*INTERVIEW FEATURE*

STARSANDHEROES talks to GOLDFRAPP’s Will Gregory

The last time Goldfrapp troubled the international psyche was the release of “Pilots”, the third single from their splendid Felt Mountain album, at the tail end of 2001. Since then, at least on the evidence of new LP Black Cherry, the idiosyncratic English duo (Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, vocals/synth and pretty much everything else, respectively) has undergone something of a transformation. While there are certain nods to the lush orchestration and jaw-dropping vocal acrobatics familiar to Felt Mountain’s half million owners, the majority of Black Cherry is harder, grubbier and dipping deeper into dark 70s electro/disco territory – a development that makes this correspondent very happy indeed.

On the phone from his West Country hometown of Bath, Will compares the two albums: “I can see that it’s gonna confuse some people because we’ve shifted ground. The electronic stuff and the drums have come to the front, and we’ve turned it all up. Also, we did approach it quite differently: we jammed a lot more, Alison and I, on synths, and those accidents that you get when you’re jamming actually turned into basslines. You’ve got this much rougher approach to the instrumentation - straight away it’s much more dirty and alive.”

Is the change a result of playing live a lot and realizing what works live and what doesn’t?

“I think that’s true. Obviously Felt Mountain was done as a studio fantasy, and the reality of gigging it did bring home some hard truths. We never expected to be playing it live, not while we were [recording] it – I didn’t even know Alison could perform live, cos I’d never seen her do it! It was all a bit of a shock, but she’s great, she’s a fantastic performer. When we came to do this record, it was in the back of our minds a bit more, about how the whole thing would go as a set, and what would be fun to do – have fun for ourselves a bit, and kinda defrost after Felt Mountain which we’d kinda frozen ourselves with a bit after a year and a half of gigging it.”

Were you very surprised that Felt Mountain had such an effect on everyone?

“Yeah, we were - it’s like telling somebody your dream, isn’t it? That’s the most boring thing you can do to anybody! And immediately you can see the eyes glaze…it’s a bit like that. We just did it for ourselves, and to think that other people had similarly twisted music sensibilities was a shock actually.”

So what prompted Black Cherry’s upward gearshift?

“When you’re writing, you’ve got to set up some sort of tension for yourself to stimulate yourself, otherwise you can just go to sleep, get lazy. If you make things a little bit uncomfortable for yourself by denying yourself some familiar scaffolding that you use, then that’s probably a good thing. It’s a bit scary but it makes for an interesting life…”

It sounds like you came straight off the Felt Mountain tour and went straight into the studio – how long did the new album take?

“It took exactly a year, more or less. 7th January 2002, start album, 7th January 2003, start rehearsing for live show! I think we’re coming to Australia in August, and we really want to go. You’re in which city? Sydney? Oh, fantastic – I’m absolutely dying to go. [cue much excited chatter from Will about Australia, and some much-needed sympathy on account of your correspondent’s imminent visa-based departure]”

Anyway, back to the record. I’m gonna say a word to you, to see how you react: Electroclash…

“[Sharp intake of breath] Well, the thing is, I don’t think we knew what it was until somebody said, ‘oh, this sounds very electroclash’. Daniel Miller [Mute Records owner and, as The Normal, creator of ‘70s electro classic “Warm Leatherette”] kept trying to find another word to invent for it…the only thing I worry about a little bit with Electroclash is that it’s a kind of ‘80s throwback, and we’re not – is Giorgio Moroder Electroclash? We’re closer to the daddies, I think, like Kraftwerk and that ‘70s stuff.”

You’ve never been shy about your love of disco, not so evident on Felt Mountain but much more obvious on new tracks like “Strict Machine” [a robo-disco homage to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”].

“Felt Mountain had very slow disco, y’know, like “Pilots” – you can bump’n’grind to that, you just have to do it very very slowly…[cackles like a madman] I think we did realise we needed to speed it up a little bit, and “Strict Machine” was the result of that.”

I saw the Felt Mountain tour at London’s ULU in 2001 and witnessed people standing literally open-mouthed, blown away by Alison’s awe-inspiring vocals. Do you think the new material will have the same effect, now she’s narrowed down the three-octave histrionics?

“Actually, for us it was broadening it - up until [the new album] we hadn’t tracked a vocal or done harmonies, so for us it was actually broadening out the range of what she could do. And in terms of her range, she’s still really pushing herself – on a song like “Tiptoe”, all those low vocals at the beginning, that’s all her.”

It’s the high vocals that knock people out though isn’t it?

“Yeah, and then she has to do “Utopia” at the end of the set, so…I think the whole thing is broadening the base from which we can write. I think some people are gonna think they’ve been ripped off cos they wanted Felt Mountain II or something, but…”

That’s a good point actually – how do you think the fans are going to react?

“We did another gig at ULU in March, and it was definitely the fans that came because it sold out very quickly, and they were a little bit baffled to begin with. But we did “Hairy Trees” and that was the turning point – once we’d done that, everyone kind of got where we were coming from and when we revved it up into “Crystalline Green” and “Train” they were right with it.”

