Alison Goldfrapp: ‘I got letters from Americans saying that I was inciting bestiality’

The ‘Strict Machine’ singer-songwriter talks to Adam White about going solo after 25 years, moments when fame got ‘quite intense’ and her brush with Simon Cowell

‘Simon Cowell said, “This is gonna be really big.” And I just wanted to cry’ (Supplied)

Few musicians have ever seemed as brooding or impervious as Alison Goldfrapp. The band named after her, which produced sweaty Noughties hits including “Strict Machine” and “Ooh La La”, helped craft the image of Goldfrapp as an electropop ringmaster with Rocky Horror hair, or a torch singer gone berserk. No one could possibly intimidate her. Well, almost no one. “Bloody whatshisname – Simon Cowell!” Goldfrapp recalls, her voice strikingly deadpan for someone who sounds so sultry on stereo. “He was very polite but I just found him so unnerving.” Goldfrapp remembers when they met: a shared appearance on a US talk show in 2005, the talent show maestro in a “fluffy pink cashmere jumper” and standing arms folded and beady-eyed as Goldfrapp sang and vamped on stage. “I thought, ‘this man’s gonna fail me – he’s gonna boot me off.’”

After the performance, Cowell stomped on over to a flustered Goldfrapp and offered some words of industry wisdom. “He said, ‘This is gonna be really big.’ And I just wanted to cry. All I could say back was, ‘I really like your pink jumper’. Anyway…” Goldfrapp sighs, grimaces and hugs her knee. “That was a weird little story I just told you.”

Goldfrapp-the-band weren’t plucky neophytes back then, either. Rather, they were smack in the middle of their imperial phase, where the swooning melancholia of 2000’s Felt Mountain had been eschewed in favour of strobe lights, kink and Seventies glam – 2003’s Black Cherry and 2005’s Supernature launched a run of albums that hit the top 10, anointing Goldfrapp and her bandmate Will Gregory as forward-thinking visionaries eager to spark trends rather than trail them.

Today, Goldfrapp is sipping coffee at home in East London in an oversized cream jumper, her striped socks the colour of a bumblebee. The 56-year-old is neither frosty nor frightening. Instead, she’s talking about how anxious she’s felt in the spotlight over the years. Has every Alison Goldfrapp interview ever written lied to me? According to journalist lore, Gregory was the amiable yet guarded adult in the room, Goldfrapp the erratic grump. “I think sometimes journalists do have an agenda,” she reckons. “If you don’t meet their expectations, there can be disappointment on their side.” She’d often refuse to play ball. “I’d deliberately veer off somewhere else when they’d say ‘Are you this or that?’” – as in when she was asked if she was “now a lesbian” shortly after her relationship with a woman was plastered over the press in 2009. “There was a lot of sexism. Things feel freer now.”

That applies to the music industry as much as it does Goldfrapp herself. We’re here to talk about The Love Invention, her debut album as a solo artist and the first body of work Goldfrapp has made without Gregory in nearly 25 years. “We’ve worked together for so long and it’s quite hard to extract yourself from a situation that feels comfortable and familiar,” she says. “But I was very eager to remove myself from it.” She says that there’s no drama behind the pair’s professional split, which she promises won’t be permanent. (Gregory, with whom she caught up with on the phone a few days before we speak, has promised to listen to her album once it’s out.) She just felt a bit trapped by their dynamic. “It’s really important to challenge yourself and try new things and be with new people. I’ve wanted to make something like this for quite a while, but a lack of confidence meant that I didn’t.”

After she toured her band’s last album together, 2017’s Silver Eye, Goldfrapp took a solo trip to America, where she rented a car and spent weeks driving across the desert. “I didn’t listen to any music, because I needed to have a purge,” she says. “But I sang in the car a lot, and that’s where I started to regain my love.” She fell out of love with music? “I’m being a bit overdramatic – I suppose I just needed to recalibrate my brain. When I listen to music, I go in there, you know? I’m thinking, ‘How did they do that?’” She becomes incredibly animated. “‘What was that? Woooo!’ ‘That sounds phwoaaar.’ It’s a bit like doing homework. So I just stopped listening to it. Then I started listening again and it was, like, wa-heyy!”

