Alison Moyet
You might think you’ve never heard Alison Moyet, but regardless of your own aesthetics and means of engaging with music, that’s probably not the case. That would be putting aside more than four decades of elegant, passionate performances from an international icon based in the U.K. who’s had the occasional American success. No stranger to pop, dance or R&B charts the world over, her voice — distinctive, earthy, passionate, playful, creative — has too much power to be held only by the 1980s. Or by any one mode of outreach: Like James Brown, like Ofra Haza, Moyet has never been just a singer and performer. She’s a building block of sample culture, a piece of the foundation of countless genres, singles, vibes and movements.
Moyet’s laugh in “Situation” — the B-side to Yazoo’s “Only You,” the 1982 debut single from her synthpop duo with Depeche Mode co-founder Vince Clarke — became one of those sounds that bound the pre-internet music world together. Her sound has been a soulful, resolute foundation for synthpop, roots rock, balladry and nervy electronics, even as it’s also been the wild swoop of possibility, unbound by tradition or expectation. It’s given life to myriad sounds and voices working on a nearly infinite plane. You’ve got to respect anyone who’s been doing things their own way for four decades — and that’s just as a solo artist. When you add in those years with Yaz (as Yazoo was marketed in the States), the story gets even more delicious.
In the fall, Moyet released her newest album Key, which allows an extensive look at the songs that have shaped this career: rethought, reworked and recorded in a way that lets an unspoken dialogue between past and future unfold. Moyet spoke with the Scene via phone in the winter in preparation for her first performance in Nashville, Sunday at Marathon Music Works. We discussed many aspects of artistic creation and careers — and solved a disco mystery that has percolated on dance floors and in chat rooms since the mid-’90s. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It brings my heart such joy to say the phrase “your forthcoming American tour.” How does that feel?
It is such an exciting thing.
As a fan, I always wondered if this was something I would ever get the chance to see. There’s so much dread in the world right now that this feels like pure joy.
These are difficult times, and to be able to have a moment of togetherness, without agenda, is just a lovely thing.
I’m fascinated by Key. Often, when an artist releases a collection of rerecorded songs, it’s about regaining control. These songs don’t feel like they’re meant to supplant anything — more that they’re part of an evolving conversation between you and the songs that have been part of your life.
It ties into the fact that it’s been 40 years that I’ve been a solo artist, and I’m very aware that my voice could go at any time. I’m at that age, and this isn’t something I can keep on doing forever. But performing live is my very favorite thing, and I wanted to tour the moment I decided to go to university. I did that during lockdown, and I decided that my next project would be touring, and I wanted to tie it in with the 40-year anniversary.
But at the same time, when you have been a solo artist and you’ve worked with so many different producers and musicians and lineups, you end up with a really schismatic catalog. And that was definitely the case for me. I wanted to look across those 40 years [as if all the material had] been written across the same year — but without being some nasty karaoke. I wanted to see how I was relating to and engaging with these songs as a woman in her 60s, as opposed to the various periods in my life where they’d come about.
I’m glad you mentioned your recent fine art degree from the University of Brighton. Do you approach the process of printmaking in a similar way to how you approach songwriting? Both art forms seem very process-oriented.
I think so. And also, there’s the subject matter. I often deal with memory, and the corruption of memory, and reframing, and grids. Grids, for me — as someone very chaotic — become quite important. I really like to be contained and to have parameters, because otherwise I spill into chaos. For me, it’s like when I write lyrics: trying to pull in all these thoughts that I have into one place, so that I can look at them in a condensed form and find out where I am with it. And it’s like that with print, in that I am awash with ideas, and I can bring in these stories and memories and metaphors and revisit my thoughts and experiences with them.
There’s also a history of printmaking in your family as well.
Oh, absolutely — funnily enough, on both sides. Particularly on my French side, I come from a long line of printers. And I left school without graduating when I was 16, and I always wanted to go into some kind of manual work, because that’s what interested me — and printmaking specifically because I’d grown up around paper and ink and that smell.
