Alison Moyet looking forward to the Dubai Jazz Festival

Ahead of her performance at the Skywards Dubai International Jazz Festival, Alison Moyet talks about overcoming her insecurities, and touring with Jools Holland.

Alison Moyet says she is looking forward to the Dubai Jazz Festival this week as she prefers a venue where ‘you can see the faces of the audience’ to the big arenas.
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Anyone who has heard Alison Moyet sing live will be aware of the spine-tingling effect of her rich, deep and powerful voice. It's a voice that can sing pretty much anything from punk to West End musical, through soulful ballads to blues, taking in anything its owner sets her mind to along the way.

She's one of those artists who pour their souls into every line and if she feels it's not going right or that she's not giving her best, she'll just stop and sing something else. She's not sure what she's going to sing when she appears at the Skywards Dubai International Jazz Festival this week.

For the past year she has been touring with Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and will be performing on Wednesday at the Dubai Media City Amphitheater as a guest vocalist.

"The set morphs all the time as I've been working with Jools over the last year. I just haven't thought about it. I'm not looking for some sort of karaoke night although there will definitely be hits in there," she says, speaking from her hotel room in Sheffield in the UK.

Moyet is clearly enjoying being part of the Jools Holland team. She's known Holland since 1982 and describes him as a "generous" musician who has always encouraged new performers. "Jools is such a warm, inclusive person that there was always a sense that we would get on really well and we have. I like the way he treats musicians."

She's the first to admit that she's not and never has been a team player, and that even on tour she tends to "do her work and go home" rather than socialise. In fact, she considers herself a bit of a misfit and has never been quite sure where she slots into the musical pantheon. It's well known that she has suffered from depression over the years, partly caused by her struggle with her weight. Until quite recently she was always a big woman and she has never felt entirely happy being in the spotlight. She puts it down to growing up at a time when the accent was on svelte supermodels.

"I think it goes back to this thing about feeling different. I always thought there was a look of a Russian farmer about me. There was an element growing up in the 1970s which was all about the waif," she says bluntly.

Even now that she has slimmed right down to a size 12 she finds it difficult and irritating to talk about her weight, although it has to be said that she looks terrific in her latest publicity shots. With her reddish brown hair and newly chiselled jawline, she has emerged as something of a reluctant beauty, but those early scars are deep.

"The whole thing about my weight has always been dragged out. I have had to deal with that all my life and I'm not having it any more. People are always going to comment on it but I'm not joining the party.

"I was told from a young age that I was ugly by boys and girls at school and other people, and when you are in the public eye and don't have the looks that people aspire to it's not easy to deal with. When your personality is being developed it ceases to be the base of your personality.

"So many friends who were beautiful when they were young really suffer when they get to my age. It's all so irrelevant. If anything, I don't like the approval I'm getting now although I might have done when I was 20."

For Moyet, it's all about the music and the singing. She says the happiest period of her life was during the period just before she shot to fame singing in a punk band where she was nicknamed "Alf". Having left school at 16 with only one O-level to her name, she worked as a shop assistant during the day, sang with various bands by night and never expected to be a successful singer.

She was 21 when she joined forces with Vince Clarke, formerly of Depeche Mode, in the electronic band Yazoo and had a huge hit with the ballad he wrote called Only You. The success they had frightened her, however and she never got used to standing out in front of a band although nearly 30 years later she's still doing it.

"Fame was quite shocking to me although I know that sounds very ungrateful," she says.

"I found that much attention very difficult to deal with. Then you have a period when that drops and there are other things you don't like, such as selling fewer records. Then you find the stuff that you like to sing and it feels better again."

Her career as a singer and songwriter really took off in the 1980s with three major top 10 successes, All Cried Out, Love Resurrection and Is This Love?, which won her several Brit awards and a place in the 1985 Live Aid line-up.

Her personal life was less successful, however, and she struggled to keep it all together as a young divorced mother, suffering periods of deep depression and agoraphobia that saw her turning her back on the whole fame thing for several years. A brief marriage to a hairdresser, Malcolm Lee, produced her son Joe, now 25. Her daughter Alex, 21, was born during another failed relationship with the tour manager Kim McCarthy.

