mountain, came out of nowhere and was a huge hit. Goldfrapp's music was hard to describe without sounding poncey (lush, symphonic, sweeping, epic just about covers it). The album sleeve featured two Alison Goldfrapp heads melded into siamese twins. On a closer look, the cover turned into a vagina, or perhaps a pubic wig.
The second album, Black Cherry, was totally different: disco pop meets stomp rock with a nod to Mark Bolan and the early 1970s. Their third album, Supernature, is a happy blend of the first two. Goldfrapp explains why it is called Supernature - something to do with a scientific experiment involving cockroaches and decapitation - but I don't really get it. No, she says, nor does she, but she likes the title.
It's amazing how much the music has changed since the first album, I say. Gregory, who admits to being in his 40s, says it makes him wince to hear Felt Mountain now. "Everything is so filled out. It's a bit like having too much sugar and then you need to go on a bit of a diet. We did actually try to write more Felt Mountain but ..."
Goldfrapp finishes off his sentence for him. "It felt contrived. We'd said it. Don't want to do it again."
Goldfrapp, who admits to being in her 30s ("and that's the truth!"), says that after a while she felt so bored singing the songs, so trapped and stymied. "Boredom," Gregory says, savouring the word.
She really wanted to belt out songs live at gigs, dance and be danced with. So they reinvented themselves with Black Cherry.
The trouble with that one, she says, was that it was also too self-conscious, just in a different way. She says they wanted to incorporate beats but they weren't instinctive about it. Goldfrapp and Gregory are masters of Maoist self-criticism. Surprisingly, they like the new album. Not that they listen to their own music, you understand. Gregory says that would somehow be wrong, like laughing at your own jokes.
They play me the song, Lovely to See You. It's a classic stadium anthem. When I say she's going to have to open every gig with this song from now on, she looks embarrassed.
"More tea?" she says.
A few weeks later, Goldfrapp and I meet up in London. She suggests the Design Museum because there's a sculpture she'd like me to see. I can't see her, so I walk round the huge bronze Eduardo Paolozzi and try to like it, but fail.
Goldfrapp appears out of nowhere, still no makeup but a new pair of mosquito shades. She sees me studying the sculpture, and I'm not sure whether to admit that I don't like it - it's obviously important to her in some way. But soon enough I blurt it out. It's ugly, I say, and soulless.
She smiles. "I don't like it either."
I look at her bemused. So why did you insist on us meeting here?
She says she likes the words engraved into it, a quote from Leonardo da Vinci. "Though human genius in its various inventions with various instruments may answer the same end, it will never find an invention more beautiful or more simple or direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing superfluous."
We go into the cafe, but it's too loud, and the music is piped. So Goldfrapp suggests we head off and look for somewhere decent. She walks into bar after bar, pulls a face and walks out again, whining in her estuary English about the bloody piped music. Her talking voice couldn't be more different from her ethereal singing voice. Somebody once told her she sounded like Sybil from Fawlty Towers.
She looks up at a smart block of flats, suddenly animated. "Look, that man's got a telescope," she says. Didn't she once describe herself as a voyeur? "Yes. I'd like a telescope, but I probably wouldn't look at the stars that often. I'd definitely be looking into people's flats most of the time."
What would she most like to see? "It's probably what you don't see isn't it? Then you can fantasise about what happens." We walk in and out of another bar. "I hate fucking piped music," she says.
She tells me she's just been to Switzerland, as we walk in and out of Pizza Express. "Very pleasant. We had a nice meal by a lake. Veal and steak." Veal and steak? "Yeah, half and half. I do like to eat. I'm anaemic at the moment, so I'm eating as much meat as I can." One newspaper article described her as a carnivore, but I think it was meant metaphorically. In another article, she said that next time she played at Glastonbury she would like three buses - one for her outfits, one for her boudoir, and one for her lovers. "Umm," she says, when I mention it. No, she can't remember that. "D'you think that Starbucks has an upstairs?" she asks. Would she say she is difficult to please? I ask. "Yeah!" She giggles. "I hate Starbucks. Let's walk round that bit." Eventually, she finds a cafe with disgusting looking stale bread and meats, but no music. Right, this will do, she says.
Alison Goldfrapp's life tends to be portrayed in black and white - she came from a very posh background and then pissed away her privilege with drink and drugs and years spent living in squats, before finding herself again. The truth is somewhere between the two. Her father came from a well-to-do family, served in the army and ended up in a job in advertising that he couldn't stand. All along, he'd wanted to be an artist. Her mother worked as a nurse. Every profile recounts her degenerate years of sniffing glue and nicking cars, and claims she doesn't want to talk about these times because she has put them behind her.
Is that true? "Well ..." she says. Come on, it's time to talk about all the things you don't like to talk about, I say.
"Well, I only did it once," she says. "My mother was quite upset reading about that. I did it in a plastic carrier bag. Actually, it makes me feel sick just thinking about it."
She was 13 or 14 at the time, and an unhappy schoolgirl. Goldfrapp had great memories of her earlier schooldays - a convent boarding school with exotic nuns to fuel her exotic fantasies. But she was forced to leave because she wasn't sufficiently academic. She ended up at a local comprehensive, where the other children dismissed her as posh and privileged despite her efforts to slum it. "I lived at the wrong end of town, and I suppose at that age you desperately want to belong."
There is an inky-blue tattoo on one of her fingers. It could be a matchstick man or an abstract. It's the type of DIY tattoo jailbirds give themselves. She did it with a needle and ink when she was 13 years old. For so long she hated it because people thought it was something spiritual or mystical when really it was just a crap doodle, but now she likes it because it reminds her of her youth.
