After almost a decade of relegation to the classic gold playlists, Alison Moyet is back on the scene. She tells Tony Clayton-Lea about the interim years.
She's been a reluctant pop star for nigh on 20 years, grasping the commercial nettle for a while and then letting it go because its sting got too much for her. She has one of the most distinctive female pop voices of the past two decades, and has measured her success through a variety of styles and over 20 million record sales.
Yet for almost 10 years, very little has been heard of Alison Moyet outside classic gold radio play: no new work, no hit singles or albums. Frankly, the silence has been deafening.
Yet Moyet is making yet another comeback of sorts with the imminent release of Hometime, her first studio album in eight years. Her voice remains sonorous and decorative, evidently hers, while the choice of mostly self-written material aligns her current listening tastes more with Massive Attack than Motorhead.
Why has she been silent for so long? The usual tiresome record company problem is given as the main reason. Sony, she says, refused to release her or allow her to record. Moyet is now with a smaller record company (Sanctuary, a label better known for hoovering up back catalogues of 1960s/1970s pop and rock acts than anything else) and, despite her optimism, says "it's early days yet".
"In fairness to Sony, I would say I had some great years there; they worked hard and put a lot of support in for me. The trouble with a label as big as Sony is that, in terms of being an artist, they like you to remain a bestseller. They're not so open to change. The great thing about my new record label is that they signed me not because I'm a current name, but because they really love the new record. We're on the same side, then, and I'm not struggling to compromise with them all the time."
Having spoken to more lawyers over the past years than record producers, it seems that Moyet, like so many others, had fallen into the trust trap: "You take people at their word, and when someone says this is the right thing for you to do, that it's good for you, and if they're smiling at you and telling you they love you, you trust them. That happened a few times very early on in my career, which inevitably led to litigation."
She returns to a pop music world radically changed from when she was last involved in it (her last UK Top 20 hit was in 1994 with Whispering Your Name). Radio play is a body with rigor mortis set in, she believes. Record companies only know how to sell albums through singles, and in that market, people half her age dominate. Her audience these days, she says, seems to be "quite crossover, from ages 20 to 50 and people on either end of that".
While she was trying to extricate herself from her Sony contract, she had children to look after (two, now aged 17 and 14, are from her first marriage; a third, aged six, is from her second). Despite being contractually bound, Moyet was lucky enough to have been able to live off her royalties during the litigation period. Not having an extravagant lifestyle or tastes, she claims, enabled her and her family to live fitfully and outside the glare of the paparazzi lens.
Before her solo career, of course, was a swift introduction to fame when former Depêche Mode keyboard player Vince Clarke founded the unlikely and short-lived electro-pop duo Yazoo in 1981. Clarke's tiny New Romantic frame and Moyet's beyond-plump, blues-diva figure made for several surreal Top Of The Pops experiences. Several hit singles followed, but Moyet's reticence and lack of self-confidence (instilled by teenage taunts about her weight) sat heavily on her shoulders. When she should have, by rights, been cracking open the bottles of bubbly, she was actually cracking up.
"I was a bit of a black sheep back then," she admits, "and I didn't cope with the attention very well. Previous to that early success, the attention I'd received had been quite negative, and I felt weird about that. I also felt I couldn't be myself in the sense of being upfront and strong, because of the working-class neurosis of people seeing you as a pop star and thinking you're better than they are. So I ended up having less of a voice than I had before I was successful."
Moyet's main regret is that she did so well at the start of her music career (nine Top 10 UK hits from 1982 to 1987) - a normal thing to say, considering that in the past 10 years she has hardly been a constant presence in the pop charts. A recent stint in the West End production of Chicago raised her profile somewhat but didn't necessarily help to raise her stock.
She seems a pop artist of substance yet with little luck, and Hometime is the kind of record (her best to date, she says, but one that is bereft of anything approaching excitement or an edge) that probably won't change her current status of Radio Four stalwart.
Sometimes, too, she admits, she has been her own worst enemy, notably in not returning phone calls from famous people wanting her to work with them. "My weakness is that I'm lazy, unfocused, too timid and sometimes too intimidated by other people, people that I should have worked with but didn't. At the same time, it's not that I'm a miserable person - I'm reconciled to the way I am. My main strength is knowing my weaknesses!"
Humiliation, she avers, is something one fears terribly as a teenager, "especially if you don't fit in with the other girls and you're not like anyone else".
It wasn't just her size, either, she maintains. "For many years I had it in my head that I was unpopular because I was big and ugly. The truth of the matter was that it had nothing to do with my physicality and everything to do with my attitude."
Moyet's attitudes have, by necessity and inclination, changed for the better. Self-confidence and self-worth inform her day-to-day life; her family, also.
"I can be disparaging about the way my body is and people get very defensive about that. To me, it speaks more about how they identify other people by their bodies. I don't do that, and I'm not being disingenuous, either. Some people cringe about fat, and it's not that they hate your fat, but that they're terrified of getting their own." She wants to be defined as a person through her work, then? "Absolutely."
Hometime has just been released on Sanctuary