ALISON MOYET: Yaz, Alf & Other Three-Letter Words

ALISON MOYET: Yaz, Alf & Other Three-Letter Words

FEATURES

by

Sylvie Simmons

"Big Pop Star." Alison Moyet stares into her tonic water; the ice obliges by crack ing with emphasis. “It seems to have become quite an obses sion lately with everybody that’s interviewed me, my size. Things like, ‘Did you ever feel you might not be able to cope because you’re a Big Woman?’ —you know, that tends to get a bit aggravating.” Fair enough. No one asks Mick Jag ger how he copes with being a Little Man. “That’s right. It’s OK to sit and write what you look like if people don’t know—’’ Big. Big up (pushing six-foot), big around the middle (baby due to pop out at any se cond), big dress (black, loose and bosom-hiding, bigger than her size calls for; 15 homeless families could canip in it and still have friends over for din her). “It’s just the angle they often take is like I became a singer because I suffered a lot in my childhood or something because I was big. And as it was, I was never particularly overweight as a child anyway, it's only something that came on after I left school, really. You think there must be some other angle that they can write about, something that’s a little bit more interesting about me than the fact that I eat too much or I'm overweight or some-

OK, I'll give it a try. Could be Moyet’s a figurehead in the return to romanticism in an increasingly conservative country; after all, it’s not really on, an artist in his garret alone with his thoughts and his DX7jMaybe it’s a class-struggle thing, because these synthesizers are rich-boy tools, most of the successful synth-pop bands are comfortably off, and here’s working-class Alison using her voice to pull herself up out of Industrial Hell. Which, paradoxically, goes right along with MagThatcher’s Work Ethic—with a synthesizer you get instant m. Then again she could st be part of some big organic ■ British reaction against the silicon chip, just bigger and more organic than most. (When she’s not writing songs about ‘emotional politics,” you’ll find her feeding her cats and mucking out the chickens.) Some angles to be getting on with; but none of them detract from the simple truth that Alison Moyet is big—first as the singing half of electro-pop duo Yazoo (you knew them as Yaz), then as the pop star with the hit solo album (after her former nickname) now as a jazz-blues singer with “That Ole Devil Called Love.” She’s „ a nice woman, Alison, smart and sen/ sibte, and talks at the speed of Concorde with an MX enema.

was around the time when Biondie was big.„f went through a long time when i hated the way I looked. When you’re younger you pick up magazines and you see that women are supposed to look like this of be like that and you’re supposed to want to get married and have babies as soon as you leave school— that’s what it was like where I grew up —and that never went along with my way of thinking. I’ve always been what I am, and so I’ve always made the most of what I’ve got and what I don’t have.”

Where Alison grew up was Basildon, a concrete, confor---—Basildon, a concrete, conformist Industrial New Town, halfway between London and seaside, “an overflow from the East End of London—after war when a lot of places were made derelict and stuff, they just had to build up these quick towns all around the outside, and Basildon was one of them. It’s very concrete, but it’s nicely situated, and I actually enjoyed living there. I lived there 23 years of my life. But to anybody else, to look at it, there’s no future for anybody, just a couple of factories and even those are closing down." Biggest local sport was shopping for discounts on engagement rings. Or for the few lost souls, going punk. Like Alison, who looked like something the cat dragged in and sounded remarkably similar at the time—singing in pubs (when she wasn’t chucked out for looking funny), in parking lots, outside chip shops, with buskers, playing guitar and singing angry songs about poverty, the Government and the like. Once she realized she could hold a tune, her sights turned to the lights of Canvey Island, and the seaside resorts where men were men and participated in manly bands—rough, tough R&B. She ended up in one, could have had a glorious career in the Screaming Abdabs, only they chucked her out when peer pressure dictated they should have a beer-bellied man who could play harmonica up front; either that or a cutesier female.

TURN TO PAGE 53

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 37

So she put an ad in the local paper, looking for a singing job. Vince Clarke, one-time member of Depeche Mode, the very Beatles Of Basildon themselves, the city’s most famous pop band, answered it. “...And said, ‘would you like to make a record?’ And I said ‘Oh yeah...?’ He was actually the first person I met in all those years who did what he said he was going to do, which was quite a shock for me. I was a bit naive then—from the age of 15, 16, I played in different bands on different pub circuits and stuff, and a couple of times I got really taken in by people, certain people come down to the gigs and say ‘I’m a manager’ or ‘I’m the executive of this record company and we’re going to do this and that’ and you used to get so excited by it; you wouldn’t go out for a week, you’d sit waiting on this telephone call and they never, ever rang.”