I was completely unaware of fame. I wish I’d been more aware, and more confident

Goldfrapp is the least media-trained celebrity I’ve ever spoken to – not in terms of frankness, but in her sheer lack of artifice, her ums and ahhs and lengthy digressions. Sentences don’t so much conclude as round off in ambiguous noises that seem to convey that her thoughts have finished. “I’ve got a really low boredom threshold,” she laughs. “My attention span is quite goldfish-like. I get impatient, but I’m also incredibly loyal, and I sort of go between the two. It sounds a bit schizo. It probably is. Anyway…”

Recorded in a home studio set up in the pandemic, The Love Invention is a breathless dance-pop album, a 11-song parade lent extra lustre by producers including Röyksopp and Richard X. Goldfrapp’s vocals are dressed in reverb and dabbed in synths – some are icy and sparse, others romantic and bubbly. At times it feels like a perfect amalgam of her back catalogue, bouncing between the vampy maximalism of the Supernature album and the airy elegance of its left-turn follow-up Seventh Tree – something she remembers as the “worst commercial decision” she and Gregory could have made back then.

She’s always been a breaker of rules, though. A strict upbringing in rural Hampshire led to a few years of teenage rebellion, followed by art school and time on the fringes of the electronica and trip-hop scenes, lending vocals to tracks by Orbital and Tricky. She met Gregory in 1999, the pair taking “f***ing ages” to make expansive sonic universes that never seemed to rest in one genre for long – the band’s label got so used to production delays and pivots in sound that they more or less left them alone shortly after signing them.

‘It got quite intense’: Goldfrapp in concert in 2005 (Shutterstock)

Goldfrapp were never massive chart-botherers, but they defined the sound of Noughties pop, with everyone from Madonna and Christina Aguilera to Girls Aloud and both Minogues seeming to riff on the template the pair dreamed up. Gregory – stocky, bearded and almost always hidden behind black shades – preferred to sit in the shadows, leaving Goldfrapp front and centre of the chaos. “I never felt famous,” she says. “I mean, occasionally I’d think, oooooh! Around Supernature, it got quite intense. Fans would follow you back from a gig and try to get in the lift with you. That was quite interesting. Or I remember being in my dressing room, taking my clothes off to get into a costume and a paparazzi bloke would start jumping up and down outside, trying to get shots of me. But that was more surreal… I think I was completely unaware of fame. I wish I’d been more aware, and more confident. I did find the attention quite difficult, but that was also because we had the most diabolical management at the time, which didn’t help.”

Between being overworked and being, as she hesitantly puts it, “a bit screwy” back then, Goldfrapp says the band’s most prolific years are a bit of a blur. She seems to flick through memories as I speak to her. She doesn’t remember the band ever being too controversial, but does recall getting backlash for some of the imagery she used for the Black Cherry album. “I put these wolf heads on human bodies in the ‘Strict Machine’ video, and I got letters from Americans saying that I was inciting bestiality!”

Her mother, who died in 2010, wasn’t always a fan, either. “She was very, very staunchly Christian, and she disliked [that imagery] because she said it was pagan, anti-Christian, blah, blah, blah. I did think: bloody hell, I should get my mum and those Americans together for tea and they can have a nice little chat about bestiality and paganism and Christianity.” She rolls her eyes, taking a big gulp of her coffee. Did her mum come around in the end? “Oh, I think she was proud, really.”

She is sanguine about the past, and her own place in the music industry. “You have to be very tough in this business,” she says. “It demands you be confident. In many ways I am, but in others…” She trails off. “I’m quite hard on myself. I question myself a lot… it’s like anything in life, isn’t it? Sometimes it takes a while to figure it all out.” I suggest that for younger musicians she probably has a lot of wisdom to extol – more than Simon Cowell, at least – but she’s taken aback by the idea. She says no one’s ever approached her looking for industry advice. “No, no,” she stutters. “I don’t know what reason there might be for that, but they haven’t. Do you know of that happening?” I tell her it seems relatively commonplace for younger artists to drop into the DMs of more established ones, particularly ones that more or less broke the mould. “Hmm,” she sighs, contemplatively. “I’d be very happy to help, but no one’s ever asked. Maybe they’re like, ‘Ooh, f*** no! That’s definitely a model I don’t want to emulate!’”

The Love Invention might provide a bit of a wake-up call. Goldfrapp tells me she wants people to listen to it “above the clouds at a very high speed”. Or, she adds, “driving very slowly across a very, very wide open road… or wherever you fancy, really.” Then, because old habits die hard: “But it should be somewhere intense.”

‘The Love Invention’ is released on 12 May