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Date January 22
Type Interview
Source Live Night&Day, The Mail on Sunday
Title Synth City
Country UK
Journalist/Photographer / Ross Kirton
Pix         
Text Once, Alison Goldfrapp was a quiet Home Counties convent girl. Now she’s the exotic queen of glam-pop, feted by America and idolised by Madonna. She tells Graham Wray why it’s all thanks to her eclectic collection of keyboards – and some singing nuns…
Can there be any female artist in Britain bigger, cooler, edgier, more deliciously glam than Alison Goldfrapp? When she releases an album, it goes gold within days; her last, Supernature, went to the obligatory number-one slot and was named by pretty much everyone – from Madonna down – as the album of 2005. (No one can say they haven’t heard it – Ooh La La is the techno-disco track behind the ubiquitous Vodafone TV ad).
She’s broken America, topping the Billboard char and about to embark on a sell-out tour there… Simon Le Bon can’t stop writing fan letters and Moby says he reveres her… Her shimmering Marc Bolan look has earned her the soubriquet “most fashionable woman in pop”. How very saddening, then, to hear her talk of the needle habit she has developed.
“I got into it when I was making the album,” she confesses. “I get obsessive about things. And I just found that as well as passing time it also helped the creative process. Now on the tour bus, we all get the needles out and sit round in circles indulging.
“I’m on of those people who like doing things with their hands while thinking about something else, so for me it’s like therapy. I also love the results. When we were on tour with Coldplay, I made a jumpsuit for Chris Martin.”
This, of course, is Alison not on mainlining heroin but on knitting – and demonstrating within minutes of our meeting how, despite her extraordinary success, she is anything but your run-of-the-mill pop star. The more high profile half of Goldfrapp, the electronic pop duo who went from avant-garde to mainstream with a heady mix of crystalline vocals, blonde beauty and glam-sex decadence, Alison is the most refreshingly different celebrity you could care to meet.
To fully appreciate the act that is Goldfrapp, you have to catch her and pop partner Will Gregory’s stage show. It is jaw-dropping visual spectacular that features Alison in furs, lingerie, stilettos and horse’s tail, alongside mirrorballs and dancers twirling nipple tassels in opposite directions.
“I’ve always fantasised about women who can twirl their breasts in opposite directions,” she says, laughing. “I’ve tried, but I can only get one going… But all the visual excess can cause problems. I remember one night my horse’s tail got caught in my stilettos. I fell over rather unglamorously and walked off stage with my tail between my legs – quite literally.”
In truth, I’m relieved to hear her laugh. The day before our meeting, her PR called to warn me that Alison’s shyness is often mistaken for frostiness, and that if she appears to be tetchy, not to assume that she is being deliberately difficult. Then ten minutes before our rendezvous, her manager phones to inform me that Alison has been “working hard” and is feeling “worn out” and “perhaps it would be a good idea not to mention the fact that she’s looking tired”.
But Alison turns out to be charming, with a nice line in self-deprecating humour and the most fantastically filthy laugh this side of Sid James; she even phones the next day to apologise for being so tired. She is also enthusiastic about sharing her passion for keyboards, the instrument that has driven Goldfrapp to the top.
“They’ve always been a part of my life,” she begins. “We had an old organ in our hallway at home. It had bellow pumps and lots of gothic writing on it which I adored. My mum used to complain that I played depressive, moving melodies on it all the time. So what’s changed?” (She lets rip that dirty laugh again.)
“I had a Rolf Harris Stylophone, too. I never mastered it but Will and I still play on one occasionally. He’ll play properly on a keyboard whereas I just randomly press keys to play notes.”
She’s doing her self a huge disservice, of course. Both Alison and Will’s distinctive use of synthesizers defines their sound; no one knows more about the range of electronic keyboards out there.
“We both play keyboards, every kind of imaginable, from little Casios to stuff you’ve never heard of. For example, on stage I play a theremin, an instrument that changes it sounds according to how near you are to it. You wave your arms around the aerial and this ethereal sound occurs. It’s the first synthesizer ever made [it was invented in 1919]. But then most of the stuff we use tends to be pre-digital retro kit.
“One of our favourites is a Polyvox. It’s Russian and was developed in the Eighties at military radio factories because they were the only ones that had access to the electronic components. It has a fantastically distinctive sound, much more exciting than playing a regular synth where all the rough edges have been smoothed away.”
Goldfrapp’s passion for keyboards has clearly taken them a long way from that classic band stalwart, the Roland sampler/synthesiser; but that doesn’t mean her favourites are out of reach to the beginner. “Go for the Wasp [see previous page]. It’s very underrated,” she says. “It’s small, only £300 and it’s got its own built-in-speaker. You can play with it on the bus on the way to work.
“With all this gear we can improvise and encourage each other. If one of us runs out of ideas the other jumps up and has a go. We usually end up renting a cottage, stick a few synths in and get settled for a long winter. We’ve blown a few fuses when we’ve got a bit excited and a gin and tonic has gone flying into the keyboard. Luckily, there’s usually someone on hand with a screwdriver to get us going again.”