And I suppose there was always that part of me that wanted my father’s approval. It was a very patriarchal family that I grew up in, and I remember saying to my dad that when I left school that I wanted to go into printing. And my dad, a Frenchman … said, “Closed shop: no women!” It was one of those things and you just took it, you didn’t even question it. There wasn’t a platform for us in that. …
You know, every year I thought my career was going to end. Who imagines being a pop singer for 40 years? You just don’t. And I thought at some point it would end, and then I’d just go back to school and study art. When COVID happened and I was unable to tour, that seemed like a really good time to engage with it. When I was making the Other album [released in 2017], I was also studying sculpture, so I’d be going to college during the day and recording the album at night, and all these things informed each other. Of course, it was weird; I was getting into my late 50s and early 60s, going to school with a cohort of 20- and 25-year-olds.
When you talk about memory and family, I can’t help but think of your song “The English U.” As a grammarian, and someone who has dealt with the peculiar cruelties of what Alzheimer’s and dementia do to lives, that song rips my soul apart. It is such a beautiful and true work, and I am so grateful for that.
It’s such an incredibly painful thing to lose someone to Alzheimer’s. And there was always this thing with my mother: She was a shy, reserved person. I never knew her to have friends round the house, and I think the only thing she ever really felt control over was language.
It was strange how, even when she entered into those silent years where you really don’t say much, I could be driving in the car with her and she would look up and see a restaurant sign had an apostrophe in the wrong place and she would point that out. These were the last things that stayed with her. And I know that she always felt disappointed with my dyslexia, and that I couldn’t spell and that my grammar was poor. I wanted to understand it all, but it was just an inability. She married a French man, and after we all left home, they’d spend half the year in France and the other half in England. I used to write to her, and I would be sure to put a red pen in the post with it so she could correct me. …
Despite failing at school and being unable to spell, the love of language and vocabulary that she gave me, and for syntax and the rhythm of words — these are things that she impressed upon me at a very young age, and one of the biggest influences on my writing are these lessons that she taught me all along. But toward the end, she still had a problem with that “u” getting lost, and I knew she would be feeling that even when she couldn’t speak.
Speaking of the building blocks of art, and the process of assembling things, what’s your preferred instrument for accompaniment when you’re writing?
Well, I’m a very poor instrumentalist. If I play piano, I play it very slowly, so with my slower songs that I write on my own, I tend to write on the piano. And with the guitar I can only play power chords. On the whole, I prefer to collaborate. During the later years, the Pete Glenister [1991’s Hoodoo, 1994’s Essex and 2007’s The Turn] and Guy Sigsworth [2013’s The Minutes and 2017’s Other] years, for example — Guy would send me a backing track. Just a little something he had put together, and I wouldn’t listen to it until I was in a space to record. And the minute I would start recording, I would improvise, having no idea what the chord structures or rhythms were going to be, no clue as to key changes. I would just dive into the music and become part of it. And after doing that a few times, I’ll collate a melody from all that, and position lyrics.
Now often I might have some prose that comes together, but then I’ve got to rearrange things in the syntax, and to make sure the vowel sounds were in the right places — you know, certain vowels work better with certain notes — to the point where my husband laughs at me. He says I write in Tudor. But I think some of that has to do with my dad being French, because growing up, whenever something needed to be done, he’d bark an order in French, and it needed to be done immediately — so my own English can seem sort of naturally inverted. Speaking English, but in a French format.
You were speaking of working in sculpture before, and it feels like you’ve undertaken an almost sculptural approach to songwriting.
I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but yeah, that’s right: It’s about feeling and touching and seeing. The written word is very important to me, and it’s one of the things I really struggled with when I went to university. Essay writing … I’ve never written an essay in my life, but I’ve been a writer for 40 years. Of course, I’ve been used to writing in phrases, and now I’m getting this feedback of “Get your sentences together,” or “Where’s your paragraphs,” and telling me I have this odd syntax. I remember spending eight hours — I hyperfocus — writing one paragraph, and it was because the shape of the words on the page had to be right, and the rhythm of the words had to be right, and I just couldn’t get in.
Academic writing has the benefit of being part of educational structures, but if you don’t have that as a background, it really is like learning a whole other language.
