Dance's golden girl returns to the groove

Singer Alison Goldfrapp is the very model of a modern pop diva, finds FIONA STURGES.

The body language isn't good. Walking towards me in the oak-panelled lobby of her central London hotel, Alison Goldfrapp keeps her arms folded and her sunglasses on. Under the mass of corkscrew curls is the expression of someone who would rather be anywhere but here. If Goldfrapp's reputation is anything to go by, I'm in for a rough ride.

Her reported habit of tearing strips off any photographer she suspects of making her look less than her best suggests she is not to be messed with. As we walk to the lifts, however, she is quietly apologetic.

The promotional merry-go-round surrounding her new album is taking its toll, she says, and today she is feeling a little off-colour. Sitting cross-legged in an armchair 10 minutes later, a cup of coffee in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other, Goldfrapp is not especially threatening, it must be said.

What is immediately clear is that she finds interviews deeply uncomfortable. Her answers are peppered with lots of uneasy "um"s and "er"s. Often, having launched into a description of a particular sound or sensation, she will suddenly become embarrassed and leave the sentence hanging in the air.

She agrees that times have changed for Goldfrapp, the band she founded with the film composer Will Gregory in 1999. Their ethereal debut, Felt Mountain, released to little fanfare in 2000, is what the music industry calls a "slow burner".

It was a work of dense atmospherics and sweeping cinematic beauty. Critics swooned over Goldfrapp's voice and Gregory's lavish orchestration. After a sluggish start, the album went on to sell 600,000 copies and was nominated for the Mercury prize in 2001. Did she imagine it would be so successful?

"You have these fantasies about how everyone will love it, but then you have the nightmares that everyone is going to hate it," Goldfrapp replies, hesitantly. "At times it all seemed a bit unreal. Of course, it is nice to be acknowledged for what you do, although it has taken long enough."

The singer is in her 30s - she won't divulge her exact age, but I'd hazard a guess at 34. These days, a new Goldfrapp record is a major event and her time is not her own.

She is, however, excited by her second album, Black Cherry, a darkly eclectic and wilfully experimental work that has little in common with its predecessor.

The harpsichord and strings which haunted Felt Mountain have been replaced by buzzing synthesisers and propulsive electro grooves. "I guess the safe option would have been to produce something similar, but I wanted this album to have a different mood. It's a visual thing for me."

"I like to listen to music that takes me on a journey. It's like going to see a film. The best movies are the ones that make you forget about where you are. I'd feel I hadn't done the job properly if people couldn't conjure up mental pictures with the music."

Gregory and Goldfrapp met through a mutual friend who felt they would have a lot in common. "It was a real insight on her part," she says. "He was a godsend. Both of us have diverse musical backgrounds and we were both interested in hearing the same kind of sounds.

"I had spent a lot of time recording with boys who would listen to the same loop about a thousand times. I thought there must be more to music than sampling a loop. Will wasn't the slightest bit interested in all that stuff. With him I felt I could do absolutely anything."

Goldfrapp grew up in a small town in Hampshire, the daughter of bohemian parents who would drown out the surrounding neighbourhood with opera at weekends.

She refers to her teens as her "difficult phase" and although she won't go into the details, glue-sniffing and car theft were allegedly among her extra-curricular activities. At 16 she finally left school, and her parents, and headed for London.

She started doing poorly paid jobs and living in squats and bedsits. At 18, she decided to go to art school, where she developed a taste for performance art and a keen sense of theatre. Three years later a friend invited her to Antwerp to sing with a contemporary dance company.

"Those were quite formidable years," she recalls. "There was a lot of discipline involved. I learned a lot about how to use my voice and about sampling and using technology. It was a whole side of music that I hadn't been introduced to."

Returning to London, she was introduced to Orbital, the dance duo who later recruited her singing talents on their 1994 album Snivilisation. But it was with her subsequent collaboration with Tricky on his ground-breaking 1995 album Maxinquaye that she made her mark. "I learned a lot from him," she remembers.

After two years touring with Tricky and continued guest vocals on a series of dance records, Goldfrapp scouted around for a more long-term partner.

"I didn't want to sing my words on other people's music anymore. I would be giving too much of myself away to someone else and a part of me wanted to keep that back. I guess I also wanted to do something that felt more permanent, something people might remember me by."

Is she ambitious? "I'm not sure. My friends tell me I am. I suppose if I was really ambitious I would have gone off and signed a big record deal by now. There have been offers but it's never seemed right. Now I like to oversee everything. It's not about making a name for myself. I want it to be good and I want it to be right."

* Black Cherry is out now.

- INDEPENDENT