Goldfrapp Live Review

iTunes Festival - London Roundhouse 22/07/10

Last Thursday night (July 22nd) saw space-disco revivalists Goldfrapp land in the Roundhouse and deploy their brand of ethereal dance-pop to a bespangled effervescent audience.

Arriving on stage from the guts of a great big horn, Alison Goldfrapp and her spandex-clad band sought to steadily stoke the fervent crowd’s headspace with tracks from new album Head First.

A definite departure from the whimsical whisperings of 2008’s Seventh Tree, Head First instigates layers of pop-synth and bass underneath the meter of playful and otherworldly lyrics that has been so much the signature of the Goldfrapp sound.   

Musical reinventions aside, Goldfrapp are a band seasoned enough to know that the success of a show is not to simply blast out the hits, but to impart some showmanship to proceedings.

This was effortlessly achieved to menacing effect by Alison who - wearing a smock possibly constructed from unfurled betamax tape - stalked and dominated the stage whilst keeping the body-suited audience captives with her icy-stare.

Hand-clapping and crooning along to favourites such as Rocket and Ooh La La, the audience had to wait until the third encore for the band to decide the time was right for timeless anthem Strict Machine.

It was a fabulous finale to the evening leaving the crowd floating home and the band charting a course back to whichever disco-planet they’ve been orbiting for the last year.

By Michael Currell.

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