“I think people generally like a large range of music: their taste always was pretty broad. I think that with most people, if you rifle through their records, you’ll find something you’d never expect. I think that actually, audiences are much more flexible than we give them credit for.”

How would you feel if you went to someone’s house and found a Goldfrapp album filed next to Dido? Would you think, “oh god, is that the sort of people we’re selling records to?”

“[more mad cackling] Well this is the great thing – you can’t be like that! If you have that attitude then you’re being sucked in to that whole marketing idea – the wonderful thing is that everybody who listens to [Black Cherry] will have a different favourite track.”

On first listen it didn’t sound like Goldfrapp at all but I liked it, and by the second spin it did sound like Goldfrapp and I liked it even more…

“Well that’s true though - when I listen to a record, I change how I feel about it, and very often the records I started by being underwhelmed by, I end up playing more than anything else. But sometimes you instantly love something and you don’t need to play it anymore, cos you’ve got it! You’ve been there, that’s it: that’s how I felt when I heard Portishead the first time, I was totally bowled over by it, I thought it was incredible. But, in a way, I didn’t need to play it over and over again, there it is in my head, I didn’t need to.”

“I think all these things work very differently, which is why it’s very hard when you’re writing cos you feel the same way about your own music – y’know, one minute you’re really up about it, ‘oh this is great’, then the next minute you think, ‘you know what? I don’t want to hear that again!’”

Having played Felt Mountain live for 18 months, are you bored of it?

“I think we probably need a break from it. At the time, lots of lovely journalists were saying, “oh, the great thing about that record is it’s timeless”, but things date don’t they, they just do, and the things that you wouldn’t predict – I think some of Felt Mountain has dated for me.”

It’s normally the beats, not the vocals, that date a record – were you conscious when you made Black Cherry that maybe in five years’ time you might be “oh, it’s so 2003”?

“Oh yeah! You just can’t predict, you just don’t know. I think what you’ve got to worry about is that it doesn’t sound dated immediately! That’s all you can really deal with.”

You weren’t tempted to go 2-step garage then?

“Erm, no - especially cos I don’t know what it is! We’re very uneducated about rhythm, and that was part of the thing for us to get over. I’m awful; I don’t listen to any other contemporary music, and I think that it’s a mistake, really. There’s that thing of being blissfully unaware isn’t there, and therefore when you do what you want to do, you’re not worried whether Justin Timberlake’s done it or something.”

So you don’t check whose albums are out at the same time as yours, to see what it’s up against?

“Not really - but what you do do, is worry that someone’s gonna release your album before you do! You know how ideas tend to pop up simultaneously in different places? [You worry] that somebody will have coincidentally just “discovered” your album and then made it. That’s probably paranoia taken to a certain extreme, though!”

Black Cherry doesn’t play on the Xbox in my house – how do you feel about the new Copy Protection technology? Do you download music?

“You can’t deny the progress of technology, can you? You can’t just put your head in the sand and say ‘ooh, they shouldn’t be doing that, I’m jolly well annoyed about MP3s’ – that doesn’t work. The record companies have been pretty slow off the mark – they need to just wake up to the reality of what’s going on and deal with it. I think DVDs are copy protected aren’t they?”

“I don’t [download music] but not because I wouldn’t, it’s just that I don’t know how to do it – everybody will do something if they can, if they’ve got the opportunity – if you don’t want them to you’ve got to do something about it yourself. I think people will always just be one step ahead, won’t they?”

You never considered doing what Madonna did, putting dummy tracks on the Internet saying “What the fuck are you doing?” instead of the track?

“[raucous laughter] You can try, but you can’t beat it – you can just maybe be a bit more vigilant than [record companies] have been. They’re gonna go out of business unless they do, and if they do, then that says something about the technology and the revolution…maybe we don’t need record companies!”

You’re lucky being on Mute though, they’re on side aren’t they? In fact, I downloaded my favourite Goldfrapp track, the Mick Harvey remix of “Utopia”, from www.mute.com.

“Oh, tell me about it! We love ‘em. They let us do whatever crazy thing we want to do, and sometimes they even smile when we’re doing it!”

One final question before the scary robot phone lady cuts us off: You composed the score for fantastic British football hooligan movie ID – have you been asked to do any more soundtracks?

“Well, I think they were gonna make a sequel to ID, where he was deep into bad boy National Front [infamous British far-right organization] territory, but then they suddenly realised that actually they didn’t want to promote the National Front that much [cackle]. So they cancelled it, which was a bit of a shame cos I’d love to have done another one. We’ve since been offered stuff singly and together, and I think we’d really like to do one together. We’ve had tracks on films, but we’d really like to score something – I think that’d be more fun.”

So there we have it. The all-new Goldfrapp: more dark, more dirt, more disco, but above all, a whole load more fun.

Originally published in 3D World Magazine, April 2003