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|
| Date |
August 2005 |
| Type |
Mag |
| Source |
Gay Times, issue 323 |
| Title |
Still Smoking |
| Country |
UK |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Richard Smith/ Ross Kirton |
| Pix |
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| Text |
Still smoking
As Goldfrapp return with another album of beautiful Electro, their sirenesque singer, Alison, opens up about her wayward youth, animal passions, cigarettes and shagging.
I really wasn't looking forward to this interview. In fact, immediately beforehand I was having what the French call une attaque panique. It was partly because I'm a big fan, and still capable of getting star-struck. But I also thought interviewing Alison "from" Goldfrapp would be so tortuous that Amnesty International would have to take up my case. Would everyone's favourite über-cool, ultra-sexy ice maiden be beautifully bored by the whole experience? I imagined various worst-case interview scenarios; Alison nonchalantly stopping every so often to take calls on her mobile phone. Or maybe she'd have this little bell she'd ring as she barked out; "Interview over. Next!"
But anyway, we got on like a house on fire - and not one that has several small children still trapped inside. I tell Alison all this, and she laughs and says she knows what I mean; "Because I'm 'frosty and cold and spiky'? It's probably because I don't say very much on stage. I always have this vision of me going; 'Hello! Hou you doing?', and there'll be this horrible, deathly silence. Then some tumbleweeds..."
But she also hasn't given much of herself away in interviews. That's 'cause people usually just ask her about the music, she says. Would she mind talking about herself? It's just that this is for a gay magazine and gay men... "Love me!" she trills, rather endearingly.
We do, of course, but gay men also often connect with a star when they start identifying with their life story. Alison's happy to oblige. She was a small-town girl who grew up in Hampshire, which was dull and suburban - all commuters and colonels. She says her background's quite posh, which, naturally, she hated. She remembers getting off on anything that seemed exotic or erotic, or that offered an escape route. One of her earliest memories is from the early 70's, when her older sister, a huge Marc Bolan fan, got sent home from school "with these huge great nails, this bright, glittery nail varnish". Alison became fascinated by people like Marc and bands like Roxy Music. "They had their own hairstyle, they had their own dance - just this whole fantastical imagery... it was much more the norm then to be the maker of everything you did."
Her mum and dad, being bourgeois, wouldn't let her watch much TV, but they thought all that funny European stuff the BBC used to show was sort-of okay. Like many people of a certain age, she's still haunted by this weird and beautiful Yugoslavian kids' series, White Horses, and its theme tune, which was even more weird and even more beautiful. A little later, Disco and Punk came along, and Alison was too smart to choose between them. She grew up loving Donna Summer, Blondie, Grace Jones, Kate Bush and Joan Jett; "I think I quite fancied Joan Jett."
Young alison was a tomboy and a bad girl. She left home when she was 16 and got a flat with a girlfriend. Hampshire was appalled. "We used to hitch lifts into town with squaddies - just squeezing into this van, sitting on their laps and thinking it was absolutely hilarious."
it does sound quite fun. "It was!"
At 17, Alison moved to London, and lived in a squatt off the Old Kent Road. She spent the next few years trying to avoid getting a proper job - this was the 80s, after all. She knew she really wanted to sing and make music, but all the people she met through Melody Maker ads were, well; "Boys." She tuts. "Such a pile of poo." Through a friend, she met a Belgian man who composed music for a modern dance company. He was impressed enough to invite her over to Antwerp to sing for them. She did that for three years - all paid for by the British Arts Council.
Alison loved being in Europe. It was so different, so romantic; "These beautiful, tall rooms with shutters and creaky floorboards..." And she got introduced to music by Françoise Hardy and Yma Sumac - the latter's a clear influence on her own astonishing, gymnastic, theatrical vocal style.
Then it was back to Blighty, and bumming around art school for a bit. And then, through a mutual friend, she met this man, Will Gregory. It was "like" at first sight; he was a twin soul who wanted to make just the sort of music Alison had been imagining.You know, "epic, melancholic things", with "big string arrangements", and "crazy vocal sounds". And "I really hate using the word, but 'cinematic'".
It was strange, because they were making music that was like nothing that anyone else was making. Goldfrapp's first album, Felt Mountain, was a cult hit and critically acclaimed - though Alison only remembers the bad ones dismissing it as arty, pretentious and humourless. "They said, 'She's an ice queen', and all that sort of malarkey."
Their second album, Black Cherry, couldn't have been more different. Alison took all the best bits of her own musical past - Glam, Disco, Punk - and put them into a blender. The result was one of the most spectacular volte-faces ever made in popular music - it was, as Alison sang on Strict Machine, "wonderful electric".
I thought something must have happened to them both after Felt Mountain, but it turns out that Black Cherry was just born out of boredom. "We toured that album for over a year, and I was fucking sick to death of playing those songs. I'd felt like we'd built our own prison, in a way. I remember thinking on stage, 'Fucking hell, I just wish someone would fucking bang those fucking drums!' I was like, 'There's so much more that I want to do. There's all this stuff, and we might as well change it now'".
Alison tells me she didn't realise quite what they'd done until they played at Popstarz last year - and there were all these queens swinging from the chandeliers and screaming at them. "With Felt Moutain, we were playing to german dentists and lawyers, then suddenly... It was awesome. I fell over at the end, rather embarassingly. I had my horse's tail caught in my thigh-length boots."
Bearing in mind their past wilfulness, you might have expected that the new Goldfrapp album, Supernature, was going to be 20 jazz Funk Greats, or something. But it's not. Thankfully, it's more of the same - more kinky Electro, more songs from the siren. And there's more of that sexual tension - that animal desire that she does so well. Alison's animal obsession is yet another hangover from her youth. "I've got all these lovely Witchcraft books from the 70s, with all these naked people running round the forest with animal heads on. There's something quite scary about it, but it's also quite charming and very English. My mother can't stand it, actually. She hates me doing it. She's very Christian, and thinks it's satanic. 'What are you doing with girls with animal heads again?'"
I tell her my favourite line on the new album is; "I'm like a dog to get you".
"That just came out!" she splutters. "And I thought, 'Fuck it, I can't sing that, for God's sake'. And Will's going, 'No, it's really good'. I said, 'Girls can't say things like, "I'm a dog to get you" - it's what men say'. He kind of forced me to sing it. But I did think, 'Oh god, am I going to be? You know..."
Answering questions about dogs fucking for the next few months? "Yes. Exactly. 'Oh, here we go again'. What's wrong with me?"
A lot of her songs are quite sexually predatory. Is that how she is, or is she singing in character?
"I think it's probably how I am." She giggles. "It's something I'm not even aware of most of the time."
She isn't aware of sex most of the time?
"I'm very aware of sex! I'm not aware that I pretty much talk about or use it in some form or another, whether it's visually or the way I look at things or talk about things. I think it's just there, and it's something I'm not really in control of. I was telling someone the other day about how I really liked - or I used to when I was smoking - to smoke and fuck at the same time. They were completely, utterly disguted. And I thought it was just quite fun and indulgent. I liked it - it was quite blasé and casual."
It is a bit. But some people might take offence - it could look like she was being a bit too blasé. |
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