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Alison Moyet- Punk, Pop Idols and Basildon Badlands - Skrufff.com

Reported by Tristan Ingram on May 6, 2008

“I knew the Depeche lot from school; me and Fletcher and Martin Gore were in the same year at school and we had a few classes together, Maths and German. Vince went to a different school so I knew him less than the others, and Dave (Gahan) I knew from college.”

Growing up alongside Depeche Mode on the rough and tumble streets of late 70s South East Essex former hardcore punk singer turned international pop superstar Alison Moyer admits she was always more than capable of handling rival gangs.
 
“There was a strong punk scene in Basildon at the time, then you also had the rival teds (teddy boys) and rival skinheads and we’d have people almost posted on corners, like sentries looking out for each other. So you might get from one corner a warning ‘skins coming’, stuff like that.” she recalls.

“Maybe it was because of the way I looked- I had my hair pretty shaved and was considered quite hard at the time- but I was able to front them quite well,” she chuckles, “With all those kind of people you have to look as hard as them to get by. I don’t mean to sound lairy but they didn’t really mess with me.”

30 years later, Alison is better known as one of Britain’s greatest contemporary singers, off the back of a singular career that started with early 80s electro pop pioneers Yazoo and developed exponentially after she went solo in 1983. ‘A bit of a face locally’ in Essex in 1980, her life would change irrevocably, however, when she’d come to the attention of Vince Clarke, the then main song writer of Depeche Mode who’d quit the band after two singles just as mainstream success beckoned. When Depeche rejected Clarke’s offer of one last song as a parting gift, he looked around for a singer to help him record it himself, auditioning Alison off the back of her punk credentials with bands including The Vandals and the Screamin' Ab Dabs.

“Vince was still raw after having left Depeche Mode and you can imagine how he felt on his own after being part of a gang with his mates. He’d written a song ‘Only You’ that he wanted to record and he knew of me in Basildon, because he’d come from the same town,” she explains.

“My guitar player in the punk band I was playing in at the time was his best mate and I was a bit of a face locally. He was looking for a very different voice than he’d found in Dave Gahan and he knew of me so he asked me to demo this song with him. I demo-ed it in his flat and he called me up a week later saying he’d played it to the record company and they wanted to record and release it,” says Alison.

Teaming up with Clarke to form Yazoo, the duo became instant hugely successful pop stars within months, enjoying worldwide hits with both Only You and proto club tracks Situation and Only You, going on to release two equally successful albums, Upstairs At Erics and You & Me Both. However, before You & Me Both was even released, they already announced they were splitting, leaving Moyet to go solo and Clarke to form the Assembly and then Erasure (with then unknown singer Andy Bell). 25 years later, they’ve recently reformed to play a series of live dates around the world, with both albums re-issued by Mute and Alison and Vince carrying out extensive interviews to promote the reunion. And chatting to Skrufff, she admits she’s enthusiastic about turning the clock back.  

“|t was easy to say yes to doing Yazoo again and it was easy because I’d been wanting to do it for a long time,” she admits.

“When you’ve been singing for the amount of time I have you’re encouraged, not only by other people, but also by yourself, to look over your back catalogue and that was one area I could never dip into because the electronica was such an important element of it. Stripping it away from that would have turned it into some kind of nasty karaoke event. The second album has never ever been performed live, this reunion isn’t about going back and revisiting it’s about doing it for the first time.”


Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Fans will know every single nuance and chord change and phrase of their favourite songs, will you be trying to replicate the songs in their original form as much as possible?

Alison Moyet: “The songs will be updated very slightly but that’s just because the old technology was too unstable to take it out on tour. But it’s not like I’ve been performing the Yazoo stuff for so many years I’ve got tired and had to start finding new ways to approach it; the very fact it’s the first time is reason enough to keep it as pure as possible. There are elements within the singing that I will be altering very slightly but in general it’ll be quite a true rendition.”

Skrufff: I guess you won’t have time to play every track in each show, how are you deciding which ones to exclude?

Alison Moyet: “Vince doesn’t want to sing so that gets rid of Happy People, I don’t like ‘The Other Side Of Love’ so we won’t do that; other than those two it’s pretty much the lot.”

Skrufff: Zazoo seemed to split extremely suddenly when you were at the height of your success, what happened?

Alison Moyet: “We planned to do just one single ‘Only You’ then we recorded ‘Don’t Go’ for a B side but it was too good for a B Side so we had to put that on the side, then we recorded Situation for the B Side which was still too good for a B Side but we had no choice. And then before we knew it, we were sparking off each other so much creatively that everyone was telling us ‘you’ve just got to carry on recording’. The minute we got in the studio we were working, there was no down time, no getting pissed down the pub, no philosophising together. We were working 20 hour days and by the time we’d finished making the album we were already famous. Only You was a hit everywhere so when the shit hit the fan in the sense that I’d gone from being this dark horse to being an incredibly recognised pop singer that couldn’t go anywhere without getting slightly mobbed, it was a bit freaky. He wasn’t in the same head space as me and there wasn’t any internal support for ether of us, we hadn’t built up a relationship or a place where we could be partisan together so it all just fell apart.”

Skrufff: How did that creative spark between you both come about?

Alison Moyet: “We wrote the songs separately; it was like we were two separate people working on the same project, There was no template beforehand it would be literally him giving me a melody and me singing it in whichever way I felt like singing it. Songs were written, recorded and mixed in three days, it was a quick procession with no debate and no analysing. We never played each other music or records or had a game plan, it all just happened. Those songs that Vince wrote wouldn’t have been the same with a different singer and the songs I wrote wouldn’t have been the same with a different programmer.”

