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|
| Date |
october |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
Q, issue 231 |
| Title |
The lone ranger |
| Country |
UK |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Nick Duerden/ Jason Joyce |
| Pix |
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| Text |
ALISON GOLDFRAPP scowls ominously across a large vodka and tonic. She has just noticed that her wilting roll-up has burnt itself out again and so, with some irritation, she reaches into her handbag for a lighter. We are seated at a corner table in a West London pub garden, and despite heavy cloud cover, the woman is wearing sunglasses. Glowering like a 21st-century Marlene Dietrich is her usual mode. But this, presumably, is just her public face. Goldfrapp, the band, have a new album out, and so its singer must build upon her fearsome reputation, right?
"Reputation?" she says witheringly. "What reputation? Fuck off!"
Her speaking voice, much reedier than the operatic swoon of her singing one, rises several octaves and the emphasis she puts on the expletive would make Liam Gallagher wince.
"Sorry", she deadpans, "but I've no idea what you're talking about."
She's being disingenuous, of course. This is a woman who could toast a slice of bread simply by breathing on it, and she knows it.
"We-ell, OK," come the concession, "friends have told me that I can be a little blunt, but it's not contrived. I'm just not very good around new people, that's all."
For the past three weeks, she tells me, she and her musical partner, Will Gregory, have been on a promotional tour of Europe in support of their new album, Supernature. While Gregory fielded questions about his favourite film composer (Ennio Morricone) and whether it's true that, back in 1985, he played with Tears For Fears (he did), Goldfrapp was asked about leather, PVC and her fondness for sexual theatricality. It didn't best please her. "I fucking hate doing interviews," she states. "I mean, what the hell do you people expect from me? And why do they always send me not just male journalists, but really odd ones?"
She recalls that, just a day earlier, she unwittingly reduced an Italian journalist to tears. "He was shaking so badly that he couldn't even talk. It was very creepy. At first I thought he was an alcoholic, or maybe seriously ill, but then I realised he was just nervous. Of me. Why? Did he think I was going to walk over him in stilettos, or something? Some men are just weird, aren't they?"
Leter, a chap from the next table asks if he can borrow her lighter. Goldfrapp chooses not to respond verbally, but simply raises en eyebrow above her Gucci frames in what he hesitantly takes to be her silent, if somewhat annoyed, assent. He lights up, then makes a hasty retreat.
"See?" she says.
SUPERNATURE IS A streamlined amalgamation of its predecessors and looks set, finally, to make a proper star of its leading lady. This is a woman, who, onstage at least, combines the very best elements of Björk, Kylie and 101 Dalmatians' Cruella De Vil.
Formed in 1999, the duo's debut, 2000's Felt Moutain, brought them a cult following and a Mercury nomination, while several of its songs soundtracked TV adverts. Success may have secretly pleased its leading lady - she'd waited a decade for recognition, after all - but it also sat uncomfortably on her slight shoulders. And so 2003's follow-up, Black Cherry, exchanged the lush ambient soundscapes for sonic squelch and filthy disco. She now sounded like a dominatrix who would be very handy with a leather whip.
"That record upset a lot of people," she grins. "Somebody asked me if it meant we'd stopped making enchanting music, and that pissed me right off. Who the fuck were they to tell me how to make music?"
The ensuing world tour coincided with the break-up of a particularly claustrophobic relationship for the singer, and this, she says, allowed her to indulge some fantasies, the majority of which, as her stage gear of leather shorts and fishnet stockings suggested, were aggressively sexual. At the start of each performance, she would gently stroke a theremin, which would wail appreciatively, as theremins do. By its conclusion, she would be thrusting it violently between her legs, the wail now a full-blooded scream.
"Well, Jimi Hendrix played his guitar like it was an extension of his cock, didn't he?" she reasons. "And so I had fun with the theremin. I must say, I did find it very pleasurable."
In private, is she as sexually voracious as her onstage self would suggest?
"Maybe I am, she says, her smile revealing what look curiously like milk teeth. "Maybe I've got a dungeon in my bedroom. And maybe I'm a total pervert."
And is she?
Her smile fades in an instant.
"Fuck off."
ALISON GOLDFRAPP'S existence is, she says, a mistake. Born in London and brought up in the sleepy hamlet of Alton, Hampshire, she is the youngest, by far, of six children, and came so late in her parents' life that her adolescence was spent explaining to friends that, no, the elderly folk were not Granny and Grandad but Mummy and Daddy.
