After past glam excesses, Goldfrapp are turning to nature for inspiration. Jude Rogers heads for their country retreat and hears why they are English eccentrics at heart
Friday January 25, 2008
As our taxi climbs through the rolling Wiltshire hills, a picture-perfect valley unfurls below, all sun-brightened and dreamy. This is Goldfrapp country. Within the folds of this landscape, four different houses have been temporarily turned into writing and recording spaces for their albums over the years. But this time round, and for the very first time, the rural world in which these records have grown perfectly matches the music Goldfrapp have made.
Up a long country lane, a smiling, affable Will Gregory opens the broad oak doors to his home. Alison Goldfrapp appears sternly in the hall, her curls fizzing away from her head. But as she leads us into the house, her heart-shaped face starts to soften.
This is the first house they've used that hasn't been rented; Gregory recently bought it for himself and his family. Goldfrapp slowly walks into the main room and starts to tell us about it. "Look over here - we can see outside." She moves across a huge white space full of analogue synthesisers, vinyl albums and tea mugs, before pausing by the floor-to-ceiling windows. She looks at the oranges, reds, greens and browns of the leaves, then her face does something it rarely does in photographs or on stage: it breaks into the broadest of smiles. "And isn't it lovely? And all because we had a feeling this time round that we really needed to get in touch with nature."
And get in touch with it they do. Following the artful sauce of 2003's electronic Black Cherry and 2005's glam-rocking Supernature, their new album's pastoral softness and lush English whimsy will surprise plenty of people. The Seventh Tree shares a gentleness with their debut album, 2000's Felt Mountain, but many assumed the band's creative trajectory up to now had been like the journey of a brash, flashy butterfly leaving its chrysalis behind. After The Seventh Tree, a carnal analogy works much better. Felt Mountain plays like the band's first gasps, Black Cherry some twitchy foreplay and Supernature a glitzy rollercoaster of full-blown filthiness. The Seventh Tree, then - languorous, woozy, breathless. It's Goldfrapp's postcoital album.
"Yes! It's true!" Goldfrapp laughs honkily, slapping her stripy-jumpered stomach like a sailor. "Sexual, sensual - I think I swing one way or the other, you know." Gregory, far less the shy, retiring person you'd expect given his reluctance to share the limelight on stage with his bandmate, jiggles his mug of tea in agreement. "It's much more about smocks than mini-skirts this time to my mind. Perhaps even woolly ones."
As The Seventh Tree unfurls, though, you wonder whether any other factors might have prompted this change in direction. After all, the past two years have been strange ones for Goldfrapp, the group. A duo who have always been more focused on their music as art than as pop, Supernature's commercial success in the UK and Goldfrapp's growing star status must have brought new irritations. And so it turned out: firstly, in the way in which she was being increasingly perceived in relation to Gregory.
"There seemed to be this epidemic," she says. "All these interviewers, especially in Europe, desperate to fit us into the roles of svengali and chanteuse. One bloke made me really angry saying we were like the Pet Shop Boys." But that's not a peculiar analogy: after all, Goldfrapp are a two- person outfit who make their music together, but present themselves as a showperson and a silent partner. "But that's not what he meant! He meant - and he sang to me to prove it - 'I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money!' I was absolutely ****ing horrified!" A smirk plays on her lips, revealing a devilish sort who relishes a nicely placed swearword.
Then there was the problem of Goldfrapp's glamorous stage persona. Her peacock tails, fancy hats, red Lolita sunglasses and fringed bell bottoms not only got the fashion magazines frothing, but also turned the heads of two premier league female pop icons. In the last few months, we've seen Kylie Minogue's comeback single, 2 Hearts, its accompanying video, and their evident debt to the glammy Goldfrapp of Ooh La La, while back in November 2005, Madonna's shocking pink leotard on the cover of Confessions On a Dance Floor bore a remarkable similarity to a certain someone's shocking pink shorts suit in the video to Number 1.
"Oh yeah, Oldfrapp." Alison's eyes make a leap for the ceiling. "Yeah, that was weird. But I definitely wasn't cavorting like her." However, they met by chance at a party, and Goldfrapp is at pains to point out that Madonna was "very nice".
She is less complimentary about the fashion crowd that fixed upon her as their hot thing. "Thing is, I really haven't got any Elle ... style ... tips." She spits the words out like bullets. "People asking me, 'Ooh, do you wear nine-inch heels on Oxford Street?' And when I'd be, 'No, I wear jeans and a pair of trainers,' they'd be all disappointed. Or I'd be in a shop in Bond Street, and the sales assistant would blank me, then see my name on my credit card and go, 'Wahhhh! Oh My God!'" She shakes her head like a schoolmarm. "I mean, I love talking about shoes, but the only reason the shoes are there is because they're part of something else."
