Alison pops her cherry

Nobody wants to keep making the same album over and over again, except maybe for Kula Shaker and look what happened to them. However, reinventing yourself is a dodgy business: it may be artistically necessary, but you risk alienating the fans who made you successful in the first place.

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have undergone something of a reinvention on their second album, Black Cherry. Where their debut Felt Mountain was all glacial, ethereal soundscapes, their latest opus drags the listener kicking and screaming onto the dancefloor with tracks like current single, the stomping ‘Train’, and the whirligig wonder that is ‘Tiptoe’. Are they not worried how fans of the first album will react to this apparent change of direction?

Will Gregory laughs: “It all makes sense to me, because I can see all the connections. There is a line that goes from Felt Mountain into ‘Train’ which I can see quite clearly, but I’m sure loads of people won’t see that and they’ll just think we’ve lost the plot totally. That’s inevitable, I think.

“But I think that we were losing the plot trying to think about doing more of Felt Mountain. We felt that there was nothing to add to it, and we needed to throw ourselves in a different direction to revitalise ourselves. If they can put up with the idea that it is just us going through our therapy, working out something from our youth, maybe they can stay with it.”

While it does inhabit, broadly speaking, the same stratosphere as their debut, Black Cherry sounds a lot more uptempo and immediate than its stately predecessor.

“It’s definitely more uptempo,” agrees Alison, “but some people think it is more difficult that Felt Mountain. For me, Felt Mountain is quite ambiguous in many ways and quite reflective, whereas Black Cherry is a lot more playful and direct.”

“We definitely talked about trying to do something that is more uptempo, more summery, sunny, a bit more easy going, and possibly a bit down and dirty,” notes Will. “After a year of playing Felt Mountain live, I think we needed to defrost from it a bit, so that was kind of therapy for us, to work on some of these more uptempo songs.”

What if one of the songs, or a remix thereof, suddenly becomes the latest dance craze in Ibiza?

Will bursts into a peal of laughter: “We like dance music and we do like disco. We talked a lot about doing a disco-sounding track here and there, even when we making Felt Mountain, because we both love that drama and flamboyance of the dancefloor, especially the ’70s dancefloor: it’s something we both buy into. So we just felt that providing we were jumping around in the room, we were happy.

“You could start a whole trend in a direction you never dreamt of,” he admits, “but I think you have to worry about that afterwards.”

Goldfrapp are already responsible for trend-setting. When Felt Mountain was released in 2000, it sounded like nothing we had ever heard before: moodily atmospheric musical mayhem with that voice overlaid on top, it was simply stunning. The album had critics on both sides of the Atlantic in a lather and ended up shifting half a million units to boot. Did they realise when they were in the throes of its genesis that they were giving birth to something really special?

“You always hope when you’re making something that it’s special,” considers Alison, “but it is only when it becomes special to other people that it starts to become weird and amazing.”

“For us, there were a lot of moments where we just thought ‘That’s exactly what we want’,” Will opines. “But we just thought that was our own little fevered imagination being satisfied. We didn’t think there were other similarly mentally deranged souls out there: it feels like there’s a big support group out there for us now.”

Surely then they were taken aback by how large this support group became?

“We were so pleased to be making our own music and recording an album, that was such an amazing thing in itself for us, so we didn’t have any expectations,” Alison recalls. “That in itself was almost enough, in a way, so then when other people really liked it as well, it was a huge thing.”

Alison and Will had started working together a couple of years previously, after Will heard her remarkable voice through a mutual friend.

“We sort of circled each other at a distance to start with,” Will recalls. “We talked a bit about what we might want to do if we worked together and we played each other music we liked. After that, when we both liked each other’s choice of music, that’s when we really started to work.”

So what do each of them bring to the mix that is Goldfrapp?

“That’s quite hard to say. It’s just one of those things that seems to work,” muses Alison. “We’re quite different personalities and I think that is one of the reasons why it does work. We complement each other really well and I feel that, unlike anyone else I have ever worked with, we can do pretty much anything we feel like doing. Both of us have a very eclectic taste in music, where we listen to everything and anything, so I think that allows us to have complete freedom.”

This complete freedom saw them decamp to a “darkened studio in Bath”, where they created the monster that is Black Cherry. I wondered if they felt an extra degree of pressure, considering how successful their debut had become, to come up with something equally as ground-breaking?

“For us, it’s always about trying new things and challenging ourselves,” Alison stresses, “and I think the only pressure we felt, or that I felt, was the time factor. Your time is so much more condensed. With your first album, you have years to think about it. Then suddenly you’ve got a year to regurgitate all your feelings and thoughts about things.”

“We try to shut the world out when we write, generally,” explains Will. “There is a lot of pressure but it is all from us making demands of ourselves and being hyper-critical, which we always are, so there was no change really.”

Unlike a lot of acts, Goldfrapp tend not to enter the studio with a full canon of songs under their belt. The songwriting process for them is pretty much born and nurtured in the studio environment.

“We’ve never been able to work out what we’re doing until we do it,” stresses Will, “which is a kind of paradox. We can’t think too hard about that, though, otherwise it all goes weird. Nowadays, because you work on a hard disc, every sound you make, from the first minute you start could end up as the finished thing, so you just live in a grey area for as long as it takes.”

Both Will and Alison are really looking forward to taking Black Cherry on the road. Having witnessed the stunned looks and open mouths at their Dublin shows in support of Felt Mountain, I can only imagine how their latest musical adventure will translate to a live setting.

“We only finished it in February so it is still quite fresh to us,” notes Alison. “Then we did two warm-up gigs and since then I’ve been doing a whole month of promotion so I’m gonna be very pleased to stop talking and actually get out there and play it all. For us as a band, it is nice to have more of a dynamic there, with the two albums, so there is the contrast of two very different moods – for me, that is much more fun on stage.”

“It’s even more in your face this time,” Will admits. “I think it is going to be a bit of a shock.”