GOLDEN GIRL
Alison Goldfrapp gets to write music, tour the world, and play dress-up for a living. Lucky.
Alison Goldfrapp: singer, composer, costume designer? Apparently.
Goldfrapp’s frontperson (and namesake) invited us backstage to check out her outfits for the band’s North American tour, and then sat down with us to talk design. Voyeurism has never looked--or sounded--prettier.
I’ve heard so much about your costumes this tour—did you design them yourself?
I kind of design everything. The only time I get a stylist is when I haven’t got time to do anything myself. I used to do all of it; I’d be trailing around the shop, buying stuff for the band, and then before a gig I’d be ironing people’s shirts.
What was the creative genesis behind the costumes on this tour?
It’s never really one thing that’s inspired me; it’s always a whole bunch of stuff. Before [Seventh Tree], we’d done this very high gloss, quite cold, slightly unreal album artwork that was inspired by fantasy. Whereas this time, I wanted things to be much warmer and to have more of a natural look.
I suppose I also wanted a sort of playfulness. Like, with the harlequin pattern, it’s an image that everyone knows, and it’s not particularly male or female. I think that’s something else that, this time around, I’m really liking. Before it was fairy, glamour, and feminine. This time I like the idea of having something that wasn’t really so in your face. I kind of wanted to get away from the tits, ass, heels thing.
Do you feel like that development stylistically is reflected sonically on Seventh Tree?
Definitely. For me, the images and the music are all very much a part of the same world. Music is visual, I think. And when you’re writing lyrics, they’re visual. So everything kind of evolves from each other.
Because you feel that music is so visual, do you prefer performing live to, say, recording?
Obviously the writing is something that I have to do. And the visual side of what we do wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for the writing. And the live part wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for that either. So I suppose the writing is the giving birth to the ideas, and that’s quite an amazing thing. I love playing live, although it’s not the most creative part in the process, because essentially you’re repeating something.
Although it does seem like you’re adding something, especially with the costumes.
I suppose it’s the audience that’s important because they make a gig. Essentially you’re doing the same thing, really, but every gig is completely different because the audience is completely different and the venue is completely different.
How was it dealing with the response to Seventh Tree, which was considered such a departure from your previous sound?
I try not to think about it too much. The easy route would have been to do another Supernature that was very commercially successful. It would have pleased a lot of people, I’m sure. But we consciously wanted to do something different. There’s no point in doing it if I stuck to a formula; you might as well just give that formula to someone else and have them do it. But also naturally you change, your feelings change, your moods change, and what you do musically is what is happening in your life at that time. My personal life changed hugely, and because of that my feelings about things changed a lot.
You’re always going to disappoint people. You’re either going to disappoint them because you did what you did before again, or you disappoint them because you’ve done something completely different and they go, “I don’t like it.” So you just have to go with your instincts and do what feels right.
REBECCA WILLA DAVIS
www.myspace.com/goldfrapp
This story was published on September 12, 2008.
