Goldfrapp's Personal Best
Celebrating 20 years of Supernature, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory join Alan Pedder for a journey through five key songs that tell their story.
Eight years on from their seventh and (so far) final album, the ‘is a band’ vs. ‘were a band’ status of Goldfrapp remains a not entirely settled matter – which, given the duo’s dislike for labels and would-be boxes, seems completely fitting.
If I’ve learned anything about Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory in the 25 years since my tiny mind was blown by Felt Mountain, it’s that anything can happen from one album to the next. This is, after all, a duo that went from the lush and fractured Shangri-la of their debut to Black Cherry’s eroticised electro-stomp in a single wolf leap. The first time I saw them was a heavenly communion (which you can, at time of writing, watch in full on YouTube), complete with string section and all; the second, not all that much later, was beneath the grimy lights of a club night, flanked by dancers wearing animal masks, tassels on their chests, and not a great deal else. As one French promoter apparently asked them, what the hell happened?
“Oh, they were really quite angry,” Goldfrapp says with some bemusement, as if she still can’t quite grasp it. “It was almost like they had us up against the wall saying ‘What have you done?’” adds Gregory, who dials in to our call from an enviably stacked looking studio. “Do you remember the promoter who gave us a real dressing down? Like we’d somehow blown it. But we’ve always just done what entertains us.” Goldfrapp nods. “There were quite a lot of people who doubted us going into this fully, sexually charged electronic music, but it seemed to go down really well in most places so we just sort of went along with it,” she adds. “That’s right,” Gregory answers. “Once we got on that Black Cherry tip we just thought, ‘Oh, there’s loads more to explore here, and that’s going to be great fun.’”
Let the history books show that the “loads more” he speaks of turned out to be the duo’s biggest swing into the pop space. Their third album Supernature, released 20 years ago this autumn, took a sleeker, more sophisticated approach to the electronic sound of Black Cherry, paired with a love of 1970s classic rock and the gleeful thrust of glam. If that album was a wayward wolf, Supernature was a panther, unswervingly stylish and with a mysterious gleam that helped to Trojan horse the duo’s trademark weirdness deep into the mainstream. “It did feel like we were ahead of the curve with Black Cherry,” says Gregory. “But by the time we made Supernature, I think some others had caught up with us, and that’s why that album had a sort of mini explosion around it.”
Narrowly missing out on the top spot in the UK album charts – thanks to the staying power of popstar turned Twitter roast expert James Blunt – Supernature powered the duo into a whole new stratum of stardom. “This did suddenly get really crazy,” says Goldfrapp, describing the jolt from making the album “thinking that we were probably going to lose some fans” into a high-demand world of travel and press that outstripped anything they’d previously known. “I found it quite intense, if I’m honest,” she adds. “Even from the get-go [with Felt Mountain] we were launched into doing a lot of things that we just didn’t anticipate and had no guidance or support for.” Her first press day, she says, was a run of something like 14 interviews, which “felt totally bizarre.”
With Supernature, and particularly with how well it was received across the Atlantic, everything sped up. “When that happens, you don’t have enough time to process anything, really, because you’re stuck on this wheel that doesn’t stop turning,” she says. “It’s a bit like being asked to explain your homework,” Gregory chimes in. “People often want to know stuff that you probably don’t even know the answer to.”
For Goldfrapp, of course, there was the matter of everyday sexism to deal with on top of all that, often in the form of very personal questions that would rarely, if ever, be asked of a man. “I didn’t understand why I had to defend my appearance or explain myself,” she says. “For me, it was about the music. Though I’m clearly very passionate about the whole visual side of things, I didn’t expect so much scrutiny about it, or for it to be pulled apart and dissected. I found that quite intense and was a bit confused about how to respond.”
The angling for gossip and borderline pervy reviews may largely be a thing of the past, albeit not too distant, but the music remains as potent as ever, as the new 20th anniversary edition of Supernature so gloriously shows. Stacked with the original masters, live recordings, and a handful of classic remixes plus four new ones, by Richard X, Sun’s Signature, and two by the band themselves.