And when you write songs, you often spend time in the first person, talking about what you’re thinking, and now all of a sudden you’re in a space where you’re quoting people. And I could read broadly but then forget to do the citations, and oh my God, it was just awful. And then the other thing about being in your 60s is that I had all these ideas, but I just needed to understand the technology to start getting them down.
And then when you’re in an academic situation where you’re citing all these people — I found myself having to search the internet to find artists who were doing what I was doing so that I could say I was influenced by them. That was really difficult. It’s funny, even when things are written about you — you can say something, and then within a week it’ll have completely changed up. If I was talking about what I had been thinking, I would fail, but if I mentioned the incorrect thing that someone else had said, I would have passed. So really, to me, it’s just all bonkers.
Moving back to music: What’s the song that you could never get tired of performing?
That’s a hard one. Performing live, you’re always limited by the set list. You can never go as far as you like. And then you’ve got deep cuts that are very precious to you, but there’s a limit because you just can’t not do a certain amount of the hits, and what’s familiar to people. And then you have to think about your lineup. Some of the songs I’d really love to do live, I don’t really get the opportunity to. …
It varies, depending on the audience. Sometimes there are songs that I’m a bit overfamiliar with, that I can even be tired of, but the response from the audience can make that a joy. And there are times when I’m doing something really nuanced, and you can feel the audience really listening, and that becomes a thrill. It very much depends. There are certain songs that I don’t like doing, and I just won’t do them. I have one song, which ever troubled the lower echelons of the U.S. charts. I haven’t sung it in 35 years and I’m not going to do it now. And I know that might cause me a problem.
But when I’m onstage, I never dial it in. You have me there completely present, and ready and wanting to give everything. At my age, I don’t care enough about a platform, and I don’t care enough about money to do anything for that purpose. I won’t stand on a song and just count down the minutes until it’s finished. And it can be a problem, because there are some songs that are beloved to other people that just aren’t beloved to me.
I can absolutely understand that. I know we’re talking about “Invisible.”
I feel bad about it because [songwriter and Motown legend Lamont Dozier] was such a brilliant and lovely man, and it is a great song. I chose it for myself, it was not put upon me. And it suited the headspace I was in, in my early 20s — where I was still very much influenced by Janis Joplin, and the idea of tragedy being appealing. But as an older woman, I just can’t sell that bleating, which it becomes. When I was young, I’d do stupid things for love and accept bollocks, but you get to an older age and you realize: “Fuck it, just be on your own. You don’t need that kind of nonsense.” And I can’t sing it like I mean it.
I love it when an artist says, “This was me then; this is not me now.”
I never listen to myself once I’ve recorded. But I know that there are songs that I love that the artists don’t want to engage with, and I think it’s not their business that I love it. And to the same extent, it’s not my business if somebody else loves a song. [“Invisible” is] a great song, and we all have different things that take us to different places. I accept that there are people that love that song. And I absolutely accept that were it not for songs like that, I would not have the opportunity to be able to play live, which is my best day ever. I’m grateful for those songs and I’m grateful that anything I’ve done resonates with someone. But genuinely, it’s not my business. Who am I to tell anyone what emotions they own?
Oh, absolutely. The song still exists. It is out there for everyone.
Exactly that. And I don’t think less of anybody for loving that. I still do songs from that time, and I do perform some hits which may not necessarily relate to the state of life I am in right now. There just has to have been a way for me to get inside it and still feel like I could relate to that feeling. I don’t do “Weak in the Presence of Beauty” anymore, for example, because I don’t care about beauty. [Both laugh] I’ve never really been attracted to another person based on their looks; physical beauty doesn’t particularly move me. Although I can acknowledge how lovely it can be for the beautiful — I’m sure they’re having a nice life with it — I just don’t really care about it. So I don’t do that song either. But there are other songs from then that I can still find the truth in, that as a woman in her 60s, I can still relate to what is in them.
What music do you find inspires you these days?
