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|
| Date |
December 2003 |
| Type |
Mag |
| Source |
NoHo>LA,issue 8 |
| Title |
Alison Goldfrapp |
| Country |
US |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Megan Gaynes, Stephi Ann/ Polly Borland |
| Pix |
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| Text |
he Canadian born/English transplant Allson Goldfrapp is known for both the beauty of her voice, as much as her physical appearance. But no mere pop tart is this one, as this art student started off singing on Albums for former Massive Attack member Tricky, as well as electronic acts Orbital and Add N To X, before joining forces with Will Gregory (previous credits of his include the Cure,
Portishead, Peter Gabriel, John Parish and Spiritualized) to form the group Goldfrapp (also her surname). Gregory helped bring her compositions to life. The first batch appearing on the phenomenally cinematic album Felt Mountain, and its accompanying single-EP for the bliss-on- tap, "Utopia," which also contained an electronic cover of Olivia Newton John's "Physical," and Calexico's version of Goldfrapp's "Human," sung en espanol by John Contretas. So now comes Black Cherry, Gotdfrapp's second album, a far darker take on the ethereal sound of Felt Mountain. Now with a recently finished US tour, Goldfrapp has remixed Marilyn Manson's latest single, "This Is The New Shit." Manson himself has described their version of the song as, "...if Gary Glitter and Marlene Dietrich turned the Nurnberg rallies Into a rave. By far the most creative remix that anyone has done for me." Recently, Stephi Ann had a chat with Allson Goldfrapp on the rooftop of Le Parc Suites in West Hollywood, where she had just returned from a shopping spree at Trashy Lingerie for some... pasties.
Megan Gaynes
Stephi Ann: After touring for Felt Mountain, it seemed like there was always this grim reaction from you when asked about the next album. It was almost as If It was this indefinite thing that was going to take years and years, and you weren't even sure if you wanted to go through it again.
Atoon Goldfrapp: I think it always feels that way since Will and I are not a band in the traditional sense, so it's not like we just sit around in bars strumming our guitars. Quite often the only time we write together is when we go into the studio, and that's obviously not that often 'cause you're out touring and promoting and things like that. So when we do get together, we don't do any sort of pre-production. Like,we don't usually write a song and then go and record it, we write as we record. So there's always that situation where
we have nothing. Like, we'll have a concept of what to do, or an aesthetic, but we don't have eight songs that we then record and produce simultaneously. There's always that
weird, scary thiing when you think, "Oh my god, this is gonna take a long time...", and we do take quite a long time. I think it's because we really are perfectionists, and there's just two of us, so it's quite a long process, I suppose. The new album didn't take a long time by most people's standards. I mean, Beth Gibbons of Portishead took about five years to come out with her second album. So in the grand scheme of things, for people who write, produce and mix everything themselves, it's not long at all. I think when you do your first album, in some sense you've been writing for years and years and you have all these songs and
ideas you've accumulated. And then those songs are the first album, and then you've got a year to get the next album out, and you still have touring! So it feels quicker in the sense that you don't really have time to sit and brood and think about things. I think that's better in a way for me, 'cause we tend to sort of do that anyway. In a lot of ways this album really seemed a lot more spontaneous, which I think we were quite excited by, and we tried to take that and run instead of seeing it as a disadvantage. There's a lot more of just me and Will playing. On the first album we got a lot more guest musicians, and this time we were just so pleased to get back in the studio and desperate to write that it was actually quite liberating. It was just the two of us working together this time, and not worrying about getting more people involved, and we had a lot of fun doing that.
Stephi: During the last tour you started doing your cover of "Physical" by Olivia Newton John. Is that when you realized you liked playing more dance-oriented music?
Alison:Yeah, we've always been really into that. I think everybody takes little bits from things, and sometimes it's the most un-obvlous that inspire you. I mean, disco and all those old soul records have always been something that's really inspired us, but it was very much in the strings. In the '70s and "60s the old soul and funk and disco always had those big sweeping string arrangements, and that was something that we all really got into. You know, you say disco to someone and they immediately think of beats, they don't think string arrangements. So I think for us it was always there, we were just taking different elements for inspiration of our sound.
Stephi: What were you doing before you began pursuing music professionally?
Alison: I went to art school. But before I went to art school, I sang with a dance company in Belgium for a few years. That was a real experience for me, that's where I really opened my eyes to a lot of music and using my voice in lots of different ways. I was working with someone who was really into sampling and things like that, so that was a real
learning experience. that was the first time I learned you could do all these mad things with vour voice, I started bumming around in bands, but then I got bored with that... and I'd always wanted to go to art school. So I went and I started out doing painting and later realized I was really crappy at it, so I thought I should start using the music things I was
doing. That's how I worked at art school: I started doing performance art, a visual thing while using sound and my voice, and I'd do little shows making sound pieces.
Stephi: What inspired the artwork for Black Cherry ?
Alison: You know, those are actually hybrid wolves. I love animals and I've always been interested in the way that humans represent animals in art and literature since
the beginning of time. Basically, they used animals to symbolize all kinds of things and used them for metaphors as status. So, that's partly what inspired the picture for the middle of the album, I wanted it to look a bit like an old painting. The lady reclined on the bed with
her dogs, and there's something quite sexual about that as well, in sort of an ambiguous kind of way. I like things that work on lots of different layers. I mean, we used images of stags and deers on the first album, and it's very similar to the wolf. I think humans see them as symbols of freedom and wildness and mystery, it's a thing that humans secretly long for - to be wild and tree - so they have metaphors for those sorts of things. |
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