As good as Goldfrapp

Backstage at The Olympia, were it not for the star on the dressing room door, I’d never have twigged it was Alison Goldfrapp sitting there. Birdlike and bundled into an anonymous black jumper, you’d be hard pressed to picture her in frilly knickers, let alone recognise her as Britain’s pre-eminent kinky gartered songstress.

“Oh, I never get recognised,” she chirps. “Last week I was buying a sofa and I had to spell out my name for the guy and he says, ‘Oh, you've got the same name as that pop singer.’ I’m just not that famous really.”
Full disclosure – I’ve been dying to meet Alison Goldfrapp. I’ve been counting the days. It’s not that I don’t know anything about her. Au contraire, I can rattle off the biographical details. She was born and raised in rural Hampshire. Her mother is a Christian, while her father, Nick, was a classical music enthusiast.
“My dad was an eccentric”, she recalls. “He would make us sit in a circle and play music and make us discuss how it made us feel. I was the youngest of six kids so I never had a clue. Then one day he played 'Carmina Burana' and it was the first time I made a connection. It was humans making this sound. Oh my god, it is so scary and dramatic. Wow, it must feel amazing to have that sound come out of you. I want to make that sound.”
A dyslexic, at school she was constantly bored and took to Tippex thinner to pass the time. She arsed around Brixton, then Belgium, before enrolling in Middlesex Art College, where she milked a Jersey cow while yodelling.
“I was always rubbish at everything”, she says. “Singing was the first and only thing I could do right. I think I’m a bit thick really.”
Her breathtaking vocals would guest on Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Orbital’s Snivilisation before her solo demos were picked up by film score composer Will Gregory in 1999. The pair signed to Mute records that same year.
Still, I’m intensely curious. I never get any sense of her from the interviews I’ve read. Mostly, they form the same narrative arc – lady journalist (and it nearly always is a lady) seeks out super sensual pop star for bonding and gossip, only to leave with a very empty notebook.
“I think it's so funny how people get obsessed with my image on stage,” she laughs. “So then I always get asked what am I like offstage, which is such a bizarre and banal question. I always wonder what the fuck are you asking me that for?”
To be fair, it’s understandable that many are bewildered by the distinction between the Weimar mirror-ball dominatrix on-stage and the reclusive thirty-something lady before me.
“Yeah, but it’s just all performance, isn’t it?” she replies. “Maybe as I came from art school and I know people who do performance art, it’s clear to me. What they do is more radical, but music is visual, and all music has a narrative, so it’s very much part of the same world. Bands with stylists used to be the norm in the ‘70s and 80s. A band had their own image and hairstyle and when you bought a record you were buying into a whole thing – an aesthetic. The image is just another physical expression of the music for me.”
So she doesn’t go home to sleep in a canary cage in her boudoir?
“No, I go home to my cats in Bath,” she cackles. “One of those magazines wanted to do a photo shoot of me at home. And I was like, no, because my home is sacred and no, because it's a shit-hole covered in cat hairs! There isn’t anything sexy about me.”
What? Not even when she’s singing a line like ‘I’m like a dog to get you’ on all fours in the video for 'Number 1'?
“Oh, Will just made me do it. Let’s say it’s sensual then. Sexy or sexual just makes me think of Jordan.”
She looks like she has a boiled sweet in her mouth as she says it. At last, I recognise the tiny blonde in giant Prada sunglasses. Bloody hell, that’s Alison Goldfrapp, that is.