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Date October 18 2003
Type Mag
Source The Guide, The Guardian
Title Red alert : Alison Goldfrapp earns her stripes
Country UK
Journalist/Photographer / Polly Borland
Pix         
Text GOING WITH THE SWING
With their latest album, Black Cherry, Goldfrapp have taken on a darker, more sensual flavour. Vistoria DeSilverio gets all the juice from their enigmatic singer


It's just after 10am on a saturday in New York, a bit late for a rendezvous with the notoriously difficult Alison Goldfrapp. The concierge at the desk of her hotel relays her message that she went across the street to a diner. She needed a coffee. The sun is pouring directly into the eatery, making the discovery of an "elfin hurricane" or a "sexed-up cabaret goddess", as she has been described, more difficult than imagined.
With only visual references from music videos and photoshoots to go by, we feebly scan the drowsy crowd for a reasonable facsimile of one of her many theatrical personas: a vixen pourred into thigh-high black patent leather boots and teased curls with glossy red lips, gyrating on the floor surrounded by girls with their tits out; a pouty schoolgirl reclining on a chaise with a dog whose jaws is wrapped around her knee, or a Marlene Dietrich figure in air force uniform and fishnets, elevating the pulses of dancing men with their arms outstreched towards her.
Suddenly we spot a pair of oversized gold Chanel sunglasses wrapped around a small head. Surely only a rock star would try to pull these off in an Upper West Side diner on a Saturday morning. As we approach, we suddenly become unsure once more. there's a striped scarf covering her head and she's got chipped black nail polish and, on her small feet, trainers. She is completely without make-up. Not the polished vision of artful perfection we had seen on TV.
"I'm exhausted and need to wake up," she greets us wearily. Taking a tug at her Garbo-esque headdress, she seems uncomfortable but polite. The 30-something singer of pop-electro duo Goldfrapp has earned a scary reputation for being terse and deeply unimpressed with the press. There was even a story of her punching out a photographer. Rumour had it she was tossed out of convent school and turned into a street urching who sniffed glue.
"i suppose I have a reputation for being quite opinionated," she says with a laugh that finally breaks the ice. "I didn't go to drama school and I don't smile at the right places," she adds with what feels like direct eye contact, though the sun on her tinted lenses is obscuring the proof.
In town to support the triumphant Black Cherry, her second album with bandmate Will Gregory, Alison Goldfrapp does not relish the dissection that goes along with the publicity machine. "Talking about the music seems to take some bit of it away," she explains, reaching for the syrup.
Alison Goldfrapp grew up in Alton, Hampshire. Her parents sent her to a convent school when she was eight and instead of rebelling against the stric regime, she revelled in its pageantry. "Oh, I thought i was in a film - The Sound Of Music !" she remembers fondly, her lips betraying a pretty smile. "Everything was such a grand performance, so fantastically elaborate. I loved the cool dark corridors with floors that had bits of glass in them so they sparkled, saying 12 Hail Marys in the morning, being escorted to the gardens to play tennis on dusky summer evenings, wearing striped uniforms, nuns walking in headdresses and giant crucifixes around their necks. It was surprisingly multi-racial too, with Indian women and Spanish women. I thought that was quite glamorous. It was the first time I had got praise for singing. Singing - like everything else there - was taken very seriously and done with enormous passion. I was devastated when I had to leave."
Ah, yes, she must have done something deliciously rebellious. "No, it wasnt' like that ! " she protests. "i was deemed academically retarded ! I was too thick. I didn't pass the exams, so when I was 12, after four years of bliss, I came down to earth, as my parents put me into a state school, where no one cared about me at all."
Ahetr four miserable years, she abandoned school and her parents, who refused to hear of her singing ambitions, and high-tailed it to London. There, she worked crap job and lived in squats. And developed a taste for car theft and glue-sniffing. How does one go from the convent to glue ? "You just do, don't you ?' she asks, as if I wonedered why one goes to work. "Your brain just clicks into another gear. But you know, none of that is relevant now and I'd rather you leave that out".
Yet the inclusion of Goldfrapp's mixed-up adolescence and fiercely independent rebellions are essential in understanding her as a complex, adult pop star. "I have this reputation... but I think people are warming to me," she says with a sly smile.
Critics have, in fact, been exceptionnaly warm (and with this new sexy album, hot and bothered) to Goldfrapp and the music she has made with Gregory, a former cinematic composer. The duo's gorgeous debut, Felt Mountain, was released to resounding international acclaim. Goldfrapp's ethereal whispers and dramatic caterwauling was compared to Kate Bush and Beth Gibbons. The disc was declared a classic and sold over 600,000 copies. One2one picked up Lovely Head for its adverts and Utopia landed on 97,8% of all chill out anthologies released in the next two years.
moby, perhaps the band's most ardent fan, chose the three-year old Utopia to be a part of a brand new animated laser show playing at Neww York's Hayden Planetarium Space Theater. 'The song is just remarkable," he enthuses. "It's sexy and ambiguous and atmospheric. Alison and Will write and perform brilliant songs that are experimental but still exist within a populist framework. Goldfrapp are without question my favourite act in the whole, wide wolrd."
After a brief stint at art school, Goldfrapp sang with a performance art/dance company in Antwerp, lent vocals to an Orbital track, and collaborated with Tricky on 1995's Maxinquaye. After touring with him for two years and guesting on a number of dance records, Goldfrapp decided she needed a long-term partner and her own project. In 1999, an auspicious meeting with Will Gregory ended her search. They instantly traded tapes full of ideas and started working on Felt Mountain. Three years would pass before they released Black Cherry, a grand departure from the classy baroque and smoky, cinematic trip-hop on which they built their name. The new songs act out all of the repressed passion of the pristine Felt Mountain imagination. Black Cheery is the freedom-seeking, corrupted child, full of raunchy tales of sexual exploration and heartbreaking come-downs. Pain is a romantic notion on Felt Mountain; on Black Cherry, it is a visceral lament.
"I had just ended a relationship," says Goldfrapp awkwardly, fidgeting with her spoon. "It was horrible and hard and I was ready to push muself forward. This record is a lot about that. And I had spent some time in Los Angeles, in between, and having quite a bit of fun at the time writing this record."
Train, with its driving basslines and the opening lyric "Plastic brain scar I want laser", is the song most inspired by her "strange experiences" in Hollywood. "That line is about a person who had something done to her brain and it all went horribly wrong!" she giggles. "I'm fascinated by this idea of being able to indulge whatever fantasy you have. If you want to look like the Mona Lisa you can do that. It's kind of disgusting but you want it anyway...
"In that song there'sz also something about a 'wolf lady sucking my brain' and a 'nasal douche'. Apparently if you do a lot of coke, you can give yourself one. It cleanses the nasal passages. I think you can buy them on the internet. Well, I mean, coke is everywhere so it makes sense and they do like to clean out all of their orifices there."
Finally easing in, it is of course time togo. Her very tall and protective manager is looming. She waves him away and speaks excitedly about unleashing her songs onto live audiances on their largest UK tour yet, starting this week. "Our music doesn't makes sense until you see it performed live," she explains. (Some band members wear giant deer heads with antlers on stage.) "Another benefit is that people get to see that I can really sing - and that I'm not miming ! At a gig in Bristol on our last tour, someone apparently walked out on us yelling, 'They're miming!' and someone turned to her and said, 'No, they are not They are just fucking good"
"Yeah, I thought that was quite funny," she says now, with a well deserved and satisfied glow. And not at all a scary one.

 
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