Why Goldfrapp Are More Than Just A 'Dumb Vocalist' And An Invisible Man

With the release of their seventh LP, Silver Eye, English electro duo Goldfrapp will be returning to Australia to perform at Vivid. Only for Will Gregory — the 'other half', alongside eponymous singer Alison Goldfrapp — it won't be a return. "You may not believe me when I tell you this, but I've never actually been to Australia," he says. "Because I'm not on stage — my role is to work with the front-of-house people, to make sure it sounds as good as possible — they try and save a bit of money by having me not even come."

This is Gregory's role in Goldfrapp: he's not on stage, often doesn't tour and rarely turns up in photos. The 57-year-old dwells in the shadows; even the band's devoted probably couldn't pick him out of a line-up. "I always wanted it to be that way, and am glad it has been," says Gregory. "Not because I don't like being on stage; I actually love playing live. It's just that I always felt inessential to the presentation, and it seemed more productive to me working on other stuff, rather than [being] out on the road."

"Goldfrapp, to us, is an ongoing conversation, a truly even thing."

With Alison Goldfrapp the face, name and performer, Gregory often gets forgotten. But there's also the chauvinist misassumption that he makes all the music, like their secret Svengali. "Alison is paranoid that people just see her as the dumb vocalist, whereas I'm paranoid that people don't even know I exist," Gregory laughs. "[But] in the studio it's a purely collaborative relationship, and the way it works — at the best of times — is absolutely perfect. It's a shame that people can't see that. Goldfrapp, to us, is an ongoing conversation, a truly even thing."

The pair started collaborating in 1999 and Gregory sees their musical relationship as "exactly the same, like it hasn't changed at all". His role is to tap into Goldfrapp's range, and strangeness, as a vocalist. "Alison has got a lot of different voices," he offers. "[I'm] trying to coax them out, because I know that there's more in there that haven't come out yet. Every song has its own dramatic persona, like she's a different person."

The band have habitually changed from record to record — "the albums tend to be a reaction to each other; you find that that rib you were tickling with the last one, it's just not funny anymore" — and, sure enough, the thumping Silver Eye marks a move away from 2013's sweet Tales Of Us. "We wanted to go back to something more pulsing, more driven by a rhythm track, like some of the rough, glam, stompy things that we'd done," Gregory offers. "We'd been inhabiting this very lush, largely acoustic, quite orchestral realm, so we needed to suck on something else to purge ourselves of that atmosphere. I've always thought of each album as like dressing up: each time you try on a completely different outfit, become something else. There's no point in dressing up as the same thing twice in a row. That's boring."