What was she like then? "I wasn't having a particularly great time. I was smoking fags and trying to be popular." And was she? "No, that's why I was trying to be popular," she says, sharply. Did she not have friends? "Yeah, course I got fuckin' friends," she answers, even more sharply. Sometimes she sounds like the kind of stroppy screw-up who has just walked straight off a Mike Leigh film set. I tell her that I had also read that she stole cars. She laughs. "It was a tractor, actually. We didn't steal a tractor, we just got a tractor. It was the boys that I hung out with that did things like that."
Goldfrapp had five much older brothers and sisters. She has always been close to her mother but says she is probably more like her father, a dreamy romantic who died from a heart attack many years ago. She describes her mother as a very Christian person who opened her house to all sorts. "A lot of people came who had just come out of a loony bin, though I probably shouldn't use that word. They just came to see my mum." She remembers visiting her mother at the hospital where she worked; "I made friends with a little child who had a giant head. I think he had water on the brain. He always stank of urine, but he was very happy. He was in a nappy with this giant head. He died."
She loved her father so much, but her memories of him are mixed. He hated her sloppy, feet-dragging voice. "My dad used to ignore me when I was a kid. He couldn't stand my voice, so he just used to ignore me and then he'd impersonate me. He'd go, 'mgnnngrawmgnnnngramgnngra'," and she does an impression of a cow chewing cud.
Why did he do it? "Because, I think, he thought I should speak better. But I just couldn't speak any other way. It made me very paranoid. It still makes me paranoid." Maybe he just thought it was a joke? "Yeah, maybe," she says quietly, but she doesn't sound convinced.
She left school without qualifications. She moved into a squat in London and became a spliffhead and dossed some more. In her early 20s, she decided she was throwing her life away and had better do something about it. She got a grant from the British Council to go to Belgium and sing alongside a dance act. Belgium seemed so exotic compared with the stultifying Hampshire where she had grown up. "Even the motorways looked really fabulous, the lights and the tunnels. It seemed like a different world, much nicer. Nice coffees and little cakes. Everything seemed much more sophisticated."
In her mid-20s, she went to art school as a mature student, and discovered a new kind of exoticism. Her graduation piece was a live installation in which she milked a cow wired up to an amplifier as she yodelled. "Because it was wired up, you could hear all the milk really loudly going into the bucket. The cow had been in Anchor Butter adverts," she says proudly.
Soon after art school, the combustible trip-hop artist Tricky asked her to audition for him. When she went round to his house he hung up a mic in his hall, asked her to improvise into it and went off to get himself some chips. "When he came back from the chip shop he said, 'Ooh yeah, it's really good, but there aren't any words. You gotta have words, you can't fuckin' sing without words.' Then a week later he rang me up and said, 'Actually I'm going to keep it like that.' "
She sang on Pumpkin, on Tricky's classic debut album, Maxinquaye, toured with him for two years, and spent much of the time rowing with him. She says he used to slag her off for having been to art school. What did he say? "'You're a fuckin' poncey fuckin shit,'" she shout-spits. "We used to spit at each other like that." I think he's a lot better now. He smoked a lot of weed and when you smoke it all the time it makes you paranoid." She estimates that she lost five years of her life to cannabis.
Two years with Tricky did her head in - never singing her own songs, never even singing words. But that was her choice. She insisted on singing gobbledegook. Didn't that limit her work opportunities? "Well, yeah," and she fizzes with laughter.
After working with Tricky, she fell into a rut. She was playing in a terrible band with terrible wasters, but she didn't have the energy to break free. She tried to convince herself they were breaking new ground, even though she knew it was a sham. One day, somebody played her Scott Walker, and that was that. "I'd never heard anything like it. I thought it was the most amazing, beautiful thing. Boy Child was the first thing I heard, and it was absolutely magical, and I thought what the fuck was I doing in this fuckin' room with this stupid fuckin' stonehead who don't know shit. I never went back there again."
She orders another cup of hot chocolate. She hates drugs these days, and is making an effort to drink less. She talks about the future - a while ago she felt broody but now she doesn't think she's cut out for children. She has waited so long for her career to blossom, and anyway she thinks she is probably too childish to have her own children.
She thinks that finally, after all these years, she has worked herself out. Yes, she says there are still plenty of times when she feels awkward and socially maladroit, but she feels easier in her skin than she used to.
You do seem incredibly confident on stage, I say. Does she feel sexy on stage? "Yeah. I have had a terrible urge on stage to take off all my clothes." Has she ever done it? "No, thank God, because that would be the biggest fucking disaster. The more clothes you've got on, the better." We talk about rock stars such as Iggy Pop who become cock stars when they get their willy out on stage. She sounds envious of them. "Now that would be something, wouldn't it? That must feel great. And it looks raw. There's something nice and raw about it."
In their own way, Goldfrapp the woman and the band have found their own form of rawness. At last, she seems happy with what she is creating. "I think success has made me more relaxed. Not just success but doing what I want to do. People say to me, 'Why did it take you so long?' But I'm glad it did in a way because . . ." And she struggles for the words again. "I did get asked to do things and I said no because I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do - it wasn't the music I wanted to do, or it wasn't the right people."
She pauses, sips at the hot chocolate and explains why she refused to sing anything but gobbledegook for so long. Even at her nadir, she was convinced that one day she would make it on her own terms and she was saving herself. "I had this thing about not giving too much of myself away, so I thought, if I sang lyrics, that's giving too much away. You know, I really didn't want to give myself away." |
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