INTERVIEW: Legendary British pop innovator Alison Moyet on her 40 year career and upcoming Australian tour: "It's when you are left to your own devices that you come up with your interesting work.”
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Naomi Davison
Published: 20 May 2025
With a career that stretches over 40 years, the UK’s Alison Moyet is an artist that has not only seen a lot of changes within the music industry, but has been one of the true innovators of pop, playing an integral role in shaping the way pop sounds the way it does today.
Moyet first began performing in punk, blues and roots band until 1981, when she advertised for musicians to form a new band with her. She only received one reply, from Vince Clarke, and the band Yazoo was formed. In their short, two year reign, Yazoo became one of the most influential bands of the 1980s with their hits ‘Only You’, ‘Don’t Go’ and ‘Nobody’s Diary’ laying the foundations for the then new genre of synthpop and electropop, that would evolve into the pop music that we enjoy today.
After Yazoo disbanded, Moyet embarked on a hugely successful solo career, releasing 10 solo albums to date and winning two Brit Awards from five nominations, as well as a Grammy Award nomination in 1993. With over 25 million records sold, her hit singles including ‘Love Resurrection’, ‘All Cried Out’ and ‘Is This Love?’ have become 1980s pop staples.
Last year Moyet released her tenth studio album Key. A celebration of 40 years as a solo artist, the album features reworked and re-recorded versions of songs from her extensive discography, including hit singles, album tracks and deep cuts as well as two new songs.
“I wanted to take the opportunity to look at the trajectory of the past four decades and explore songs that, in their original form, were never fully realised or have had their relevance to me altered by time,” Moyet said on the album’s release.
A world tour to support Key kicked off earlier this year in Ireland, and after dates across the UK, Europe, North America and New Zealand, Moyet brings the tour to Australia next week with her first show in Brisbane on 29 May. Stops in Sydney and Melbourne follow, before the tour comes to a close in Perth on 4 June.
“Australia has been such a rare visit for me but its impact has been the stuff of wonder. The light and the astounding beauty. My travelling years are drawing in, so this return to you is a significant one,” Moyet says. “It has taken all my working years to get to know myself as an artist and live work is the summation. It’s a privilege to be offered a stage and my joy to accept it. I am beyond happy to be sharing those days with whosoever of you may come.”
Moyet has always been one of those rare artists who makes music that transcends the ordinary. Fluent in practically every possible music genre, her music over the years has embraced soul, blues, electronica, synthpop, rock, trip hop and jazz. Holding it all together is her remarkable voice - powerful, gentle, raspy, nuanced, bluesy, larger than life and always incredibly warm and connective, Moyet is undoubtedly one of her generation’s greatest voices and a chance to see her live in possibly her last Australian shows is an opportunity not to miss.
Ahead of her Key Tour, Moyet sat down with Women In Pop’s Jett Tattersall to chat all about the show and her 40 years in pop.
Alison it is such a lovely opportunity to talk to you today. You're such an absolute legend of music, and massive congratulations on Key. It's more than this retrospective, because we have new songs, and then there's this reinvention of older songs of yours that I imagine comes with having sat with them and delivered them in a certain way for so long, and then growing as a person and what they mean to you. What was the spark that led you to rework this particular selection of tracks?
I just finished university [Moyet completed a degree in Fine Art Printmaking in 2023], and it tied in with my 40th anniversary as a solo artist. I'm very aware of my age and very aware that I have a voice, but that's not something that's going to last forever. I wanted to tour. I wanted to sing, and the thing is that when it comes to a 40 year anniversary, a record company can just bring out a greatest hits album, do another compilation. That's been done to death and I wanted to find a way of looking at a 40 year old catalogue and bring it together so that I could create a cohesive set. I wanted to make a set of songs that sounded like they could have been recorded in the same year, and also to engage with the songs that I could still engage with as an older woman, that use the language that still resonated with me. It was about looking into the catalogue and finding those songs it was still possible to do that with.
In so many ways all the big hits have kind of been done to death, but they have to be included because they are a part of that 40 year story. But it was also an opportunity to choose certain songs that had come out during the years where people are not interested in you, so they don't get that same kind of platform as the big hits, but you feel are deserving of it. They feel important to me. They feel like songs that I want to include in a set.
My live work is very much based around electronica at the moment, and when you've worked for 40 years as a solo act, you've been dealing with a lot of different producers, and were I to play that music as it had been recorded, it would be like a really nasty karaoke. I wanted it to sit together with an aesthetic that I related to now.
I love this. Speaking of a horrendous karaoke,. one of your songs that I have butchered at karaoke is ‘All Cried Out’. As a listener, hearing it on Key, there's not this huge shift with the melody and your composition, but I feel it's all in your delivery. There’s a gravity, a venom, a resolve.