In retrospect, she admits, Supernature inadvertently created a monster. "People expected me to be this pop dominatrix all the bloody time, and I got quite uncomfortable with that in the end. If I turned up at an aftershow party without my costume on, for instance, people would gasp at me in horror, and that isn't nice. I mean, we weren't creating a person, we were dramatising the music. But suddenly, without me even wanting it, I became part of this trashy magazine world where everyone's too thin or too fat or too old if they're past 25, where everything's WRONG! RIGHT! WRONG! I mean, I don't go strutting around the house in my bloody horse tail shouting 'How ya doing, London?' at the neighbours, do I?" She shrugs. "Thank God that this time, the emphasis is elsewhere."
Nevertheless, The Seventh Tree is not from an entirely different planet to Supernature. It's also inspired by music from the 1970s, but the softer end of psychedelic pop rather than glam-rock. The band craved a sound that was woozy and hypnotic, and after the album title came to Goldfrapp in a dream, everything else followed suit.
"It had to be heady, like you'd hear it by accident down a corridor in a slightly echoey room," Gregory explains. "It had to have an effect like music in spaghetti westerns, like when a child gets shot in the head and suddenly there's a major chord. It had to combine beauty and darkness."
But, despite the American references, the record still sounds indelibly English. Gregory puts it down to their music not having its roots in blues, but I fancy it's more than that. It's the deadpan-meets-Carry On humour that crackles through the album. It's the way in which Edward Lear's nonsense poetry finds a new home in the song Little Bird, which features a crow with mouths for eyes. It's in the Moogs, Mellotrons and Optigans that bring to mind the terribly English electronica of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and when Syd Barrett haunts the album's more psychedelic corners.
There's also a sense of cracked innocence threading itself through these sounds. In the process of songwriting, Gregory and Goldfrapp remembered music from their childhoods - spooky soundtracks to children's programmes, strange sci-fi shows and public information clips. "It was that era that everyone thought the world was going to blow up," Goldfrapp says. "Either the bomb would get you or the rabies."
As children, both Goldfrapp and Gregory were exposed to classical music, thanks to their parents. Gregory's mother, a teacher, encouraged him to take up the cello and oboe, whereas Goldfrapp's father took a more hands-on approach, making his children sit and listen to a symphony or sonata then make them discuss it afterwards.
Gregory was an only child, and as Goldfrapp was the youngest by 12 years, she adds, she often felt like an only child, too. "I suppose we both had parents who encouraged our imaginations and left us alone with our imaginations, and it's hard not to go back to that." Neither of them got into pop music until college, which underlines how different Goldfrapp are from conventional pop groups - though the CDs lining the rehearsal room walls suggest they're catching up.
Another unlikely musical experience influenced The Seventh Tree, Goldfrapp continues: a 2006 acoustic session for Radio 1's Jo Whiley. "We were very against playing them before it - one, because we're not an acoustic band and, two, because people often want to hear you unplugged as they think that validates your status as musicians, which we're very anti. But we were so desperate to take our music down a few notches, we went sort of, unggh, nyaaargh, oh-kaaaay." Goldfrapp sounds like a grumpy teenager. "And then - ha! - we loved it."
But why continue with a one-off experiment that they were at first reluctant to embrace? Because, they say, rule-breaking is Goldfrapp's number one priority, even if they lose fans in the process. Still, they hope people will come along for the ride - though their pre-album antics have hardly been models of ruthless marketing. Two video messages appeared on the band's website in December, one featuring Goldfrapp dressed as a post-operative bunny and Gregory as a tree, and both featuring Goldfrapp singing a song that rhymed the words "baby Jesus" with the line, "he's not a foetus". Not quite the same as "I need ooh la la la la".
But what's the point in making music if you don't try something new, Gregory counters. "Music-making to us is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and working hard in the wilderness until that moment when you go 'Ah!' I can't understand people who just do the same thing and get stuck in a rut. To us, it's all about starting again - and who wouldn't want to get that buzz again?"
Goldfrapp uses a more natural analogy. "This way of working is just in our water, isn't it?" Her eyes wander again to the trees waving outside in the wind and the corners of her lips start to lift once more. "Or rather, it's part of our nature. And once something's part of your nature, you can never get rid of it. You just have to embrace it."
NO! 