When she decided to step back into the spotlight, her springboard was an unusual one. She accepted the role of Mama Morton, the prison warder, in the London production of the hit musical Chicago. She was sensational, receiving a standing ovation on her opening night for her rendition of When You're Good to Mama, and her run, initially scheduled to be a short one, was extended for six months. She admits she has always made individualistic choices about her music, sometimes provoked by her insecurities about her own ability.

"I'm an eclectic turn. The one thing I could say is that I'm versatile. I've sung so many different things and it's a big old leap from punk rock to the West End. When I was a kid I never went to any West End shows or musicals. One of the things that made me do that part in Chicago was the fact that I didn't want to.

"So many decisions have been affected by my fears. I reckon what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," she adds.

None of those decisions has been a deliberate reinvention of herself, unlike, say, Madonna, who changes her style every few years. It just sort of happens with Moyet, depending on her mood swings.

"I'm a game of two halves. I'm either gregarious or incredibly remote. Sometimes I'm not very good at socialising. I never really know who I am going to be when I wake up in the morning. I always felt like a bit of a misfit. It's harder when you don't know what your own thing is. I'm so changeable. Madonna, for example, has always been more contrived, not negative. It seems that everything with her is a building block. I have no sense of that."

The past few years, however, have been considerably more settled for Moyet, who was born on a council estate in Basildon, Essex, the youngest child of a French printer (hence her unusual name) and an English mother.

She has a brother and a sister, neither of whom was musical, so she was very much left to forge her own way. She says she was about 15 when she realised there was a distinctive tone to her voice. "I never imagined I would be a singer. When punk happened the issue was less about the voice, it was more about standing in front of the band."

She has sold more than 25 million records, despite the eight or so years she spent out of the limelight and parting company with her record company.

Her second marriage, to David Ballard, a 47-year-old former social worker, produced another daughter Caitlin, 14, and today Moyet seems to be content in her personal life. When the children were young she stopped touring to be with them, but now that they are older and the elder two have left home and are living their own lives, she's able to go on the road again knowing Caitlin is being looked after by her father rather than by a nanny.

Her relationship with Ballard, whom she has known for 20 years, helped her through her dark days and she describes meeting him as "life-changing". Although she credits him with introducing a certain stability into her life, she hesitates to say her life is perfect. "I grew up in a difficult family. Nowadays it's more to do with age and accepting that the whole kind of perfection isn't attainable. In my marriage, as with all other marriages, there is a struggle, but motherhood has done it for me in terms of making choices. Life is what you make it, there are peaks and troughs. Saying you are totally happy is a dangerous thing to say. It's unfair on anyone else."

Their home life in rural Hertfordshire is a simple one, she says. They keep chickens and Moyet likes to cook but says she's a "mother cook rather than anything else".

"I can make five different meals at the same time," she laughs. She and her husband, a keen Southern United football supporter, go to matches together and Moyet is happy standing unnoticed in the crowd cheering on the team. Her children are all happy and settled. Joe, who studied computer science and Alex who did languages, both went to Cambridge University and Caitlin is just starting work on her O-levels and is already turning out to be a good singer with an excellent memory for lyrics.

The other man in Moyet's life is the producer and songwriter Guy Sigsworth, with whom she is writing a new album, due to be released this year. She may sing some of the new material in Dubai, depending on her mood. She's looking forward to the jazz festival and says she likes that kind of smaller venue rather than big arenas.

"In smaller theatres you can feel the atmosphere and see the faces in the audience. I'm quite happy to be heckled. Sometimes I will stop in the middle of a song if I don't feel it's going well. I really want to give it everything and I feel if I'm not, then it's just rude. If I'm not feeling it I just stop."

Moyet, who will be 50 in June, performs the Ira Gershwin hit The Man that Got Away, made famous by Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, on the latest Holland album, but she doesn't intend to go on singing, as Garland did, long after she should have stopped. One day she wants to do something completely different.

"When the singing stops I would like to be a sculptor or a portrait painter. There have been long periods of my life when I have thought the singing might stop. I want to stop some day. I've been doing it for 30 years so I don't feel cheated. I'm comfortably off and don't have to work. Considering I left school with one O-level, yes it has been better than expected."

For more information about the festival go to www.dubaijazzfest.com or call Chillout Productions on 04 391 1196.