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| Date |
May/June 2003 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
Amplifier Magazine, Issue 36 |
| Title |
Moving A Mountain |
| Country |
US |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Eliot Wilder / Dara Kushner |
| Pix |
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| Text |
"The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found expression in a particular way," Jeanette Winterson writes in Art Objects. "The true artist is after the problem."
Clearly, the problem is what Alison Goldfrapp, like all true artists, is after. She and collaborator Will Gregory comprise the group that bears her surname, and on the band's debut, 2000's Felt Mountain, as well as the new Black Cherry, the two of them have created a tidy little body of work that addresses such unsolvable puzzles as life, death and everything else in between.
Understandably, Alison is so intensely driven to follow her path that she gets a bit tetchy when she's forced to tear herself away from it long enough to explain just what it is that she does. Is it techno? Techno shmechno. Spiritual, romantic and brooding? Hey, don't bother to pin a label on her. She'll probably heave a grumpy sigh. And don't ask her something dumb like who writes the lyrics or lays down the beats or switches on the keyboards. She'll probably say you're full of bullocks for not looking at the liners. As a matter of fact, she did say just that.
So, when we get down to the matter at hand, discussing Black Cherry and why its sound is less Morricone and more Moroder than Felt Mountain, Alison's responses have a can-we-just-get-on-with-it petulance about them. "Why the change? Because we wanted to," she states emphatically over the phone from New York. "Because I don't want to emulate something that I've already done. I think it's completely pointless. I wanted to change the mood. And it would've been the safe, easy, commercial option to just repeat what we'd done.
"We would've been guaranteed record sales, but it just felt very natural to go somewhere else," she continues. "I wanted to express something new. Also, playing Felt Mountain for about a year, as much as I loved it, I found the immaculateness of it very claustrophobic. I just really wanted to play something loud."
And Black Cherry is exactly that. Clinking and clanking with the caliginous ambiance of a steamy '80s disco, the album's bursts of adrenaline and euphoria are kilometers removed from the Lynchian blue velvet of Felt Mountain. "You know, you make rules and you break them," she says of her new direction. "That's what it's all about. As a creative person, I think it's important to push yourself all the time."
But was there any pressure, say, from a manager or a record company, to repeat the narcotic, after-hours feel of the first album? "No, we don't get that, ever. That's one of the fantastic things about Mute [Goldfrapp's label]. Most record companies wouldn't have let us make Black Cherry. They would've wanted us to do the same thing we'd done before. Our record company and our manager were very supportive of us doing what we felt was the right thing to do."
Doing her thing her way is of paramount importance to Alison, who has embraced various creative pursuits, beginning with three years singing for a contemporary dance company in Belgium, followed by time spent as a Fine Arts major at Middlesex University, where, through friends, she met musicians like Orbital and Add N to (X), whose albums (Snivilisation and Avant Hard, respectively) she would lend her ethereal pipes to. Later, she added vocals to Maxinquaye, Tricky's 1995 debut.
"I'd done many things but I always had the intention of doing my own work, which I did do," she says. "I'm not into compromising, so even though it was tough at times I was prepared to wait because it was important for me to be doing it the way I wanted to."
The wait was over in the late '90s, when Alison met multi-instrumentalist Will Gregory, whose eclectic tastes in electronica, folk and cabaret were similar to her own.
"It was a happy accident that we met," she says. "We are very, very different personalities, so he wasn't someone I would've thought about working with. But we talked a lot about what we wanted to do before we started, mainly because both of us had worked with so many different people that it seemed pointless to embark on something if we weren't coming from the same world. So, we had many meetings and we sent each other music that we really like, everything from Yma Sumac to Prince. And it turned out that we complemented each other very well."
Now that she and Gregory have made two records that don't bow to outside influences or agendas, it must be going just swimmingly, right?
"Fuck, I dunno. You can plan life the best you can but it never pans out the way you imagine it, you know? People expect their lives to be sorted out by the time they are 25, and that's just bullshit."
For Alison Goldfrapp, ever the true artist, the pursuit of the problem continues. |
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