Releases/
 |
New single
MELANCHOLY SKY
8 Jan 2012
|
 |
New album
THE SINGLES
6 Feb 2012 |
..................................
Live dates/
..................................
Latest updates/
Disco Dec 21
Video May 28
Gigo Nov 01
Press Apr 03
Pictures Jul 08
Bootleg May 04
..................................
Our Myspace/
..................................
Official site
Official forum
Official Myspace
.................................. |
|
| Date |
July 2 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
Scotland on Sunday |
| Title |
Kitsch confidential |
| Country |
Scotland, UK |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Craig McClean/Complimentary |
| Pix |
 |
| Text |
ALISON GOLDFRAPP was worried about her Auntie Nona. The singer knew her aged relative was in the crowd at the Reading Hexagon. How would Auntie react to coming face-to-face - or face-to-groin - with her niece in her incarnation as the voice of Goldfrapp, the most startling female pop star in Britain?
Alison is renowned for her provocative stagewear. Some nights it might be the uniform of a dominatrix air hostess; on other occasions she is attired as if she has just stepped from her bed into a fairy-tale land. Going by Goldfrapp's CD sleeves and phantasmagorical website, you can see that Alison has a thing for fairy-tales, and horses, and animal heads on human bodies, and fantasy. If you ask her whether she likes Angela Carter, specifically her novel The Company of Wolves, Alison will reply, with characteristic half-assed disengagement, "Yeah, I do, but I haven't read a great deal of her stuff, actually. But yeah."
Performing live with the band to whom she gives her name, she cuts some fairly risqué moves. She'll stand next to a wind machine, skimpy clobber billowing, hair flowing, frozen under a spotlight like a silent-movie-queen-cum-pornstar. Most dazzling of all, though, is when she thrusts and gyrates over a miniature theremin; the instrument wails and quivers on contact with Alison's inner thighs. "I did it once and I thought, 'I really wish I hadn't done that'," remembers Alison. "When something becomes a routine, it makes me feel sick. I did do it for a while and it was fine, and it was kind of a spontaneous thing, but after a few gigs I thought I should stop doing it. It's just silly now."
By the time of Goldfrapp's sold-out UK tour earlier this year, Alison had managed to wean herself off this rather pervy interlude. The tour was going brilliantly, buoyed by the superlative reviews and sales of the band's third album, Supernature. Then they got to Reading. "The audience was odd, very down, and a group of blokes kept booing, being obnoxious. I think they must have walked in off the street. So I just went, 'F*** off!' And then I thought, 'Oh my God, Auntie Nona's there! I've sworn at Auntie Nona!'" Alison cackles.
"Isn't that mental? I nearly apologised for swearing. Then I thought that would be even worse. God!" She shakes her head. "The whole tour was amazing, apart from that one really duff one in Reading - typical. The one that your ancient auntie comes to, and she always thought you were a failure anyway. Here's proof that you are. Ha ha ha!"
Taking Sunday brunch in Los Angeles, in the restaurant of the dazzlingly cool Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, it has to be said that neither Alison nor Will Gregory, her musical partner, have the appearance of failures. He's an avuncular, 40-something chap who looks like he would be more at home nodding off in a university library, or idly polishing his oboe (as well as conjuring glacial pop-techno from computers, Gregory plays oboe and baritone saxophone). And shorn of her glam gear and imperious stage persona, Alison could pass for a diminutive 30-something secretary with a potty mouth.
But, yes, success has come late to them, which is partly why both are so cagey about revealing their precise ages. Gregory did time in Michael Nyman's band-cum-orchestra, and performed on the soundtrack to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. He scored music for other films, and also performed live with 1990s cult trip-hop act Portishead. Alison sang with Tricky and Orbital and mucked around in various failed indie bands.
But all that seems a long time ago now. Goldfrapp are in the US for a whistlestop series of shows. They've never done a full tour there, usually only performing in cities where their vampy, campy Eurodisco might find a more natural audience. Alison winces at the memory of a "dreadful" show in the Midwest, "in a little tiny pub" in Minneapolis. "We've always had the attitude that whatever happens will happen. We won't slog our guts out touring or trying to crack America the way I think a lot of people do. We always thought if the Americans get it, they get it. But we're not working our arses off trying to make them get it."
Luckily, this refreshing attitude is underpinned - or negated - by the fact that, since the album's release last summer, the blisteringly infectious singles and inventive videos from Supernature ('Ooh La La', 'Number One', 'Ride a White Horse', 'Fly Me Away') have been all over radio and TV, both in Europe and the United States.
The night before we speak, Goldfrapp - live, this means Alison backed by hired musicians and dancers - sold out the 2,500-capacity Wiltern Theatre, in Los Angeles. Alison did the theremin/ crotch thing. Was she carried away by the knowledge that, three albums in, there is a fairly hefty American buzz on Goldfrapp? Or was she perhaps compensating for the fact that, unlike their spectacular UK shows, the band were touring the US with a reduced bevy of dancers (only two), a dimmed light show and an underpowered sound system? "I dunno what happened, sorry," says Alison from behind huge round sunglasses, which cover most of her small, slightly chipmunky face. "Jet-lag, that's what it was."