"I like that people seem to have strong feelings about Supernature. I do think the album has stood the test of time."
“It was nice to go back and see what the material could be morphed into, to match our current moods and mindsets,” says Gregory of the new Goldfrapp remixes, though he shares his bandmate’s general phobia of having to revisit their own songs. “When you make an album you have to listen to the songs a lot, to the point where they feel so ingrained in you that you just don’t need to hear them again,” he adds. “But actually, with the kind of distance in time we had with this album, it was quite nice to listen back and still feel okay about it.”
Goldfrapp held out much longer, she says, unable to face hearing the studio versions again despite still enjoying playing some of the Supernature songs in her own live shows. “I like that people seem to have strong feelings about this album, but as soon as I’ve done something it’s almost like I don’t hear it anymore,” she explains. “Though I did listen to some of our past material recently, when I was away, and I actually felt good about it. I do think the album has stood the test of time.”
Part of the band’s longevity – and I mean that in a continuing sense, ‘were a band’ be damned – comes down to Goldfrapp and Gregory having the good fortune to find in each other someone who brought their own skill set to the studio, without treading too much on the other one’s toes. “It’s wonderful because we don’t really cover each other’s bases, and you don’t find that in life very often,” says Gregory, who was once in an overstuffed band called Loggerheads, so named as they were always fighting. “Right from the start, Alison would come up with visuals and art concepts that always complemented the music so brilliantly, so it immediately felt like a good partnership.”
Asked about the visual world of Supernature, Goldfrapp gets warmly nostalgic for a time when there were decent sized budgets and a willingness of labels to invest in real craft. “So much work went into it, and I really treasure those moments,” she says. “It was on a scale that we haven’t done since. The times when you could put all that time and effort into the visuals don’t really exist anymore. They really are great images, though. They’ve stood up as well as the music, I think.”
Given their reluctance to listen back to old material, it’s a small miracle that we’ve been able to coax them into picking out five of their personal favourites from the entire Goldfrapp oeuvre. And what better place to start than with “Ooh La La”, the song that kicked off the Supernature era and remains the duo’s highest and longest charting single to date.
"Ooh La La" (2005)
BEST FIT: This was obviously a huge, landmark single in your career. What’s your personal take on its importance to the Goldfrapp story?
ALISON GOLDFRAPP: Well, it's just one of those tunes that just keeps going and keeps on giving, isn't it Will?
I remember having the chorus and not really being able to come up with a lyric for it, so I started to think ‘What do I need? I do need something right now in my life, what is it?’ and ooh la la popped up. I thought, well, that’s pretty stupid, but it also feels quite good, so we just went with it and built it up with all these sort of robotic voices and that felt quite good too. Will was just saying the other day that this song is basically only one note, or was it two?
WILL GREGORY: It's just one note all the way through. I think that's as minimal as one can dare to get, and that was a real milestone for us.
When you’re writing a song, you’re trying to create mood and atmosphere through the way that elements are shifting and relating to each other, and in how the harmonies are developing. It’s one of the greatest bits of ammunition for a song, if you know how the harmonies move as well as the melody. So to have a song like “Ooh La La”, which doesn’t do that at all, was very interesting and we just kept going with it. We thought about adding more to it, to see how the song might shift.
ALISON: Some of the best songs ever were written with only two notes but every time we tried to add something, it sounded a bit naff. So we stuck to just the one.
WILL: Why not, if you can get away with it? If something is very simple but you don’t mind hearing it over and over again, that’s always a very good sign, I think.
People always assume that minimal is easy, but it's really not.
WILL: No, that's true. That’s a very good point. Simple is complicated.
ALISON: The things that you do choose become vitally important.
You were famously channelling a bit of Marc Bolan-style glam rock in this song.
ALISON: Yeah. I grew up with my big sister's record collection, so I became a Marc Bolan fan when I was a kid. I always loved his sort of camp and fun look and sound, so that was definitely an inspiration for “Ooh La La”. You know, handclaps are a big thing in glam rock, and I remember we spent quite a lot of time trying to get the claps to sound not too perfect. Close to perfect, but slightly off, to keep everything sounding authentic to the glam rock era.
