414141ALISON MOYET“WHAT I LOVE
NOW IS THE
FREEDOM OF
NOT BEING
NOTICED SO I
CAN ACTUALLY
OBSERVE”
ALISON MOYETthis accoutrement to do it.” She also talks
angrily of “people who put words in a
deity’s mouth and claim him for their own,
and yet there’s nothing Christian about
the way they behave other than their
church attendance.” She points to other
hypocrisies, too, such as those who are
“anti-abortion, pro-life, and yet really
anti-social care. When does this child
go from ‘Their life must be preserved’ to
‘Their lives may be damned’? Is it when
their adult teeth come through?”A MOVING EXPERIENCE
Alongside the freedom she now feels
to express herself and defend others,
Moyet’s also taken severe measures to
liberate herself from her past. When
she moved house, she threw out huge
mountains of historical baggage. “I just
trashed everything I had: the stuff in my
loft, my gold discs, all my itineraries,
everything that I kept pointlessly. I have
no care to carry things. I have no care to
carry that success. All of those things that
you keep and buy, that make note of the
fact you existed: when do you ever look
at them? When does it touch your life?
When do you need them?”
Evidently these extreme decisions
have paid off. Other celebrates Moyet’s
individuality in an unexpectedly vibrant
fashion, as well as the fresh lease of life
that her newfound self-assurance has
brought her. “I’ll tell you how normal my
life is,” she chuckles. “I came back from
sculpture the other day on the train, and
I looked bad. I’m covered in plaster, my
hair hasn’t been brushed. I was sitting at a
table of four people, and there’s a smartly
dressed young woman, sitting diagonally
to me, who pushed over her bag of nuts
and said, ‘Would you like these?’ That will
explain to you how invisible I’ve become:
she thought I was a bag lady! I feel so
bad now. I should have taken her nuts
and thanked her for my one meal of the
day. I never ever felt I looked underfed!”
35 years, almost to the day, since
Yazoo battled their way to No.2 with
Only You, Alison Moyet seems fi nally to
have found not only herself, but also a
refreshed muse. “What I love now,” she
concludes, “is the freedom of not being
noticed so I can actually now observe,
as opposed to spending my whole time
worrying I’m being observed. Maybe
that’s where creativity for me comes from
now: I can actually be a person in society,
which is what I wanted to be, and yet
invisible. I still feel ill equipped. I still feel
like a different beast. However, where
once I would very much have liked not to
have been, now I have no desire for it to
be otherwise.”
Vive la différence!Other is out now on Cooking Vinyl
and reviewed on page 89CP30.Feat_AlisonM.print.indd 41 07/06/2017 16:49