She speaks in a flat, fatigued voice. Partly this is indeed jet-lag. But partly it's just the way she is. If Alison is hard on herself and her performance tics, she also gives a fair impression of being thoroughly disappointed with the world - and underwhelmed by the plaudits that have come Goldfrapp's way. For example, I mention the occasion Madonna was snapped by a paparazzo clutching a copy of Supernature. Alison barely registers it as important. Can't she acknowledge that if Madge is seen to give Goldfrapp the seal of approval, it can only help their sales and their profile? "Yeah..." she replies drearily.
Moby has been banging on about how good Goldfrapp are, and Simon Le Bon sent them approving e-mails. "Yeah, it's nice," she concedes, as if a plate of Brussels sprouts has been placed in front of her.
And the fans - last night's were a weird and wonderful collection of LA's wackiest - are clearly wild about Goldfrapp. The band obviously exert an intense magnetic pull on people. "Well..." she says, pulling a prunish, sceptical face of the kind that might do Auntie Nona proud.
Alison, it's fair to say, has a bit of a reputation. She's as stern as the thigh-high boots she sometimes sports; as intense as the spirit of Cabaret's Sally Bowles; as cool as the classically minded, artily elaborate techno-disco that Goldfrapp make. In every respect she's the ultimate platinum-blonde diva.
Actually, like the grumpy one from Girls Aloud, her bad press is unfair and exaggerated. She's far from the imperious ice-maiden she is often painted as. Certainly, she doesn't suffer fools gladly and won't mouth soundbites and platitudes. She doesn't like talking about her private life. She has been around the block enough times to not play the popstar game. Yes, it takes her a while to laugh, but when she does it's genuine and done with gusto. Mind you, it does take a few revivifying slugs on her giant berry smoothie and a good hour of conversation to get to that point. And the outsized sunglasses stay firmly on.
But then this aloofness and theatricality are what make Goldfrapp such a magical band to watch on stage. Compared to meat-and-potatoes guitar bands, it makes them appear like a disco-fish out of water. Goldfrapp's look is a throwback to a time when bands dressed outrageously and were proud of it. "It's just come very naturally," shrugs Alison. "I haven't got a problem with bands that just want to wear jeans and T-shirts."
But for her, performance requires dressing up. "I don't even think about it, really, because I can't separate the two," she says.
"When you go to a gig, you do want that," chips in Will. "Because basically it's a theatrical experience, with lighting and drama and scenery and audiences and spotlights. All those things. To deny that seems a bit strange."
ALISON grew up in Hampshire, the youngest child (by some years) in a well-to-do family. She was the classic middle-class rebel, throwing off the shackles of her convent education, leaving school with no qualifications and heading to London. She lived in squats in Brixton and smoked spliffs and partied and messed around in bands.
In her sometimes topsy-turvy speaking style, Alison recalls how, in her early 20s, she was singing backing vocals "for this shitty band". A member of the band happened to live in Belgium, and asked her to be part of an experimental dance troupe there. She ended up spending three years with them touring round the Netherlands and Switzerland. She didn't dance - "God, no!" - but she was the vocal accompaniment. "The guy who was writing the music was interesting because he was doing things like sampling, which, for the time, was fairly unheard-of. He introduced me to things like cutting up the voice, how to play with it and play with sounds. So that was a really formative time, hearing lots of music I'd never heard before."
Alison the aesthete (she would attend art college, as a mature student, on her return to Britain) was also turned on by the look of Europe. "It seemed really sophisticated and glamorous - even the motorways," she laughs. "Signs that were really graphic. Lights that seemed to have some sort of design, not like driving up the bloody M4. I thought, 'Wow, they've really thought about this.' Bridges - they had really great bridges. Trains where someone had thought about the colour scheme, and they had little pastries for breakfast. Really sophisticated."
Did the experience of touring with the troupe give her a taste for performing and the incentive to do something about it? Alison pauses to give this proper thought. "Yeah," she says reluctantly, before adding, "but I saw it as a learning curve. It was just another form of what I wanted to do, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. It was really interesting at first, but it became dull after a while."
She came back to Britain and did an art degree at Middlesex Polytechnic. But there was no simple painting for the restless avant-garde student: her degree-show piece was an installation featuring a cow attached to an amplifier and being milked by a yodelling Alison.
Two years spent touring as a vocalist with Tricky followed. She went to clubs and hung out in Brixton, and fiddled with her own music. Then, in 1999, she received a phone call from a soundtrack composer and multi-instrumentalist who lived in Bristol. It was Will. "I'd heard this track that Alison had been writing - 'Human' - so I phoned up and said, 'Why don't we meet, maybe we could do some writing?' It was all quite formal," he says.
And so a musical partnership was formed. Their songwriting has improved drastically over the course of their three albums, moving from symphonic, post-trip-hop soundscapes into the more pneumatic, often glam-rock-influenced disco swagger of Supernature. It's still clever, daring music, but now it's thumping good fun too.
These days both Will and Alison live in Bath. They wrote and recorded most of Supernature there. The creative process is enjoyable, they say tentatively, but you won't find them dancing round the room, caught up in their own musical brilliance. Alison saves that for the shows. (Will, I suspect, never gets carried away; he doesn't even join her on stage, staying instead at the gig's mixing desk, tinkering and thinking).
"It has its moments," Alison concedes of their long months in the studio, "when you find a new sound or you have a right giggle about something. Then there are other days, when it feels like you're extracting teeth. That's just the way it is."
Alison stares out of the window at Sunday-lunchtime Los Angeles. "It's like some mad jigsaw puzzle," she concludes, impassive and elusive behind her big shades, the maddest and most puzzling piece of the lot. |
|
|
|
|
;)
;)