We wanted to try and retain a certain sound that they had in the ‘70s, especially with the drum sounds. I love the drum sounds used by bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in that era, which was this quite dead, flat sound. So that was definitely something we looked for with “Ooh La La”.
I think what was so great about Supernature is that it felt so different from what felt like a lot of quite lightweight dance-pop tracks around at the time. “Ooh La La” has this really thick, kind of soupy feel by comparison. The bass is so juicy in it, it’s impossible to sit still when it plays.
ALISON: Yeah, the bass was definitely a big thing in that album, wasn't it? Charlie Jones, who plays bass for us live, really contributed to that, I'd say. He came up with some really wild sound effects for his bass.
WILL: Yeah, but also you're right about the bass being so thick. I remember being in the studio with Mark Stent, who mixed the album. He would go in and prep the mixing desk by labelling all the channels, of which there were many, and he’d just give me this look as he was doing it, raising his eyebrows and going ‘Ah, bass number nine.’ To which I’d be like, “Oh, sorry, yeah. Yeah, there is just one more…’
ALISON: There’s a lot of Will’s squelchy synths too.
I love it, and I'd totally forgotten that it was Adrian Utley of Portishead playing the electric guitar on this.
WILL: Yes, and he’s a very intuitive musician, I think. He knows exactly where you are musically and can reach for exactly the right kind of nuance.
ALISON: Yeah, he just came in and did it so quickly. Like you say, Will, he just knew exactly what to do.
WILL: He's like a lexicon of guitar vibe. We've done quite a lot of things with him over the years, even though, to begin with, guitar was banned from our landscape for being too full of baggage. Even then, Adrian would come in and play some synths. But by the time we got to Supernature, we were breaking all our own rules, and that helped a lot, actually.
"You Never Know" (2005)
BEST FIT: Let's move on to another Supernature track, “You Never Know”, which I think is an underrated gem. I love the way this song opens with the synthesised voice and how that motif comes back later. It's so delicious. Alison, is it true that it was partly inspired by the Diva dance scene in The Fifth Element?
ALISON: Oh yes! Christ, I totally forgot about that. She was the blue one with all the tentacles, right? A bit like an octopus. I loved that scene. I picked “You Never Know” because it’s just so strident, with all this drama in it, and I still love to play it live. I’m also really pleased with the remix we’ve done for the anniversary reissue.
WILL: Again, this song is one that’s not really built on a lot, in terms of the number of chords, but I agree with Alison that it feels strident. By that time in our career we had access to facilities like really nice studios and string sections, so it’s actually a string section playing those chords. Those are all just massive down bows, so they’re quite aggressive and thick and full and exciting, and then we just kept layering them up and up. It’s another example of a song where we were trying to write something that you can play over and over and still feel like you want to hear it one more time.
ALISON: I remember when you played the keyboard part to me for the first time in the studio, when we were just starting work on it. I came up with the melody, but it started out super basic. Again, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what the fuck is this? Actually it feels quite good, we should carry on.’ But everything we do starts from improvising, doesn’t it?
WILL: Everything. I think it's great that we're both musicians who can improvise. We have tried talking about things and conceptualising them in advance, but it's only when you actually get to sit down and bash away together that things start to come together. Hopefully, you know, you're recording it all, so you can go back if you’re like, ‘Ah, I liked that bit that happened half an hour ago,’ and that’s how a lot of songwriting is done, for us.
Lyrically, this song is quite mysterious. It’s not entirely clear what it’s about, but seemingly it’s about being stuck in some kind of way.
ALISON: You’re right, it's not that clear is it? Though I agree, yeah, it’s about being a bit stuck.
WILL: I feel like you kind of know what it's about, because of the drama of it. I think it's nice not to be filled in completely, and to have a bit of room to fill it in yourself.
