Goldfrapp's latest album, a deliciously decadent collection of glam-noir numbers, sounds like Kate Bush in a nightclub during the Weimar Republic, writes Brian Boyd
What a letdown. Over the years Alison Goldfrapp has diligently carved out an image for herself as that of a slightly demented rock dominatrix, a sort of Polly Harvey meets glam rock meets the front cover of Vogue in a Soho peep show. This morning, though, in a tiny London hotel room, Goldfrapp is soberly dressed with her eyes hidden behind a gargantuan pair of sunglasses. She looks and talks like she's about to captain her team on University Challenge.
"Ha, ha, ha." She laughs at the analogy. "No one ever recognises me. It's great. People see me in the pictures and in the videos and then when they meet me they sort of pull a face and go 'you look nothing like you're supposed to' and stuff like that. It's doesn't worry me in the slightest."
You get the feeling that the term "most fashionable woman in pop", which inevitably follows any mention of her in the press, is not something that Goldfrapp is entirely comfortable with, given that she's got some of the most smart and sussed opinions about the lamentable state of popular culture this side of a high-powered university cultural studies department.
Goldfrapp is sitting beside her musical significant other, Will Gregory, a pleasant man who you suspect enjoys his position in the shadow of the group's lead singer. Alison comes with baggage. She started off working with the "difficult" (which is always a euphemism) Tricky but, as she says herself, "I gave as good as I got". She has bashed photographers over the head with a microphone and has been known to answer journalists' questions about her private life with the unequivocal "What do you fucking want to know about that for?"
Her back story has been a bit mythologised over the years. The received wisdom is that she's from dead posh stock, but ran away from it all as a teenager to sniff glue and steal cars. The truth is a bit more prosaic: her father worked in advertising, her mother in nursing; she only ever sniffed glue once and has never stolen a car, but maybe once dossed around on a tractor that wasn't strictly hers.
"I don't know what it is about me or the music we make," she says. "But somehow I attract all these weird stories. I know the show is a bit theatrical and dramatic and I dress up and stuff, but that can't explain all these obsessive fans. I get some very strange letters."
Goldfrapp first appeared on the radar with the wondrous Felt Mountain a few years ago. Nominated for both a Mercury and a Brit, it was a sumptuous symphonic affair that was very much on the tense, nervous and edgy end of the ambient scale. People who don't think they know anything from it actually do - the songs are consistently used as atmospheric backing on television dramas.
The group could have ridden the wave of epic, cinematic pop with their sleazed-up Morricone sound. But on the next album, Black Cherry, they veered into disco stomp territory with liberal dashings of electroclash and Marc Bolan.
"Maybe some people were a bit taken aback by it," admits Alison. "We had all those layers and textures going on, but we did want something a bit more up-tempo with Black Cherry. It wasn't supposed to be a massive leap or anything, it's just that we didn't want it as filled up as the first one. We went after a simpler style and made it more jagged and angular, but still quite polished at the same time."
For the new album, Supernature, they've retained the angular electro feel on a work that is more of a logical step forward than anything else.
"A lot of Supernature is to do with the fact that we really want to belt these songs out live and also wanted to incorporate some form of beats" she says. "After all the theatrics of previous live outings, I thought it would be nice just to have me singing in front of a band."
The album was recorded in a tiny cottage in Bath, and was as spontaneous as Goldfrapp are ever likely to come. "We didn't demo anything beforehand. It was written and recorded simultaneously. I like the glam aspect of the songs; some people say they hear a bit of Kraftwerk in there, but I don't think so. There are no real layers of strings on this one; it's a lot edgier than anything we've done before.
"The great thing about doing it was that our record company, Mute, left us totally alone so we had to crack our own whip, so to speak. But I loved doing it. It was immediate and all very quick."
In these days of gloomy young men in indie bands, there's something very glittery and eccentric about Goldfrapp. They now exist in a musical world side by side with Scissor Sisters as a sort of dysfunctional Bananarama. And Alison Goldfrapp, like Roisin Murphy and Shirley Manson, is ably displaying that there's more to the female singer-songwriter than ever-so-sensitive banalities.
Ooh La La, the first single off the album, comes complete with a stunning video by much-raved-about director Dawn Shadforth. The video, Goldfrapp says, is a bit like "Brian Eno-era Roxy Music, very 1970s - we've always been into how they treated vocals on albums back then, all those slap-back effects and drum sounds. I love that slightly throwaway but slightly nasty poutiness. Marc Bolan was always bloody great at that, as was Marlene Dietrich."
Supernature is Goldfrapp's best album yet. Very glam-noir, it's twisted, decadent electronic pop that lifts the band away from their lushly symphonic beginnings into something that sounds like Kate Bush in a nightclub during the Weimar Republic. It's always a bad idea to get the person behind the album to describe it, but Alison doesn't disappoint.
"It's somewhere between New York, Berlin and north-east Somerset. It's an uber world of sound and hybrid creatures. It's a place to take part in fortnightly disco seances, where people dance with spirits and howl like beasts of the forest wearing lycra and stilettos."
Oh La La is reviewed in Singles; Supernature is released on August 19th. Goldfrapp play the Electric Picnic on September 3rd
