Everyone’s heard of Goldfrapp. As the moniker of the acclaimed electronic music duo behind raunchy Noughties hits like Strict Machine and Twist, it’s been famous for 25 years. Now, at the age of 56, Alison Goldfrapp is emerging from the shield of her surname to go solo for the first time with The Love Invention.
“I didn’t have that confidence to do it sooner,” she says. “I sort of felt like maybe I couldn’t do it. This is a feeling I’ve wanted to explore for quite some time. And I want to explore it more.”
She and Will Gregory, the producer and keyboardist, made seven studio albums as Goldfrapp – with her siren-like vocals setting their work apart, from the 2001 Mercury Prize-shortlisted debut Felt Mountain to the platinum-selling classic, 2005’s Supernature. Gregory didn’t tour with Goldfrapp, operating out of public view and once joking he was paranoid that people didn’t know he existed. Still, Goldfrapp herself doesn’t feel like she’s going solo, as such.
“I’m still collaborating,” she says. And with stellar names no less; Richard X (who produces Róisín Murphy) and James Greenwood (who works with Daniel Avery) both had a hand in her new record. “I feel like I’ve got my mojo back,” she says.
“I really hope this album will take me to the States, and to more of Europe. I really missed that element,” she continues. After touring in 2017 to support Silver Eye, her most recent album with Gregory, she took a sabbatical from music for a few years. And then, Covid hit.
But lockdown, for all its limitations, was a motor for creativity. Faced with social distancing, Goldfrapp set about building a studio in her east London home: a space that would unlock the reveries that course through The Love Invention. The window out of which she stared was both a reminder of her confinement and, she’s explained, a gateway to another world: “I’m not in this room when I’m in this room. It’s the portal.”
The album’s lead single, So Hard So Hot, plays on those feelings. Written at the peak of last summer’s heatwave, it reimagines the extreme temperature she felt in the studio as an invitation to join a sweaty dancefloor. “I like lyrics that have a double meaning,” she deadpans. So Hard So Hot is a sexual come-on, but it also has a deeper message – somewhere beneath the percolating beats is an environmental alarm bell.
The climate crisis is a major source of anxiety for the songwriter. “I think of it for no more than five seconds, and I feel absolutely terrified,” she says, giggling nervously. “We’ve all got our heads in the sand about it.” An increasingly polarised political landscape doesn’t help either, she says. “On the one hand, we seem to become more accepting, but on the other, there are people consciously going against that.”
Goldfrapp blames social media for galvanising division and admits to feeling confused by the resurgence of fascism in the West, amid so much progress and acceptance elsewhere in society. She fears we are hurtling towards annihilation: “We’re not going to be here that much longer, because we’re f***ing it right up anyway.”
Goldfrapp’s album is an antidote to all the fear and anxiety: a call to abandonment. Drawing on Italo disco and electropop, the album is chiefly about pleasure seeking, she says. While that’s hardly surprising for a dance record, it’s thrilling to hear something so energetic from a musician in her 50s. She’s not one to be hemmed in by convention: her music is as sexy and ebullient as it was 20 years ago. For Goldfrapp, ageism has no place in music – or anywhere else. “I still think there’s a long way to go,” she says, about what older women are told to wear or how to behave.
“Madonna’s an interesting case,” she continues. “I do think we have this notion that once we hit a certain age, we shouldn’t be wearing this or that, or doing certain things. I felt like that in the last few months, getting my hair cut a certain way or wanting to wear a certain dress.”
She fears it also ties into a wider narrative that puts a deadline on achievement. “I do think people have these notions, even if they’re trying very hard not to, that you should have achieved certain things by a certain age. It’s just a load of garbage really.”
There’s personal history behind this: though Goldfrapp has been making music since she was a teenager, moving from the South West to a London squat at the age of 16. She didn’t get a record deal until she was 30, after an early appearance on Orbital’s 1994 album Snivilisation, and lending her voice to Tricky’s 1995 song The Pumpkin. It was that collaboration which brought her and Gregory together: he heard the song, reached out, and the rest is history.
“I’ve always felt older than everyone else,” she says, of signing to Mute Records in 1996. I ask her whether that translated to more maturity – an advantage over the fellow newbies who came up alongside her. She cackles. “No! I was such a babbling, nervous idiot a lot of the time, and didn’t know what the f*** I was doing!”
She wishes she’d had the same confidence and eloquence that she sees in younger pop stars. “I hear Taylor Swift talk, and I’m just so impressed,” she says. “Irrespective of whether you like her music or not […] she’s so articulate.”
Goldfrapp’s approach to making music is fascinating – something akin to synaesthesia. “For me, making music is a visual experience,” she says. “I think about the atmosphere, and often picture a particular environment, and particular colours... It’s sort of like a dream.”
Our talk turns to this weekend’s festivities. Amid all the Coronation celebrations up and down the country over the next few days, Goldfrapp is among those who will not be hanging up the bunting. She finds it all a bit embarrassing, baffled by the celebrations of the monarchy in the 21st century. She wouldn’t, however, “mind a little ride in the carriage. I’d like to rock up to a club, and then maybe a gig in that carriage, if it’s for hire.”
