Goldfrapp

Despite dog-tiredness, the Goldfrapp performance to which R kindly treated me last night was most entertaining. Their award-winning website is visually beautiful and delightully quirky, designed for browsing rather than quick links.

We were up in the gods, nosebleed territory, in a rather grand operatic gilded rotunda built at the turn of the last century. A suitable venue for their theatrical, airbrushed performance, which portrayed something between cabaret, interbellum cinema and a 70's carnival ride. No dancers, but a fantastic lightshow. Alison's ponytail wasn't in evidence- my favourite stage accessory since Morrissey's bouquets. Instead she looked tiny on the stage from our height, in black with a hibiscus-pink winged jacket which exaggerated her every eurythmic movement.

'Felt Mountain' was a louche theramin-laced score for a lost cinematic masterpiece from the 1930s. Since then (Black Cherry, Supernature) they've become self-consciously and brazenly glam electro-pop. Ms. Goldfrapp obviously appreciates the 70's, and she plays beautifully the smoky-eyed Biba woman of that time, strutting in gold platform shoes. The mica in her eyeshadow winked even up in the gods in that spectacular Broadway, Busby Berkeley, carnival-ride lighting; her blond hair and pink pleated Ossie Clark jacket animated by a front-stage wind-tunnel fan, as she stomped on sparkly gold platforms to a glitter gang-beat, with the demonic fiddler's shadow magnified on the screen behind them.

Goldfrapp smells and memories:
Belle epoque, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Weill, Jacques Brel, Scott Walker.
Roadmaster buses, socks with toes, Carnaby St and patchouli incense, my purple mutton-sleeved purple Biba dress and a new war to worry about, 1971. Noosha Fox (after whom the cat is partly named) singing 'S-s-s Single Bed' on TOTP c. 1976. Travelling carnivals ('shows') of the 70s, with blaring music and the screaming exhilaration of the waltzers or twister at Glasgow's Kelvin Hall, 1976-1979.