Was there a particular thing about this song that made you want to remix it yourselves rather than giving it to someone else to do?
ALISON: It was quite spontaneous actually. To be honest, most of the time with remixes it's been the record company that decided who should do them. Normally you don't really have any say in it at all, unless you've got some part in doing it yourselves. But I think we got lucky with these two [by Richard X and Sun’s Signature], didn't we Will?
WILL: Yeah. Because very often the remix is just a marketing tool to get the song played in clubs or to get it on other platforms, but obviously we always see a remix as being an opportunity to create another bit of art. Something that’s interesting and has nutrition.
ALISON: At least that's what we hope will happen, isn't it?
WILL: Yeah, and sometimes it does. But it's a very narrow little window.
"Clowns" (2008)
BEST FIT: Seventh Tree was another successful left turn for the band, and a surprising one because you'd been pretty resistant to doing acoustic sessions in the past, right?
ALISON: Yeah, totally. That was one of the things France were always trying to get us to do. They always wanted us to play these acoustic sets, and I used to get really pissed off with that. I didn’t understand why they so desperately wanted to hear the songs as acoustic versions, or why they felt it was needed. I sort of read it that they didn’t trust the songs being electronic, and that by doing them acoustically meant that we were real musicians somehow. Maybe I read it wrong, but it was annoying.
WILL: Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't ask Kraftwek to do, you know, "Fahren, fahren, fahren, on the Autobahn” on guitar, would you?
ALISON: No, that's right. That’s what we used to say. But with Seventh Tree, we just ripped up our rule book again.
So what changed and led to that?
WILL: Well, we've always enjoyed exploring. I've sometimes described it as thinking – and I’ve heard other people say the same thing – what other outfit can you put on that has a whole mood, colour, and atmosphere to it that would be nice to explore. It doesn’t have to be hard, bright lights and steel. It can be dark wood and fabrics. So it’s always about trying to entertain ourselves by seeing what other, new things might be out there for us.
ALISON: I agree. Also, I’ve realised that I just like extremes. I'll really get into one thing and explore that, but then I want to do the complete opposite. It’s like I’ll go somewhere really fucking cold one week and then the next week I’ll want to go to Spain.
WILL: But don't you think it's almost like an antidote as well? It's like you need to cleanse yourself of it.
ALISON: Yeah, especially after having done a lot of touring behind Supernature, I remember I just wanted to bring everything down, to quieten all the noise. There was this feeling of wanting to clear the decks and get back to something very, very basic and simple.
If you look at your discography, the only two consecutive albums that are kind of in the same space are Black Cherry and Supernature, and everything else is almost a reaction to what came before.
WILL: Yeah, that's exactly it. It's a kind of purge, I think.
PJ Harvey always says the same thing about her albums.
ALISON: Does she? Interesting. It's funny, I kind of feel the same way about colour. Quite often I want a lot of colour, because it reflects my mood, but then, almost as way of finding a new direction, I'll go back to black and white. It's very similar to starting a new album. Just getting everything around you out of the way and starting to build up something new again.
What is it that you love so much about “Clowns” that earns it a place on this list?
ALISON: I mean, it's just so weird. It has all this sort of pastoral beauty, and it’s harmonically delicious, but it’s also really weird and I really like that combination.
WILL: Yes, me too. And I like the lyrics are so… not that. So I think, with “Clowns”, there’s a polarisation of the context and the message. The song has these opposite extremes, and I think that's delicious and surprising. I like that you’re not really sure where you are when you hear this song. Weird is a good way of putting it.
ALISON: “Clowns” came out of an improvisation, too. It's got quite a strange time signature, which I've never quite got used to, actually. But I love it for that too.
I read you were going for Robert Kirby-style strings, like on the first two Nick Drake albums.
ALISON: Yeah, that's right.
WILL: Also, I was listening to quite a lot of [Gustav] Mahler, who sets up these very still string textures that are very beautiful, so I think there might be a bit of Mahler in there too. It’s quite an unusual sound world in this song. There's a lot of bass harmonics going on.