One of the great things about being an older singer, an older act, is that you can bring with it a lifetime of experience. It’s one of the sad things about pop music, which differs from writers or painters, in any of the other art forms, we understand that those years bring to your creativity a wealth of knowledge, a great vocabulary. And sadly, with pop music, it's one arena where your platform tends to be given to you when you are just springboarding into life. That’s lovely in itself, but you haven't got a lived experience. Music is not just something for one generation, it's something that we engage with throughout our lives, and I feel it's important to use the voice that I have now. I have no desire to pretend that I'm an ingénue and so it really is significant to me to sing about things that still resonate with me. When I play live, I'm completely present, so the concept of standing on stage and dial it in, or to be looking at the set list thinking, ‘I'm really looking forward to that song being over’, that really doesn't work for me. I feel a shame that I've not been authentic.
And I also love that you were talking about the respect given to not just pop, but also the hits, and why they were hits, and what they mean to an audience. But in order to mean something to an audience, they have to mean something to you as an artist. I think there's a lot in that, and I can really feel that in this album.
Yeah, it's kind of funny, because I I've had a mixed relationship with my hits. At the beginning, I think I kind of resented them because creatively, I'm a traveller and I didn't quite understand when I was young that I’d be fixed into something. I try something because I like trying things, and then I'll go on to the next thing, and suddenly it's ‘no, you're firmly in this box’. And I resented that, as you would a controlling parent. It's only later, when you move away from it that you have an understanding of what that gifted you. It's the very fact that I had those hits meant that for many years of my career, I was able to say no, because I had this buffer of security. I have no ambition for world domination or to be the biggest pop star, that stuff is the downside of being a musician for me. I was able to say no to money and no to opportunities, because I knew they would just further entrench me into a place that I didn't want to exist in
That's quite a take on it, because we're quite familiar with the narrative of the pop star as the wheel in the machine, and I do love this idea that there's moments of it that you may feel you lose yourself, but it also really is a platform for opportunity, that you can have a career
Absolutely. Popular music careers are really a sine wave. You often see people who've been stars, who’ve had massive hits, who are really dismantled by the loss of that platform, by the loss of that star, and so they spend a lot of their time and anxiety trying to recreate this moment of success. For me, I would have been a creative regardless of whether it was successful or not. I've just been to art school, and even with my teachers and tutors, these are really fantastic artists regardless of whether they're making money from it or not. So from my perspective, I had this big burst of attention, and quite naturally, that doesn't last. It's not the nature of the game. I was lucky to have had it anyway, but to then carry on working, to carry on developing your craft, and then you might gain some attention again, and then you lose it again. And that’s alright, because if that attention is the thing that sparks you, you're on a hide to nothing, because no one is going to be centrestage for the whole of their life, and I see that as a complete blessing. It's when you are left to your own devices that you come up with your interesting work. You see that time and again, with an artist’s first album, they can be really interesting, because they’ve been beavering around on their own, figuring stuff out themselves. It's only when they become successful and they start smelling of money that the A&R [Artists and Repertoire, music industry talent scouts] starts wanting you to compromise everything.
I certainly feel my best work has happened at a time when people have noticed the least, and that's all right, because it's what I do and it's kind of irrelevant whether people like or not. That's the other great thing about age, when you're young, you're looking for validation. You're looking for people to tell you you're doing all right, and you have to get to the place where you trust your own voice. I trust my own voice better than somebody else's, which is not to say that I disrespect people who don't like what I like. That's completely human. But I have to work to my own aesthetic.
That’s incredible, and I love this notion of you do your best work when no one's paying attention. I guess. Does that come with as well a sense of the pressure that we put on ourselves is off?
The pressure is always on yourself. I'm notably hard on myself and songwriting can be the most excruciating thing. It can be frustrating and lonely, and sometimes my heart sinks when I decide to do it, because I know the journey I'm going to take with it. But when you've written something that you can look at and say, ‘Fuck me, that's brilliant’, It's the best feeling in the world. And that doesn't always fit with other people's narrative, other people see your best work as being the stuff that's sold the most, but we know there's a plethora of brilliant musicians and artists that we'll never know existed, but they did exist. I find that quite an interesting concept.
And I guess it's this notion of when the artist became more the celebrity than the artist.
