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| Date |
April 11 |
| Type |
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| Source |
Times Online |
| Title |
Goldfrapp's new album Seventh Tree is right on cue, so what is it that worries them? |
| Country |
England |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Pete Paphides/ Serge Leblon |
| Pix |
 |
| Text |
Alison Goldfrapp, international woman of mystery, lets slip a few clues to Pete Paphides
Just because Goldfrapp’s new single is a sunny pop tune that goes by the name of Happiness, it doesn’t mean that Alison Goldfrapp holds any insight into achieving such a state. Three months ago, she says, she was worried that – what with the Mellotrons, pastoral strings and acoustic guitars – the band’s new album Seventh Tree would “bamboozle” people expecting the glamtastic sado-pop of their previous two albums. With the world now in broad agreement that Seventh Tree was the right album for them to make at this point, you would think that they might allow themselves to enjoy this moment. In fact, old worries have merely been replaced with new ones.
“But what will people do when we play it at festivals?” the singer frets. “We’ll be delicately playing and suddenly there’ll be this booming coming from another tent. And people will be twiddling their thumbs because they want to party.”
You suspect that in Alison Goldfrapp’s world the good things are all too transient and everything else amounts to so much tedious inconvenience. Even without the formidable onstage warpaint, there’s something about her in person, which, from the off, means that you approach her with the caution you might reserve for John Lydon or Lou Reed. Over time though, it turns out that she’s more yielding than the former, less damaged than the latter and funnier than both.
Also here is Will Gregory, aka the Other One In Goldfrapp – posh, “if you can call growing up in Battersea posh” – and, after years spent in Tears For Fears’ touring band, well practised at being a phlegmatic presence around testy musicians. “We don’t mean to be pessimistic,” he smiles, “but we didn’t get to this point by expecting things to go well – not least at a festival.” He turns to Alison. “Do you remember Poland, on the Supernature tour?”
Remember Poland? Whatever happened in Poland two years ago, Alison Goldfrapp’s ire is raw as a newly plucked goose. “We drove forever to get to this dusty field with about ten people in it,” she says. “We started our, y’know, pretty flashy, highly theatrical show and these people stared at us like: ‘Who the f*** are you’? Then straight after us someone out of Public Enemy came on – Chuck D? Perhaps – and spent his whole set going ‘Whooa!’ at the crowd. And they loved it Then we drove back across Europe for another however many hours. Honestly, sometimes the pointlessness overwhelms you.”
Across the table at this private club in Soho, Gregory – a few years her senior – can barely contain his glee at Goldfrapp’s indignation. In the past, some European journalists have sought to cast him as a shady Svengali figure. Among others, there is the tendency to barely acknowledge Gregory’s existence beside the woman whose surname doubles up as the band name. Given that he is palpably neither, both depictions irk Goldfrapp – although Gregory struggles to muster a committed opinion on any of it.
What with her aversion to “almost every note” of music played in the 1980s, Goldfrapp says she probably wouldn’t have seen Gregory appearing on Tears For Fears hits such as I Believe. However, during our conversation, they do stumble upon a strange intersection between her family life in deepest Hampshire and his own, 50 miles away. “My mum was quite a girl in her day,” says Gregory. “She was always on demos and protesting against something or other. She was at Greenham Common and apparently she got off because she made the judge laugh.”
Goldfrapp’s ears prick up. “Wow, my Mum went to Greenham as well. She was more on the Christian side of it. Not as bohemian as yours.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her mother’s proclivities, fear of the bomb played a large part in Goldfrapp’s childhood. “In fact,” she says, warming to her theme, “there was the nuclear bomb and rabies. And rabies was on every weird drama programme on TV.”
In the end, her obsession with rabies intensified to the point where her family sought medical help. “I refused to go out of the house because I thought: ‘I’m going to get bitten, get rabies and die in a very horrible manner.’ I kept seeing a person in a cot frothing at the mouth, having injections in the stomach.”
To her parents’ absolute surprise, the problem was diagnosed as a hormonal one. “He told them that I was about to start my periods and lo and behold, I did. Apparently, it’s quite a normal thing for children of that age. It’s all to do with puberty.”
By the end of the 1980s, Goldfrapp was coming around to the notion that perhaps she had been right to not leave the house. The transition from a convent school prepubescence to adolescence at a secondary school “so rough it ended up on television” left its mark. The year she arrived, someone had held the RE teacher at gunpoint.
“Before I started there,” she says, “I would walk past the fence in my uniform. You would have people spitting at you through the fence. And then I had to go to school there. So I was the posh girl who needed a good beating.” She laughs briefly. “It was probably good for me in the long run, you know?”
She’s famously guarded about revealing her real age, but the rabies story (and, it should be added, the births register in the Family Records Centre shows an “Alison Goldfrap” born in 1966) seem to interlock with a particular moment in time. Perhaps her reluctance to reveal her age stems from the fact that she packed so much into her life before Goldfrapp the band’s debut, the lush, cinematic splendour of Felt Mountain (2000): “prancing about” with a dance company in Antwerp, singing in a “dodgy band” whose name she doesn’t want to reveal; singing on records by Orbital and Tricky. Add to that three years studying fine art at Middlesex University – a YouTube clip of a crop-haired Goldfrapp apparently dates from 1988.
By the time she met Gregory in 1999, pop stardom – the proper, iconic sort that entails style magazine covers and “inspiring” Madonna to adopt similar costume ideas – must have seemed all but unreachable. You can see, then, why she takes such exception to people who miscast his role in Goldfrapp. She says that until she met the classically trained Gregory she had never felt comfortable singing in front of anyone. The paternal sense of safety he exudes – indeed, last year he became a father to a baby boy – must be connected to the ease with which Goldfrapp is able to leave her comfort zone. It might also be worth noting that Goldfrapp’s late father was a middle-class gentleman lover of classical music.
“Believe it or not,” she says, “I feel self-conscious about singing.” She turns to Gregory. “And you’re quite patient at dealing with the musicians, aren’t you? You’re very good at that, and I’m very crap.”
“It’s true,” says Gregory, “Do you remember the last time,when we decided we’d have a [secret] sign if it was going really badly? When you left the room, got in your car and drove home, I thought that was quite a good sign. Quite conclusive.”
“Still, I like to think I’m getting better,” she says hopefully. No sooner do the words leave her mouth, though, than she remembers an earlier skirmish with a hapless shop assistant. “I went to a shop that sold furniture. And the bloke said the table I was looking at was ash. I asked him: ‘Is it solid wood or veneer?’ He didn’t know. I said: ‘Do you think you should be selling furniture if you don’t know what veneer is?’”
“You see,” says Gregory, sounding more reasonable than ever, “It’s awful, really – because I just end up thinking, ‘Well it must be a bit boring working in a shop. They’re probably writers or something, and it’s the last thing they want to do, but they need the money. That’s the thing about Alison and me. Together, we make quite a nice, well-rounded person.” Happiness is released on Monday by Mute. |
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