And then there was Vince, skinny, bristly little Vince, who looked like he either needed looking after or locking up, with his trusty synthesizer. Not exactly the blues band she’d advertised for.

“But Vince was quite open to things. The only thing he was set in his ways in was the way he used his instruments—sounds nice doesn’t it!” Dirty laugh. “But material-wise he was willing to try anything. The only reason we didn’t do more blues is that for me blues was still sacrilegious, the idea of singing blues with a synthesizer. But since then I’ve taken the blinkers off. I realize I was just narrow-minded about music—everything me and my mates from Basildon were doing was right, and everything that everybody else was doing was wrong, and that was just like a really sick attitude. After working with Vince, I realize were so many different things you could do and you could enjoy everything.”

She’d intended the collaboration as a oneoff, “so I’d have a demo and I could go off and have a better pick of musicians.” But fate was to boot her in another direction. “One week I was at college and the next week they’re flying me off to do television.”

When the Press were chasing Yaz down the street like dogs in season, it was Alison doing most of the running—the promotion, the interviews, the photo sessions, the traveling, “not the best side of being in the music business,” while Vince got to tinker around in his studio. That’s why Yaz broke up, she says—not her ego, not the money, none of that. “It just felt to me it wasn’t 100 percent fair that I should be doing all the hard slog on my own. Also there were some people we were working with at the time that I didn’t particularly trust in a lot of ways, and they came out with some very nasty comments when we suggested we might call it a day. I was in a hotel room on my own and I got a phone call from one bloke saying that if I give up Yazoo I’d fall on my face, nobody would want me, my career would be over, I might as well thank my lucky stars that Vince ever picked up on me and stay where I was. So I thought well bollocks, if I’m going to flop then I’ll do it on my own, and if I’m going to work hard then it’s going to be for me and my own and not for people who obviously don’t care about me.”

Things didn’t exactly start with a bang. There were legal hassles, throat problems, a period of serious pissed-offness.

When she came back, it was with a husband, Malcolm Lee, her old Basildon boyfriend and now her manager, and an album called Alf—the nickname Alison earned for the more so-called masculine aspects of her character; like blowing record company advances on a motorcycle and sidecar.

She’s already thinking about the second album. Thinking “I find singing comes quite naturally. I think the reason I became a singer is probably because I’m so lazy at everything else that I did it because it didn’t involve too much work! But songwriting isn’t so easy, unless I’m under pressure. I know I’ll say to you, ‘right, after the baby’s born I’ll sit down and write an album,’ and I’ll sit there with pen and paper and I won’t write anything until two weeks before the album is due to be recorded and suddenly it’ll come out. I can only work under pressure.” Hmm. Was having the baby a way of being able to opt out for a while and take the pressure off herself? “No!” she laughs. “Not at all. It was a bit of a surprise,” the pregnancy. “I don’t think it’s really going to affect anything, even touring. I don’t intend to get a nanny or anything—but my husband travels everywhere with me, so I think between the two of us we can carry the workload. I think the only time I won’t be able to care for the child is the actual half-hour I’m onstage or the actual time I’m doing an interview. Most of my time is spent like traveling really, so I think we’ll be able to cope quite easily.” A big beam of a smile. Not exactly the manic-depressive Janis Joplin figure some (there’s been tales in the press of her cutting chunks off her hair, hence the hat and hoods in the videos, in sheer Joplinesque misery) would have her be.

Over a drink the other night I did a quick survey amongst my pals on the subject of Alison MoyeL Women liked her, it seemed to reveal; men generally didn’t.

“I hadn’t noticed that. During Yazoo the following seemed to be more female, but during my last tour I noticed a lot more men in the audience. So long as there’s an audience somewhere I don’t care about their genitalia or anything!” Maybe she scares off the men by using words like ‘genitalia.’ Female singers are meant to be coy and polite. “Absolutely! But I only write songs the way I would speak. I’m quite brazen really, so I don’t see any need to be that way lyrically. If they’re scared of me, that’s their problem, if a woman scares a man by speaking about her own sexuality. Maybe it’s good for them to be a little more aware of woman’s sexuality—it seems that men have always been so concerned with their own!”

Malcolm pops upstairs. The interview’s drawing to a close. The future? She wouldn’t mind being the next David Bowie, wouldn’t mind doing a duet with Paul Young, but will probably settle for having a baby by summer and an album by Christmas.

“I take things as they come. If I started looking too far ahead, I get to feel too trapped by it all. I feel like I’m in a big tunnel and there’s a spot of light 20 miles away and every time you go for it it always stays the same distance away. I tell Malcolm to only tell me what I’m doing the next day, or at the very most the next week, and that’s it. I never like to know too far ahead.” %