Skrufff: You solo career continued pretty seamlessly after Yazoo split, was that a similar creative roll?

Alison Moyet: “It was an odyssey, At the end of Yazoo I had a bit of a breakdown, and I got manoeuvred into a solo career by lawyers and accountants and to be honest I was a bit disassociated from everything at that point. When I first started working on the first album with Swain and Jolly it was a continuation of what I’d known as a kid; I didn’t feel any pressure or any sense of direction particularly, we were just writing. ‘All Cried Out’, for example, was done at the kitchen table in half an hour- again it was a really quick process without any sense of career or thoughts that anything you did would pin you down. That became a later realisation after I’d had a massive album; I thought, ‘oh fuck, people think they know who I am musically’. When I recognised those shackles that’s when it really disorientated me, because I felt I was known as being something completely different to what I felt I know myself to be.”

Skrufff: I understand you had stage fright, did that develop?

 Alison Moyet: “Yeah it did, I’d been playing on stage since I was 15 or 16, playing in punk bands and pub rock bands, which was very much the scene that waas going on in South East Essex then. There was quite a dirty sub-culture going on, with bands like Dr Feelgood and I was never intimidated by that scene at all. I think my problem came because I’d always played in bands and had no desire to be a solo singer then suddenly I was in this really odd position. There’s no-one that you’re there with feeling the same.”

Skrufff: Did you find yourself very isolated?

Alison Moyet: “I was completely isolated and this was one of the difficult things with Yazoo. I’d never intended to be a pop star, that was never an ambition of mine and I’d cut myself off from this scene that I’d been a part of before Vincent. Where I came from having anything to do with the pop charts was ‘bad’. When I got together with Vincent, all of the contacts Yazoo had were his; so for any dialogue with the record company or publishers; Vince did it. When me and Vince fell apart I wasn’t connected with anybody. I could have called them up but it didn’t fell right. I was suddenly incredibly famous and didn’t know anybody and that was a really un-useful place for me to me at the time.”

Skrufff: What do you make of youth culture today?

Alison Moyet: “Alternative has become mainstream. In the late 70s there were the ‘normals’ then there were these sub sects which some of us belonged to. There was a whole alternative music scene whereas today alternative seems the norm. Middle of the road is actually fucking completely leftfield.”

Skrufff: What was your club scene like then?

Alison Moyet: “There was nothing, in my day there was no culture, no theatres, no clubs. Gigs were played in carparks, in youth clubs and top rooms of pubs. We didn’t have loads of money; our culture was magic mushrooms, getting smashed (drinking) and lots of speed. That’s what we were about.”

Skrufff: Did you hang out much with Depeche Mode then?

Alison Moyet: “Not really, Depeche started as a band a little later than us, I’d already been a part of the Basildon music scene since I was 16 and they were a slightly later generation to my lot. I’d been a part of the punk movement and they came slightly after, with the new romantics. My sensibilities were uglier at the time than how I perceived new romantics.”

Skrufff: How did you feel when Vince teamed up with Andy Bell and started Erasure?

Alison Moyet: “Firstly, my solo career hit the ground running and Vince’s stalled for a while so in terms of competitiveness I didn’t feel jealous on that level. Where I did feel jealous was the way that Andy was able to have a longevity with someone who I felt creatively I was in a good place with. I think Erasure are really talented people but they’re more pop keen that I was, I was never a great pop fan and never a clubber. The music they were making was not where I wanted to go musically but I did feel jealous of the fact that he was in a band and I was solo.”

Skrufff: Looking back is there anything you could have done differently to have not had a breakdown?

Alison Moyet: “I don’t know I think I was always heading for that, I was always a bit disaffected and a bit odd. It was always that way with me. The biggest mistake I ever made was to sign to a major label but it all happened so quickly and I was only 21 at the time. I got taken over by suits really, and if I’d been a little more savvy or had more people around me at the time, I don’t think that would have happened.”

Skrufff: What do you make of today’s Pop Idol culture?

Alison Moyet: “I watched Pop Idol on occasion over the years but it’s not a passion of mine. I don’t relate it to music or see it as part of the music industry, it dabbles in notes and chords but it’s not creative in the way that I recognise creativity. That’s OK, it’s just a different thing that’s not designed to interest me and it doesn’t.”

Skrufff: How much do you still identify with the term ‘punk’?

Alison Moyet: “In a sense that I’ve always felt different, yes. Punk suited me then because I grew up in Basildon, coming from a French family, my dad was from peasant stock; we were physically hardier. He was a communist and we never had aspirations that were above nature, if you know what I mean. As such I never had designs to become rich or to spend my life beautifying myself or to buy shoes and dresses. That attitude stayed with me.”

Skrufff: What do you make of all these people today on reality TV shoes and the like who want to be famous?

Alison Moyet: “I think they do not know what they wish for. I think most people imagine fame to be something that it isn’t, they think that being famous, as we all did when we were younger, is being admired, being loved and being, you know, a nice seat on the bus. That’s not what it is. Maybe for people who aspire to being looked at and puppied (mollycoddled) for 12 months that’s good enough for them. I always saw fame as the downside (of success); I always thought the exchange was negative. For somebody who never had a taste in expensive handbags, money for fame is quite a poor exchange.”

Yazoo tour shortly.

http://www.myspace.com/yazoomusic

Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)