goldfrapp - black cherry

Black Cherry is fantastic, if it doesn't get a Mercury nomination I'll be wholly bewildered.

Oh, and < trumpet > here is a most illuminating interview wot I did with the band (well, one of them) a couple of months ago.

It's come out deliciously - Tom, dip yr toes in with "Hairy Trees" and check the excellent video for "Strict Machine".

Tico: Ithink you might like it. As Charlie points out it is quite different to Felt Mountain. Despite my distaste for the singer, I do really like the band's music. I've got the album somewhere (or I may have given it to Toby), you can borrow it if I find it.

let's hope she isn't a googling bint...

I've got the album somewhere (or I may have given it to Toby), you can borrow it if I find it.

yeah, i have your copy (you were going to chuck it!). i was going to offer to copy it for you, tom, but it's copy-protected. but you're welcome to borrow it if you wish.

Her speaking voice alone is like chalk down a blackboard.

Daft twat she is..... being rude to fans at some of their very first tiny gigs. God knows what she's like now......

I don't think she's very keen on journalists/ doing press. I interviewed her for a recently folded dance mag (google proofing) and she was rude, rude, rude.

It wasn't just me. The photographer's assistant found a dead mouse in the bathroom and I am told they debated putting it in her handbag as a revenge attack. (This is why I'm not posting the name of the mag or the hotel.)

She says she doesn't like the internet. Fingers crossed.

i don't think she was, she just sang on top of the track's vocals - its got self-harmonies etc.

Also, why would lip-syncing be against the rules? At this point I consider lip-syncing a form of protest.

from The Fly interview:

ALISON GOLDFRAPP SPEAKS

About anything bar music, please

Small, adorning a Burberry cum Diesel, Trilby hat, pinkie brown tweed trousers, there was something about Alison that struck you as gentrified but also consciously urban trendy.

Alison Goldfrapp was found quivering in an extremely cold and dingy building out on the Harrow Road, North London that shockingly, houses her label, Mute Records. It's a surprisingly run down place that had taken its décor from the pseudo industrial feel of the Hacienda crossed with a meat factory in Scunthorpe. Small, adorning a Burberry (you know, that beige Tartan stuff) cum Diesel, Trilby hat, pinkie brown tweed trousers, there was something about Alison that struck you as gentrified but also consciously urban trendy. Stuck in the middle of the city and the countryside you might say, and definitely trying to find middle ground between the extremes in her personality.
From first impressions you begin to think that she probably has little time for most people, appears nonchalant, unperturbed and indifferent to the people that surround her. Distinctly unimpressed by the day's affairs, she seems to enter the interview with a clear view to ending it as quick as is humanly possible.
Opening with a question about their 'comfortingly' entitled debut album Felt Mountain, Alison, with a fiery expression on her face, darted in before I could finish. "Talking about what we do. I don't like it. It just feels like every time I do it, I lose another part of what I do." At this point I offer to either leave politely or ask her if she'd rather talk about something else entirely. After what seemed like an entirety, a tight grin broke into an actual smile. She continued, "It's just fucking bizarre talking about music and analyse something that you've just finished. It's such a tangible thing and we're tearing it to pieces."
Instead of sitting in a cold London studio with the rain pouring outside, I ask Alison where she would rather be. "I'd like to live on a mountain in Switzerland. I'd like to make honey, I'd like to have bees on the mountain. I'd like to be a naturist, walk round with a rucksack on my back making honey...I don't know. Or being in a room of rabbits playing piano all day" Now, this isn't the first time that someone has suggested that to me, so I'm not finding that comment particularly strange. Being someone who is obviously quite visual, I ask Alison whether her time at Art College ('I know the biog says Art College but it was really Middlesex Uni') influenced her career choice and if she ever thought about exploring the possibility of working in film. "No, I think I would be terrible, I would constantly be changing my mind. And it would be completely stupid. I started out painting and I was crap at it so I thought I should start thinking about getting music involved, because that's what I know about really." She expands and all of a sudden starts to talk about how she got involved in music and the process that has brought her to where she is today. "I just started bumming around in bands and one thing led to another, I was quite determined but then I spent two years singing with a dance company in Belgium and it was a good learning experience for me. It opened me up to something completely different. And then I got bored of that and went to college and did performance type stuff, but I always knew I wouldn't carrying on doing it. I always wanted to do music. I wanted to do something accessible and immediate, I didn't really want to do art, it wasn't for me."
Alison has been involved in many collaborations, with the most notable being Tricky and a stint singing on his first album, Maxinquaye. "That was just accident again, um...I did something with Orbital, I met them at a party and they were kind of a friend of a friend and their company wanted to manage me. They asked me, what are you into? I'd heard this bloke Tricky on the radio; I think it was Aftermath before it was properly released. I thought yeah, I'm really into that and I can imagine doing something with this person. Amazingly they revealed that they managed him." Amazing, eh? "I sent him something and he invited me over to his house and it went from there. Then I went on tour with him before Martina was around. After two years it did my head in. How do you sing someone else's songs and be yourself? It's too much. I sort of lost my way. I completely forgot what I was meant to be doing. Then it took me another two years, before I started again."
Although Alison appears to be forthcoming, you can tell from the look in her eyes that she doesn't actually want to be here and there's no getting away from the fact that she is completely negative about everything she had achieved in her life, whether it be the Belgian dance troupe, recording and touring with Tricky or her efforts at 'art school'. The conversation ends with her saying, 'well, that wasn't too bad really...quite a short day' and you realise that Alison Goldfrapp really ought to start being a little more positive about her life, otherwise she'll be misinterpreted as a miserable bitch.

Nicola Slade

AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAAHHAHA. my album of the year so far, btw

Fuck Carling though, I hate all that "we will decide what you will drink" shit - not even any Guinness...grrr.

i couldn't work out what the song they started the second encore with was until j0e deduced correctly it was their cover of Baccara's 'Yes Sir I Can Boogie'! formidable. and 'Pilots (On A Star)' remains the great Bond theme that never was.

sorry we didn't meet charlie, i'll make more effort next time.

The ticker tape end bit is a glorious move.

This Narnia chic must be stopped!*

*by "stopped", of course, I mean "actively encouraged"....