By the time she reached eight years old, her loathing of primary school was turning her rebellious, and so her mother (a nurse) and her father (an advertising executive), deciding she needed some strict discipline, enrolled her into the local convent. Bizarrely, she loved it.
"It was fabulous," she says, "like being in a film. I loved the reverend mother's huge black cross and her stiff, starchy skirt. I thought she looked amazing."
Three years later, her mother withdrew her, fearful, Goldfrapp says now, "that I would become a lesbian". She was sent instead to a regular comprehensive, where she quickly became a tractor-stealing, glue-sniffing delinquent.
"Well, I was bored," she says in mitigation, "and all the action seemed to revolve around the kids who went to borstal."
At 16, she left home for London and spent the next few years living in squats, throwing herself into the party scene. At 19 she escaped her squalor when she landed a stint singing for a theatrical composer in Belgium. On her return to the UK, she attented Middlesex University's School Of Art, and it was here, during a show that involved her yodelling while milking a cow ("I was into experimentation," is her explanation), that she was discovered by early collaborators Orbital. Later, following her degree, she toured the world with Tricky. ("I did learn a lot with him," she says, "but living day-to-day with the bloke was - well, it was difficult. Argumentative, miserable, wretched - you name it. I hated it.")
The next chapter of her life was filled with a despair that she refuses, now, to go into, but when a mutual acquaintance introduced her to budding film composer Will Gregory, her relief was overwhelming. Gregory and Goldfrapp make an unlikely couple. He's a mild-mannered session musician who gets uppity when you ask his age ("I'm allowed to be just 40-something, aren't I?" he says), and whose erudite air must have been at distinct odds with Goldfrapp's previous collaborators. Did she ever consider him a geek?
"Yes!" she laughs. "But that was what was so brilliant about him. I was so fucking bored of all these idiot boys smoking spliffs and obsessing over bpms in their bedrooms. They were narrow-minded wankers, but Will was open to everything."
And so, a functioning musical duo was born, albeit rather later in life than its singer would have chosen. She has never admitted to her age in print before, and doing so now will prompt the biggest scowl of the afternoon.
"OK, look, I'm 37, alright? But do we have to make such a big deal about it?"
A MONTH LATER Alison Goldfrapp is sitting in the gardens of Peter Gabriel's Real World studios in Bath, where the pair are in rehearsals for Supernature's live show. This time, the sunglasses are Dolce&Gabbana.
She has just come back from a two-week holiday in Ibiza - "the north of the island," she points out, "not the fucking 18-30 bit" - but despite the blazing Mediterranean sun, she remains the colour of a ghost.
"I don't like the sun," she says. "I tend to hide from it while lathering myself in factor 50. But if you look carefully at my arms," and here she holds out both for proof, "you can see that I have caught some colour. I'm not happy about it."
She has also come back with an infection of the colon. "I had to give the doctor a shit sample, and he confirmed it. Dodgy squid, apparently. I feel very weak."
But then the poor woman, it transpires, is somewhat prone to illness. While doing a piece of performance art in the window of a transsexual prostitute's room in Antwerp several years ago, she caught amoebic dysentery, "and that was so serious that they sent the council round, who all but shaved my head and put a bell around my neck. It's terribly catching, and so I was virtually quarantined."
On another occasion she contracted scabies. "It's true!" she says, cackling demonically. "I know it sounds all very 1600s, but I did have it. I scratched that parasitic itch all over my body. It was fucking horrible."
The last time we met, Goldfrapp refused to discuss becoming a bona fide pop star because, she grumbled, it made her nervous to even consider it. Given the mix of icy hauteur and unbridled sexuality that informs her onstage persona, this seemed an unlikely response. Surely deification was what she was after? Apparently not.
"It's different when I'm onstage because that's, like, an exaggerated extension of my personality," she says now, "but otherwise I'm not interested in all that fame nonsense. Nobody ever recognises me in the street, you know. Never."
This is hardly surprising because, in person, she looks disarmingly frail and dresses like an impoverished student, her hair in knots. A few days ago, she says, she handed her credit card over in a department store, and the sales assistant informed her that she shared her name with a pop singer. While she was relieved that the assistant failed to put two and two together, she still managed to take umbrage with his chosen description.
"A pop singer?" she scoffs. "Bloody hellfire, is that what people think of me as?"
What should we have called her? A diva?
"Oh, I don't know, anything. But pop singer makes me sound like Rachel Stevens."
She takes a very long drag on her very thin roll-up, and slowly exhales.
"I am not Rachel Stevens," she says. |
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