ALISON GOLDFRAPP may have ditched the disco dominatrix persona for a more wholesome sort of look these days, but as she sits in her Ray Bans in the darkened dining room of a Soho members' club, it's obvious that every single inch of her tiny frame is pure pop star.
Her creative foil, Will Gregory, is sitting opposite, also sporting a pair of impenetrable shades in the mid-afternoon gloom but, it has to be said, he looks more like a slightly groovy lab technician than a musician. Her reputation for being a trick
y and sometimes truculent interviewee precedes her, yet Gregory is so laid-back and unfailingly polite that it makes you wonder how their relationship actually works.
"I think we're the wrong people to tell you how things work between us," he says. "If you think about what making an album entails, it's the two of us in a room together – eight hours a day, possibly for a year – so we tend not to see each other outside of work. I think we have a nice time, but we have our ups and downs. It's a working partnership that's all based around the music."
"I don't like talking about this or even thinking about it, actually," Goldfrapp cuts in. "It just is what it is. If you've spent a day in the studio, you want to go home and try and feel normal, so you really don't need to hang out too much after that, because you've hung out all day. We just turn up in the studio and talk about what we want to do musically, and that's all we need to know."
After the Dystopian stomp of the multi-millio-selling Supernature album, they retreated to a 1960s bungalow in the Bath countryside to record the follow-up, Seventh Tree – a mellifluous, mellow mix of English psychedelia and pastoral pop. But, despite their huge success, having toured the Supernature album all over the world for over a year, Alison Goldfrapp was feeling so trapped within the prism of her uber-sexual persona that she decided to have a complete rethink about the image she had created and the music they wanted to make together, whether that meant losing her place in pop's premier league or not.
"Because most of Supernature was pretty banging and in your face, we really wanted to strip everything back and get down to the bare necessities," she explains. "It was perfect timing for how I was feeling, because the relationship I was in was a total disaster and I'd been through a really shit time, and I had invented this highly sexual image for myself. Eventually I decided to change because I felt so pigeonholed within that persona. It's too much maintenance, and I injured my back, so I couldn't wear heels and I felt uncomfortable with the whole thing. I just got really f****** bored of it. I think I was quite naïve, because I didn't think people would take it all so bloody seriously."
So people actually thought she'd be doing the housework in her high-heels? "People did seem really disappointed that I was actually quite shy and I wasn't wielding a whip or something," she says with a chuckle and a casual flick of her cloud of corkscrew curls.
"I'm constantly asked whether I'm the same person off stage as I am on stage, which I think is really ridiculous. Of course, there's always a part of you that is that person, but you're singing on stage, which is a whole other language… a different world. When you go home and you're feeding your cat, you're not living out some kind of 'moment.' I don't even look at magazines at all anymore because they're just depressing, and I think there's a lot of pressure on women to live up to all that. But I think women put it on women as well, which is quite strange."
Goldfrapp's glamorous image and infectious music captured the mainstream and caught the razor-sharp eyes and ears of Madonna, the ultimate pop chameleon, who like David Bowie constantly manages to bring leftfield ideas into the spotlight: "It was very annoying, especially when some of the visual and musical elements seemed to get magnified," Gregory offers, "but on the other hand, it's a compliment, because I suppose it means we're actually on the radar now."
"I think it's all fine, but I suppose the only thing that's really been bugging me lately is that I get asked about her all the time. I know it sounds slightly childish, but I just think – f****** hell…I don't even like her music. I kind of resent the fact that I'm supposed to say I love her because she paid us a compliment and she really likes us. And I wish she'd stop showing me her muff all the time in those bloody videos," Goldfrapp grins, "because I'm getting really bored of that."
In the current climate, where tastes are more fickle than ever before and major labels expect their artists to find a formula and stick to it once they've had some commercial success, a few people in the Goldfrapp camp must have been more than a little concerned when they heard Seventh Tree for the first time, not least Alison Goldfrapp herself.
"I just found that level of stardom shallow and boring. I just thought – as an artist – this is not what I want to be doing anymore, and, ultimately, it wasn't really what was going on in my heart. During our last tour, I'd be in make-up and having my hair done for ages, or we'd be making videos or doing interviews, and I think it does start to feel like it's got nothing to do with the music.
"But recently, I've been feeling incredibly lucky that we're still doing this and that people are still interested," she adds. "Because Supernature was so commercially successful and then we just decided to go completely in the opposite direction with this new album, I suppose I thought people were not gonna be interested and they'd just say: 'What the f*** are they doing now? Your time's up.'"
"I think it's fairly unusual for something which is so wilfully its own thing – which we are – to be allowed to keep doing it, and I think we have been allowed to keep doing it," Gregory beams.
Can she see herself still doing this in 10 years' time? "God knows. I think I won't want to be touring as much, and I'd really like to write for other people. Anyway, nobody will probably want to look at me croaking and creaking around on stage...zimmer-frame pop," Alison Goldfrapp laughs, removing her sunglasses for the first time in our two hours together and suddenly cheering up a little as lunch arrives. "I reckon Will's gonna come out of himself in about ten years' time and we'll swap roles. He'll be there in stilettos, and I'll be the one with the beard, twiddling knobs at the back of the room."
• Goldfrapp play the Hydro Connect Festival, Inveraray, on Sunday.
The full article contains 1198 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