And is it true you're whistling the bird noises at the end yourself, Alison?
ALISON: Yeah, that was me. I’m a good whistler.
Have you heard of Molly Lewis? She makes whole records just out of whistling.
ALISON: Yeah, and I have threatened to do that myself, but I don't feel like the world needs that from me right now.
"A&E" (2008)
BEST FIT: Let's move on to “A&E”, which I understand was inspired by an actual trip to the accident and emergency department that you had, Alison.
ALISON: Yeah, that was a pretty horrific time, actually. I was in an A&E waiting room, wearing one of those bloody hospital gowns and trying not to show my ass and my knickers, completely off my face because they’d given me something to help with the pain I was in, so it was a quite a weird day. A nice, sunny Saturday outside.
The song is quite literal, lyrically speaking, and it’s another one of those tunes that seemed sort of ridiculous at the time we were doing it. I was kind of unsure about it at first, but I’m really glad we did it. I feel like a lot of people seem to be fond of this one. I really love the middle-eight where there’s this sudden change of scenery.
WILL: I think we were really in a folk tip at the time. I love that thing where, if you can hold a note and move some things around it, you get this lovely sense that’s sort of like planing. A sustained kind of momentum.
Once Alison came up with this really great melody, the rest of the song just came together. It wasn’t a very difficult one to do, unlike another tune on the album, “Eat Yourself”, which for some reason took about six months even though it’s not any more detailed. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, coming up with songs? It’s like you’re not in control at all of what is going on. Things either come to you or they don’t. You just have to accept it and learn to live with the out-of-controlness.
ALISON: That's what's so exciting about writing, isn’t it? It's like a sort of unfolding where you don’t really know what’s going on. The song reveals itself, really. You start out with one idea and it can evolve and morph into something else. I don’t want to sound clichéd, but I don’t know… there is so something so magical about it. It still always amazes me, and I still love doing it.
WILL: Yeah, it's so weird, isn't it? At nine o'clock there's nothing then at midday there's something, and nobody really knows how that's happened. There’s no formula, is there? Not for us. We just have to kind of live in hope all the time and enjoy the not knowing what the hell you’re doing.
Have there been certain songs in your career where you've listened to them years later and suddenly get a whole new perspective on what they mean?
ALISON: Oh god, yeah. And there are songs that you don’t like, but then you hear them a while later and think, ‘Oh, it’s okay actually.’ Or sometimes it can be the other way around, like, ‘Why did we do that?’
WILL: You've got to forgive yourself sometimes, to not be too hard on yourself, and I think I'm finding that easier as we go along. I've becoming more forgiving, but at the same time I’m always wanting to move on. As a musician, you don't want to be in the same place all the time. You want to be in the new place. So there's a part of you that always thinks, ‘I've done that, and now it's receding into the past in a beautiful way. I don't need to be inspired by it anymore.’
ALISON: Yeah, and I think that’s the reason for not really listening back to things so often. I prefer to be like, ‘That was there and then. Time to move on.’ But then there are some songs that come back to you suddenly and you really want to hear them. I can’t remember what made me go back and listen to “A&E” recently, but I will say that listening to it in a different country was really nice. It gave the song a different perspective.
WILL: Yeah. I remember forgiving myself for Seventh Tree when they played the whole album in a café in Cornwall, in some kind of sculpture park. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I haven't actually heard a track yet that's made me want to jump up and make them shut the PA off,’ which usually happens at some point when listening to an album. Anybody's album, actually. So that was quite nice, I think. It exists in its own place, Seventh Tree.
"Alvar" (2013)
ALISON: I was listening to this song again recently and I actually felt quite emotional about it, which hit me quite suddenly. I was like, ‘Oh, god yeah, I really like this,’ and I’ve been wanting to make a film to it. I’d love to go to a frozen lake in Sweden or somewhere and make a little two-minute film for “Alvar”. I think that’d be good.
WILL: Yeah, it would be. I love the film that you did for “Yellow Halo”. I'd actually forgotten about “Alvar”.
ALISON: Really?
