"It was a tree with the number seven on it. It
was a very beautiful tree, with big branches, swaying, a bit like seaweed
underwater. And I woke up in the morning and decided that's it, that's
the name of the album." Alison Goldfrapp looks faintly embarrassed
as she describes the christening of Goldfrapp's fourth album, 'Seventh
Tree'. Will Gregory, her partner in crime, smiles reassuringly: "If
Alison dreams it, it's fate."
The last time we saw Goldfrapp, they were the consummate disco beasts,
wielding the subversive sound of stylised seventies glamour with a whipcrack
of erotica and a lick of British humour that they had distilled over
the course of three albums: 'Felt Mountain' (2000) 'Black Cherry' (2003)
and 'Supernature' (2005). From the sweep of 'Lovely Head' to the thrust
of 'Ooh La La', theirs was a sound that was impeccably conceived and
thrillingly ambitious, an explosion of glitter balls, electronica, dancefloors
and lust, bolstered by live performances that featured tassled dancers
and disco horses.
Now they return with 'Seventh Tree', an album that confounds all that
went before; warm and sensual and shimmering, it is the sound of a very
British delirium, echoing the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear and the
eccentricities of early Pink Floyd. Recorded in a 1960s bungalow in
Bath, it was a conscious move to step away from the Weimar-esque strutting
of earlier work and explore a more psychedelic terrain. "We kept
saying 'it's got to be more psychedelic, more psychedelic'," recalls
Will. "And neither of us knew what that meant actually. I think
it was our word for describing something that had a sort of dreamy,
rural feeling to it but had also a darkness." "We've always
talked about films like the Wicker Man," adds Alison, "films
that were very English and quite dark, with elements of paganism, but
with a humour to them - a very British humour. So it's this combination
of the naive English folkiness with a bit of horror and Californian
sunshine thrown in."
Alison and Will met in 1999, united by a love of the avant-garde, Add
N To (X) and Scott Walker. They swapped tapes and books and letters,
pushing boundaries and testing each other a little, to see if their
tastes were strong enough to hold their combined weight. When they set
about making music together their sound was born effortlessly, and grew
quickly from wide-screen electronica to disco-stomp. It was strange,
symbolic, compelling, a collage of Roxy Music, science fiction and wolves
heads and, perhaps weary of the stolid indie-rock of Oasis and their
peers, audiences became quite slavishly devoted to Goldfrapp. They were
soon feted across Europe and the US, their music seized upon by both
film and television, their videos adored, and swiftly gained a reputation
for being one of the most thrilling live bands in existence.
'Seventh Tree' was recorded over a much longer period than any of their
earlier records, a conscious decision after the intensity of touring,
and the desire to create something tangibly different. "It's more
of a left-hand turn," says Will. "Our heads were bursting
with 'Supernature' after the tour. And we thought wouldn't it be lovely
just to have a nice empty space? Not all this revved-up musical intensity.
And when you think of an empty space you sometimes think of someone
just strumming a guitar, gathered around a campfire. The problem is
neither of us play a guitar."
Renowned for the privacy of their working methods, on 'Seventh Tree',
Will and Alison not only brought in Flood for co-production, but also
added other musicians to the mix, such as harp-player Ruth Wall, who
brought in a steel-strung harp designed in the 1600s, and which they
sampled on the track 'Road To Somewhere'. "I'd never heard a sound
like it," says Alison. "It's almost like a sitar. You imagine
harps to be angelic but this nasty gritty sound came out." "Very
often sounds are very good ways to start writing, they're very inspiring,"
explains Will. "That's been the story of this album. Having real
players come in really helped it whereas before it's been created painstakingly
and rather inorganically."
A particularly unusual instrument appears on the track 'Eat Yourself'.
"It was a thing that was made by Mattel called an Optigon, it's
a toy but a very sophisticated organ, that runs on these tiny little
optical discs, that are little loops of sound. In this case it was a
lovely folky guitar pick, but it completely wobbles because it was made
in the 60s and was very much degraded. And then Alison did this kind
of scatting over it, what you hear is the first thing she did, it was
something I hadn't really heard her do before. We thought it sounded
like a cross between the New Seekers and Emmanuel."
Many of the tracks began in a flurry of musical and lyrical jamming.
"People automatically assume that because we use synthesizers and
programmed sound there isn't any of that process," says Alison.
"But it's a bit of a myth really. People have this thing that it's
not a real instrument because it's a keyboard, because it's an electronic
sound it doesn't involve skill or thought. And that's totally wrong,
it's just a very different quality in sound."
The fruits of their spontaneous jamming can be heard particularly on
tracks such as the opening 'Clowns', with its lyrics inspired by crash
TV, breast implants and the idea of being watched, and also on 'Cologne
Cerrone Houdini', a song which Alison says is "about being on a
journey with someone and realising that it ain't happening." A
lot of the songs are, she adds "musically and lyrically about going
somewhere."
Indeed 'Little Bird' is the story of a friend of Alison who "is
constantly moving around everywhere", while 'Caravan Girl', "is
about a girl with amnesia who wants to run off with a girl in a caravan,"
Lyrics that seemingly sprang from nowhere and were set against a deliciously
frenzied music. "It's a C major thing," says Will. "We
got into that rather poundingly happy feeling and it turned into this
church organ piece. But it's also bonkers. It's so relentlessly wide-eyed
grinningly poptastic production, everything painted with bright colours…
there's something sick and wonderful about it as well."
Other journeys take them to LA, a city that "I like for three days,
in a kind of TV car crash way," says Alison. "After that I
find it quite disturbing." Accordingly, 'Monster Love's lyrics
conjure heartbreak and the mad shallowness of Hollywood.
Not all of the journeys are literal. 'Happiness' is more a kind of head-trip,
an exploration of the ways we seek to be happy. "We just worked
it into a slightly nutty piece" says Alison. "We were trying
to give it a slightly psychedelic, slightly natty, almost delirious
sound."
With the album ready, Goldfrapp are now trying to devise a way to translate
their hazy English psychedelia to the stage. "The musical and the
visual, they're inseparable to me," says Alison. "When you
talk about sound, it has an atmosphere and it has a feeling and colours
and character." She smiles a little wickedly. "So I'm imagining
maybe scantily clad Morris Dancers in ribbons and flowers, pole dancing
round maypoles…"
'Seventh Tree' is out now.
