‘We get a lot of requests to use it in sex scenes’: How Goldfrapp made Ooh La La | culture

Allison Goldfrappco-member, writer, producer

This song was an ode to great rock music. My older sister was a huge fan of Marc Bolan, and her passion for him and his voice really attracted me. I love the sound effects and drum sounds on those old recordings.

However, I couldn’t think of a lyric for the chorus, and I thought to myself: “What do I need?” We had just been to France, hence the “Ooh la la,” but we wondered if that would be enough. It was good, so we stayed with it and kept layering the sound and then adding these vocoder sounds. We loved the artificial robot feel combined with the natural sound.

The lyrics were personal and talked about the relationship and how I was feeling. I like to use visual metaphors. The detailed part, about breaking the heel of the shoe, came from an old 1950s movie I saw on TV. Image of a woman walking down the road wearing a tight pencil skirt, limping because of a broken heel. This stuck with me. I had a book of Baudelaire poems, so I incorporated that into the lyrics somewhere as well.

Adrian Utley from Portishead, a friend of ours, came over to play guitar, which was a big departure for us because for ages we’ve wanted to get away from guitars. He’s very instinctive in the way he plays, and incredibly dependent on the notes. He got the right tone right away.

For the video, I thought it would be fun to have a fictional rock band. Dawn Shadforth was the director, and the late Cathy Edwards was the designer. We had good budgets at the time, and there was plenty of time to do it all carefully and in detail, without rushing.

The song is used in many places. Some of the requests are very funny – often sex scenes. We’re not very precious but we’ve said no many times too. I remember performing the song on American television, when I was in this freezing studio waiting for the broadcast, and Simon Cowell was standing about six feet away with his arms crossed, doing that thing he does on The X Factor, which is a slightly disapproving expression. He was wearing this fluffy pink jacket that I focused on. “amazing!” He said. “It all started for you in America, didn’t it?” I was already so nervous and having him there saying it made me freeze with fear.

Will Gregoryco-member, writer, producer

I was listening to Ooh La La again recently for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised by how little there was actually on there. It all comes down to the claps – it’s just claps, a bass line, vocals and a few little stabs of synths and guitars.

We’re used to renting spaces – usually elegant holiday homes – during the winter when you can get a six-month rental. The more lo-fi, the better. It felt more satisfying than being in a flashy studio. Not being in London was important. A lot of great music comes from that isolation.

The song was weird because every time we tried to change the chords, we thought: “Why don’t we just stay the same?” So it’s literally a one note piece. We were glad that we somehow got past all those complexities that usually come with songwriting. I made this mistake one day when I was playing a piece of music – I left the microphone on, so when I turned it back on, I heard the bass but also the clunk of the keys. I couldn’t get rid of it because it was all on one track, so it’s there.

I’m old enough to remember the 1960s and think in the 1970s: “Oh no, it’s all over, it’s all gone wrong.” I absolutely hated it after the Stones and the Beatles, but Alison was very good at teaching me. I remember she played Joan Jett. I needed to talk about it, but I got it.

I did not appear in the video. Perhaps this was a mutual choice. Alison has always had this wonderful visual side. I was going to sound like Ron Mael, the synth player from Sparks. He wasn’t doing anything – and I always thought I could relate to that.

We were intrigued by Mark “Spike” Stent, this amazing mixer with millions of hits. We ended up camping out at his studio while he was mixing and we were still writing. I felt like an amateur – I couldn’t even put together a piece of music without splitting it into a mosaic of different parts. But it was exciting, a real whirlwind.

The track still sounds relevant, partly due to the synths and simplicity. It doesn’t fit into an era in particular, because it has this mixture of things that has been boiled down to something without really putting a foot forward into any identifiable genre.