It’s funny, because I don’t really listen to music, and I don’t really look at art. And it’s been a problem — like in school, when they’d say, “What’ve you been looking at?” When I’m really interested in something, I’ll deep dive, and then that’s what I’m doing. … So when I have downtime from work, what I’ll tend to be doing is DIY, listening to audiobooks. And there is music that I hear that really moves me. But it’s a deficit in my character and my ability to learn that I don’t remember names. So I can hear something that moves me to tears, but the very next minute if you asked me what I was listening to, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
That is a difficult way to be, because the world is so big. There are all these sources of things that move me that I can’t access quickly. I can’t locate them; they’re in rooms that are too disordered. They’re in rooms that I’ve thrown everything in, and I can’t find them. And that is a problem that covers all eras of my life, that scattergun chaos.
Shifting gears: Was there ever a time when you, George Michael and Darren Hayes got together and commiserated over your mutual difficulties with Sony Music?
No, though I’ve had nice moments with the both of them. I’ve had really nice exchanges with Darren. And with George — when we were at Sony and he was having his difficulties, he was still top-tier, and would have had some position when dealing with them that I did not. I met him a couple of times, and there was at one point going to be a few gigs where he wanted me to come along with him that sadly never happened.
But I was always struck by what a gentle and modest man that he was. Not at all what I would have expected, because you would come across all these big pop stars that were so lost in themselves, and he really retained his humanity. In those kinds of situations, you feel very much alone, because you are kind of isolated in this unique pit of misery. I never socialized within the industry. I had a period of being agoraphobic, and I always shamed myself amongst the beautiful people, so I just tended to avoid it.
In my time as a DJ, I’ve found a secret dance-floor weapon in the Severino remix of your song “Changeling.” A big part of it is the timbre of your voice — you don’t often hear that range in dance music, and it’s a singular and comforting aspect of the dance-floor experience. I lived in New York in the mid-’90s, and “Whispering Your Name” was such a glorious moment. At that time, everything was all Sound Factory pots-and-pans X-Beat Tribal House, and then “Whispering Your Name” had energy and drama and a killer chorus. It was so needed at the time.
Oh, it’s such a great song. I love all the drama, and it hit all the sweet spots for my singing, with what I was saying about having the right vowel sounds and the big notes that just really worked well for me. And like when I was working with Vince [Clarke] on the Yazoo stuff, we had been working in different genres at the time, and I didn’t know much at all about the dance scene.
When we decided to work together, there was never any discussion — we never even played each other records. We never said, “This is what we’re going to do.” We just each brought our own colours to the table with a mix that was really not considered. There was nothing cynical about it; it was just two people doing their thing without editing one another, and it was quite an unusual amalgam. Because of that, I never go into anything thinking, “Oh, you can’t bring this into that.” And that’s how I work: I just do what I do, and it either hits well or it doesn’t.
Your work is enduring because it’s distinctive. I revisited your 1994 Top of the Pops performance of “Whispering Your Name,” in which you’re singing live. The post-raver children were not ready for it, but you won them over.
The fact that I can still work is an amazing thing. So much of music can be tied up with youth. Because when you look at so many other things, when you look at painters and writers, we accept that with each passing year, there’s a new school honed or there’s a new vocabulary that is expanding. There’s a greater understanding of life, a greater sense of nuance; all those things get brought to the table. For me there’s just a little bit of sadness that I got my biggest platform when I wasn’t really prepared for it. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do, or figured out my path.
And when I was signed to Sony — everything that was suggested I said, “Yeah, I’m gonna give that a try, I’m going to see what that’s like.” Because that’s what you do at that age. And suddenly you have a hit, and you get locked in. And it can be very difficult to come out of that, because you’ll have years of being called “an ’80s artist.” Which can be really frustrating, because you want to respond “Fuck off, I was singing in the ’60s.” When you call me “an ’80s artist,” all you’re saying is that’s when I made money.
And that’s a very sad thought for anyone, that the most significant period of your life is when you were making money. And it’s just not the truth. Great artistic moments can happen at any time, and they might never be seen by others, and you might never get that platform. The greatest songwriter who ever lived we might never hear.
There’s a mystery that I have grown to fear may never be solved, even from years of searching the internet and asking DJs and industry folk. Who are Steve Rocket and Johnny Nitrate, who remixed “Whispering Your Name”?
They were producer-engineers Pete Davis and Adrian Bushby [future Spice Girls, Eagle-Eye Cherry and New Order collaborators].
