disco side and on a more kind of personal level , and we were unusual . I think there

AM : No , I don ’ t listen to music . It ’ s fascinating . I ’ m at college all day now studying sculpture . I know no artists . I make music . I don ’ t listen to music . I write poetry . I don ’ t read books . I can only explain this to you in a sense . I come from a very working class background where I never had a record player or all of these things . Whenever I wanted to do something , I couldn ’ t participate , so I had to create it myself .

In terms of the sounds , this would be a [ producer ] Guy Sigsworth thing . What ’ s

was a freshness to that . The whole period was one of the last generations where you were allowed to see the freak in the act . All of the success and all of the failures that bands of that period made were of their own doing and from their own creativity . Now you look around and everyone is beautiful because everyone ’ s got a stylist , a choreographer and all this kind of business , so I don ’ t think you can connect in quite the same way . There ’ s a greater cynicism than there used to be .

IE : So many of the sounds on the new album are also so interesting and intriguing . How did you come up with the sonic landscape ? Where there any other artists you were listening to ?

brilliant about the way Guy and I work is , for example , he ’ ll give me a real basic track with very little information on it and I write the song to that , usually from a basis of improvisation . I usually don ’ t listen to the track until I ’ ve got it in “ record ” and I start singing before I even know what the next chord is going to be . So consequently , my melodic information becomes subconscious . You get moods you wouldn ’ t naturally expect because I don ’ t know what ’ s coming next . So I build the song up that way and then it goes back to Guy . Then he literally strips it bare again and paints around me after we ’ ve had this whole discussion of what the lyric means and what I ’ m feeling . So we work actually as a band , which is the great joy about Guy , and I

Alison Moyet , 1982

love working with him because he trusts me implicitly and vice versa . We don ’ t edit one another .

IE : What do you do to take care of your voice ? You sound exactly the same as we ’ ve always known you on this album . AM : Well , I think I never pained it . Because I was socially inept in the ‘ 80s , I would work and I would go home . It ’ s quite strange to me because if I speak too

much , my voice is lost , so I think the very fact that I had all those years where I was just isolated and I wasn ’ t talking between shows because I didn ’ t have any friends on tour with me , I think that kind of saved me from myself . And now in my spare time , I do art , which is a silent pursuit . I ’ ve never over used it . IE : Your first four solo albums were recently reissued as deluxe editions with extra songs . To what degree did you look back

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