Glastonbury 2023: Alison Goldfrapp remembers her first time at the festival ahead of set
Ahead of her performance on The Park Stage on Sunday, Alison Goldfrapp has remembered her first-ever appearance at Glastonbury Festival.
The musician looked back on her first experience at Glastonbury in a new interview with The Telegraph. “I must have been about 16. I didn’t have a ticket,” she told the publication. Goldfrapp took her mum’s car and parked it in a field when she heard the festival, thinking it was close. However, it wasn’t. She continued: “I walked for what seemed like hours across fields, and then I managed to find a sort of tiny hole under the fence that looked like a dog had made it.”
Once inside, Goldfrapp watched an unnamed funk band and wandered around, thinking she’d bump into a friend or acquaintance, but it didn’t happen. She recalled: “I ended up asking someone if I could sleep by their fire and have some of their food, which they kindly gave me. But I didn’t sleep and by lunchtime I was so kind of over it, I went home.”
In 2008, Goldfrapp’s eponymous band – Goldfrapp – played the Pyramid Stage after scoring top ten hits with ‘Ooh La La’ and ‘Number 1’. To mark the occasion, they used dancers who started in smock dresses and then changed into bikini-clad pole dancers. She says that some of her family members did not like it.
“My godmother didn’t like it,” Goldfrapp expressed. “She came up to me after the Royal Albert Hall gig [four days earlier], and said: ‘That was so unnecessary.'” Additionally, her mother had already expressed disdain for the dancers in animal heads, who she performed with in London’s Hyde Park in 2006. The musician continued: “My mum hated the wolf men and wolf ladies because to her that was a pagan fantasy that was anti-Christian.”
The conversation then switched to Elton John, the Sunday headliner. She was asked if she’ll watch him perform. “Oh my god, I’ve been thinking about this for bloody months,” Goldfrapp responded. “I’d love to. It’s gonna be so insane. I can’t imagine how we’re gonna get anywhere near that stage. “
“I’m really hoping he’s gonna wear like crazy boots and crazy glasses,” she concluded. “Maybe we’ll end up watching it round someone’s camp fire and having a party.”
Alison Goldfrapp released her latest album, The Love Invention, in May this year. Awarding it three stars in his review, Far Out‘s Tyler Golsen wrote: “If you loved the feverish rhythms and groovy disco touches of Goldfrapp, then The Love Invention will double as a solid entry in the singer’s discography and a welcome to the woman herself… The Love Invention is an intoxicating listen, ready for any kind of night out where clubs and dance floors turn the rest of the world into a blur.”
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