It is, because you can doubt yourself. For me, I found it confusing, as a working class kid. I left school without qualifications and I grew up in a time where the patriarchy ruled, I certainly came from a family with a very strong patriarch in it, where when you don't fit in, you spend a long time trying to work out why. Can you change your shape? What is it wrong with your character? What is it that you are doing wrong that is annoying people, frustrating people, or repelling people? And then when I was given a platform very young, I certainly had a period where I thought where should my compromise be? How much should I try? Because it must be me that's wrong. And then you understand the truth that you're working in a world with so many people that are looking for somebody else to tell them they're listening to the right thing, or they're looking at the right thing or they're doing the right thing, because they're floundering themselves. Everybody's floundering. It's just some people have better masks than others.
You're so right. You spoke about revisiting these songs and getting a clearer vision of where they sit now, but within this you also have a couple of new songs on Key - ‘The Impervious Me’ is very cool, by the way. You've got such an incredible back catalogue here, where did these two sit within that?
It was important for me to include new music, because whereas this is an overview of 40 years, it is not being bracketed, it's not saying, ‘This is who I am. This is the end’, because the creative process continues, and obviously I don't have another 40 years, but it's kind of a screenshot of where I'm at, taking into account where I've been. For many years I’ve become very lyric centric, that's my main area of fidelity. And going back to what I said to you before about wanting to be authentic, I just deal with narratives that affect me now, or things that I see now. That's another great joy about being older, because when you're a young pop star, you feel very observed. You're observed all the time, and it makes you self conscious. The joy about being older is some people have a problem with the invisibility that comes with it. I absolutely love it, that I am then put in the position of where I become the observer. So I'm kind of musing about what I see.
‘Such Small Ale’ is a story of a life. I think about all the time I have wasted, all the time we waste in the minutiae of petty point scoring when, even when we win, what have we won? We've won a point, and we've just entrenched ourselves in misery. This stuff, with the hindsight of life, is so unimportant and we have such a small amount of time to engage, such a small amount of time to look and find joy and to accept that joy has happened in minutes, which refers me back to my album, The Minutes, which is what that was about, is not feeling like you’re cheated when you're not living this whole stream of fantastic, aspirational life. When you recognise that joy does happen in bursts, and that really is enough. So ‘Such Small Ale’ really is a case of just stop. Stop and let it go and just accept the other human being in your life for who they are. Stop trying to change everything.
‘The Impervious Me’ is dealing with exactly that - becoming impervious. You're not going to avoid attack. you're not going to avoid insult or slight or challenge. And if you want to progress with whatever it is that you do, even if it's fucking gardening, you have to become impervious. You have to grow that skin, and that's not having no sensitivity to people that hurt, because I understand hurt and and I've tried to engage with that hurt in terms of mending it many, many times. The only thing that works in the end is to become impervious, to accept it and to stand back and look at it, and to feel it, and to realise that what doesn't kill you doesn't kill you.
II much prefer that one to ‘what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger’. That always pissed me off, that one!
Yeah, that’s bollocks that one. A great big car crash you survived from but your bones are broken, like me, and it didn't make me stronger. My body certainly isn't stronger. I just have a greater ability to work through discomfort.
That's it! Lastly, before I leave you, do you feel that at this point in your life as a creative you've now carved out a space within this industry that feels like home?
No, because when you think of space, you think of a short hold. I'm not one of these people that sits there and dreams of a legacy. I have no need to imagine that I will be remembered or revered, or any of those things. I'm very much when you're dead, you're dead, and it makes absolutely no odds. What I am very aware of is that you can have some territory for a while, but nothing is permanent. So I don't think of myself as having a space, because that almost infers that that space is going to stay around me.
I've seen the way people have seen me time and again: you're a massive pop star, you're brilliant, you're a brilliant singer, you’re shit, you're beautiful, you're a munter [ugly] you're talented, you're risible, all of those things. I just know that I'm settled in my own head and I'm just not particularly needy. I don't feel need, and I'm aware that's a privilege, because lots of people have need purely to survive, purely to feed themselves, and that is not a problem that I face. I can only talk personally, and I don't think about my space.
I live a really normal life. I had the big house in the country where I wouldn't have recognised my neighbours, even though I lived next door to them for 10 years. And I changed my life about 12 years ago, I thought this is not how I want to live, and I sold up, downsized and moved into a street where I don't even have off street parking. Like I said, I'm an old woman, so I'm invisible, and I really cherish that. I really like the fact that I just know my neighbours. My neighbour’s got my front door key, the shopkeepers know who I am - who I am as the neighbour, as opposed to who I am as a singer. That's the life that I inhabit - my mates from school, my mates from college, and so the music world is something I glance at. It doesn't identify me.
Key is out now via Cooking Vinyl. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Alison Moyet on Instagram and Facebook.
ALISON MOYET AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES
29th May - QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane SOLD OUT
31st May - Darling Harbour Theatre, Sydney
1st June - Plenary, Melbourne
4th June – Riverside Theatre, Perth