WILL: I mean, some songs just pop out of my brain. But since you talked about it the other day, I haven’t been able to get the tune out of my head.
ALISON: It’s funny, because I don’t really like my vocal very much on it, actually, but I really like the guitars. There’s a moment in the song where the guitars really swell up and then it goes into this backwards vocal, and I just love that. There’s something really satisfying about it. I also love the rhythm of it. There’s a sort of lolling, rocking momentum to the whole thing, which I think is really nice. The melody is really lovely.
WILL: I remember buying this funny little Indian guitar that looks a bit like an ironing board with strings, which you pluck, but then it also has these typewriter-like keys on it that you fret. I think that’s what give the song this slightly hypnotic sound.
ALISON: It has a sort of metallic sound to it, hasn’t it? I really like that.
WILL: Yes, and it’s kind of raw. Some Indian instruments have that quality. Western instruments can sound a bit too perfect sometimes.
ALISON: Alex Lee is playing on this song too, isn’t he?
WILL: Yeah, he’s playing a lot of the other guitars. He’s a great player. He did a really nice job.
ALISON: I think I need to learn to sing backwards. I always think I prefer my voice when it's backwards. It's normal. I did try singing backwards once, but I’m not sure how successful it was. Maybe it's time to try it again.
WILL: Didn’t you learn something that was backwards?
ALISON: Yeah, I sang and recorded it backwards, and then I tried to do it backwards live as well. But, yeah, going back to “Alvar”, I’m just really into it these days. I kind of want to hear it again right after this interview.
BEST FIT: I read that this song was inspired by a trip to you took to Iceland.
ALISON: Yeah, somewhere cold and dramatic.
WILL: Was that the time you went down into a volcano?
ALISON: Oh, yeah, I did. I went into a volcano. I did some quite wild things out there. I remember swimming in between the two tectonic plates, which was amazing. Water was a big feature for me around that time, as it often has been in my life. I’m very fond of water, which is why I like the Stockholm archipelago so much. I love islands. I’m not very keen on looking at just a horizon, like when you go to a beach and there’s nothing but water. That makes me feel a bit weird. I like being able to see some land across the water, you know? Sorry, I’m going off-piste!
I like the darkness of Tales of Us. Sometimes I think I find it a little bit overly earnest in place, but I really like a lot of the instrumentation and the drama of it all. I know we’re talking about “Alvar”, but can I say this? This is the opportunity I feel. I fucking hate TV. I’ve hated every performance I’ve ever done on TV. I cannot cope with it. I’m terrible. I get these panic attacks and it’s really traumatic, so I have huge admiration for anyone who can just turn up on TV and suddenly perform. I just cannot do it. But the one and only performance where I felt like I was good was performing “Annabel” from Tales of Us on Jools Holland. I watched it again recently and thought, ‘Yep, it’s still good.’ We had a little string quartet, didn’t we Will?
WILL: Yeah, and I remember for some of the shows on that tour, everyone was barefoot. But it's interesting, going back to what you said about earnestness. I think, very often, if you make a strong statement – if you're just putting something out there very, very strongly and you're not hedging your bets at all – it can sometimes backfire and appear earnest, but do I think the gesture is always coming from a really good place.
ALISON: Yes, I think that's really true, and I think it's worth it for that.
WILL: Yeah, definitely. I don't have antibodies to anything on Tales of Us in that way. Again, it was a kind of antidote, wasn't it? Because with Head First we’d gone into this shiny pop world.
ALISON: That wasn’t quite shiny enough, or something.
WILL: Yeah, or not quite rough enough.
ALISON: Yeah. That's not my proudest moment, although I do think some of the tunes are great.
WILL: Yes. I forgive us for it.
ALISON: I’ve actually found it very therapeutic playing “Rocket” live recently, which sort of gave me hope for that song again.
WILL: There was quite a long period when that song was kind of persona non grata, wasn't there?
ALISON: Oh my god, yeah. I was deeply in shame. I whipped myself at night. Why? Why?! But no, I've got over that now.
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