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8 Jan 2012
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6 Feb 2012 |
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|
| Date |
March 2 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
TimeOut New York (#544) |
| Title |
All that glitters |
| Country |
usa |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Smith Galtney/ Ross Kirton |
| Pix |
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| Text |
The erotically charged duo Goldfrapp aims to pack the dance floor with its sparkling third album, Supernature
"We're driven by concepts like human versus nature and human versus
machine."The audience at Goldfrapp's December show at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square seemed like your average mix of downtown celebs and scene magnets. Heatherette designer Richie Rich held court by the bar. Sammy Jo, the DJ for the Scissor Sisters, made the rounds. There were boys, boys and more boys. Gay boys movin'. Gay boys groovin'. Gays boys bashing gay boys.[Cue sound of record scratching.] Security! Three burly, mutton-chopped homos are about to beat the crap out of a wispy, baby-faced homo because he's--uh--dancing too much?
Triggering fervid dancing and freakish behavior is the Goldfrapp way. Led by icy-suave frontwoman Alison Goldfrapp and the Wizard of Oz-like Will Gregory, who stays behind the mixing board at concerts and doesn't appear in videos, the duo may seem like your typical European glam-disco pop group. (Dance beats + hyperstylish chanteuse = niche fan base and catnip for gay men.) But a closer look reveals that this hit machine is powered by some pretty bizarre ideas. Their third album, Supernature, takes its name from two cultural curios from the '70s: a popular paperback by author Lyall Watson about unexplained phenomena, and a disco hit by French producer Cerrone about a lab experiment gone terrifyingly wrong.
"It sums up a lot of the things that inspire us," Alison says the morning after the show. "We're driven by the idea of what nature is
exactly, and concepts like human versus nature and human versus machine."
Such profound notions have helped the pair achieve platinum-selling
status in England, where the locals seem to appreciate it when their pop idols traffic in unsettling surrealism. The video for "Ride a White Horse," for example, finds Lady Goldfrapp vamping in front of the standard all-white studio backdrop you've seen in a thousand other videos--only this one's strewn with garbage, and she's feasting on a slice of pizza stubbed with cigarette butts. The white-horse metaphor could be clubland's oldest cliché, but when Goldfrapp sings it, she brings to mind activities far more subversive than snorting coke.
Sitting side by side on a love seat in the Hotel on Rivington, Goldfrapp and Gregory look like quite the happy--though completely
platonic--couple. (The pair are secretive when it comes to their private lives; both live in Bath, England, and neither will reveal a precise age, though Goldfrapp has admitted to being in her thirties, and Gregory to being in his forties.) In reading glasses and knit sweater, Gregory might as well be lazing in the faculty lounge of a liberal-arts college. Bundled up in a wool-lined parka and scarf and hiding behind a pair of huge Jackie O. shades, Goldfrapp huddles over a cup of tea like it's a campfire in the Arctic.
She perks up when asked about the origin of her pixieish yet operatic voice. "My dad used to play me classical music," she remembers, mentioning how Carl Orff's Carmina Burana provided the eureka! moment at the age of eight. "It was the first time I understood that it was humans making these sounds. It was just like, 'BWAAAAAAAAAH!' " Gregory laughs. She goes on: "Like being catapulted into the stratosphere by these sounds. Sort of dying and going to heaven and everything. I thought, Well, fuck, if I could do that..."
As a major in fine art at Middlesex University, Goldfrapp often mixed music and performance into her installation pieces. In 1995 she sang on her friend Tricky's moody outing Maxinquaye, and eventually collaborated with the electro likes of Orbital and Add N to X. A friend introduced her to Gregory, who was then just an anonymous producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist toiling near Bristol. In 2000 they released Felt Mountain--a lush, atmospheric debut that was impossible to review without using the word cinematic (fittingly, Goldfrapp went on to score the sultry 2004 feature My Summer of Love). The album was widely praised, but all those down-tempo tunes became tiresome on tour. "We played a festival, right after Queens of the Stone Age," Gregory recalls, "and I just felt so...unprepared." Goldfrapp chimes in, "The album had only nine songs--we knew there was more to us than that."
Giving the finger to those who pegged them as a Portishead-come-lately, Gregory spiked the melodies with glam-rock beats and Goldfrapp cranked her divadom to 11. The result was 2003's Black Cherry--a hugely successful and very radical departure. DJ-producer Marco Haas, a.k.a. T. Raumschmiere, was called in to remix "Train," one of the album's standout singles. "That shuffling, T. Rex-style beat was so appealing," Haas says. "My girlfriend wanted to listen to it. I wanted to listen to it. Everyone wanted to listen to it."
Their tightest work yet, Supernature streamlines the duo's split
personality more effectively. The album's kickoff single, "Ooh La La," is the kind of electro-rock/dance-pop that spells fab-U-lous.
Pre-programmed to cause massive bouts of heel stomping, hip thrusting, fist pumping and lip pursing, the song "beats you into submission with a really big chorus," says Gregory, stating the Goldfrapp agenda in ten words or less. Indeed, the crowd at the Nokia behaved like obe-dient slaves, chanting, "I need a la-la-la-la-la-la, I need a ooh-la-la-la-la," as if in some rally scene from Pink Floyd: The Wall. No wonder those burly gay dudes got so carried away. |
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