Alison can thank her opera-loving bohemian parents for that first old organ. She was raised in a quiet Hampshire village and sent to convent school at the age of eight. “I loved those nuns,” she says. “I saw them as really strong. I loved saying 12 Hail Marys in the morning and wearing the striped uniform. I was always a bit of a drama queen so convent school fitted my romantic little fantasy world. I thought I was in The Sound of Music.”
It was there she first discovered her talent for music. “I remember the moment I realised I could sing,” she says. “It was in a music lesson and I hit this really high note. The top of my head was actually buzzing and I thought, “That’s an amazing feeling. I’m having such a good time.” It felt particularly good as I was so rubbish at everything else. The teacher was really encouraging and I loved her for that.”
At 12, Alison left the convent for being what she describes as “academically retarded”. In fact, she is dyslexic. Forced to slum it at the local comprehensive, she became something of a teenage rebel.
“I got into make-up and inhaling Tippex,” she says. “Then I ended up doing community service – for being bad generally.” Is it also true she got into stealing cars? “It was a tractor actually. It was the boys I hung out with. They always did things like that.”
She also ate shirt buttons to make herself sick, raced scrambler bikes with the local bad lads, tattooed her finger and gave her parents a hard time.
“I was a nasty bit of work, awful to them,” says Alison. “I felt terrible about it for years afterwards. Puberty is miserable but it’s worse in the countryside.”
Like her fan Madonna, Alison’s overnight success was the culmination of years of hard graft and disappointment. She left school at 16 and headed to London where she lived in squats and struggled to hold down a series of soul-destroying jobs.
“The worst was screwing the tops on shampoo bottles on a production line,” she says. “I kept grabbing them and getting covered in gunk. Everyone around me looked like they’d had a lobotomy. I lasted a day.”
Disillusioned, she travelled around Europe before taking a place at art college. Her fine art degree show at Middlesex University allowed her to find a new form of exoticism. One piece of performance art involved her spending three days in a bed.
“It was a stupid performance called Love Sick,” she says, clearly embarrassed. “I was in this sort of cubicle in bed on a drip and people came and visited me. I appeared to get worse and worse because I was supposed to be getting more and more lovesick. Some people did find it offensive but then performance art is supposed to be dodgy.”
Her graduation piece hinted at the musical innovation to come – 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 the milk going into the bucket really loudly,” she says.
After college she became a vocalist for dance music icons Orbital and Tricky until, through a mutual friend, she met her musical partner Will. Together they created the electronic glam concept that is Goldfrapp. And the rest, as they say, is hysteria.
“Because I’ve been skint and struggling for such a long time, I constantly think, “ What am I going to do when this all goes wrong?” says Alison. “I can’t do anything else so I’ll probably have to work part-time in my local deli.
I’ve always wanted to do what I’m doing, so it’s really precious to me. Even when I was young I had fantasises about being on stage and singing in front of vast audiences. I’ve always been a dreamer but funnily enough, I was convinced that this particular dream was always going to happen.”
The downside of success is inevitably that some illusions are shattered. “They say you should never meet your idols and it’s true – when I appeared on Top Of The Pops 2, I got to meet my childhood idol David Cassidy. The first thing that shocked me was that he was so short. He had dyed eyebrows and hair that made him look very sinister. You could see that he’d been doing it for ever and just hated singing an autograph for this old bird. He barely looked at me when he signed it.”
The irony is, now it’s this “old bird” – mid-thirties is as close as she gets to admitting her age – who is a pinup for thousands of men. When questioned on her love life she replies, “I am taken, that much I will tell you.” She does, however, admit to regularly having crushes on people. “It happens at least once a month (the air reverberates with that dirty laugh again). I get crushes on random people in the street or in shops. They don’t last long – a couple of weeks.”
Trawl the internet and you’ll come across a glut of Goldfrapp fan sites, where those crushes are repaid – in spades. “I try not to delve too deeply into it but I have seen some mucky stuff on the message boards,” she says. “But as long as they’re having fun… I don’t mind the pervy ones that much – it’s the wordy, intense ones I don’t like.”
It was the very afternoon we met that Madonna claimed that Supernature was her favourite of 2006. “I take that as a real compliment,” says Alison, smiling behind her huge glasses. It’s intriguing then to see how swift she is to defend the ageing disco diva after Madonna was referred to as “Oldfrapp”.
“It’s nasty and unfair,” she says. “It’s great to see a woman of her age still performing and producing such fantastic work.” Judging from her coyness about her own age and her determination to keep her own show rolling, that may be Alison’s most heartfelt comment.

ALISON’S WASP KEYBOARD
EDP WASP
£250-£300 (secondhand on eBay.co.uk, or vemia.co.uk)
Released in 1978 by now-defunct British synth manufactuer Electronic Dream Plant, the Wasp was named after its distinctive buzzing basslines. A small but devoted cult following still rave about it. Unlike modern synths, which have preset sounds, the Wasp uses various effect knobs to distort and change its sound. Goldfrapp employ the Wasp for its chintzy lead riffs and lo-fi percussion.
Verdict A legendary retro synth with a bold sound that’s matched only by its brash black-and-yellow case. Only 3,000 were built, so finding a Wasp – especially one that works, because they were made from flimsy plastic – is tricky.

 
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