Let's stay with the 1984 album, Alph

And track two, which is "All Cried Out"

I'm just gonna check, are all the vocals for Kie, brand new?

Yes, 'cause your voice sounds every

Bit as impressive as it did originally

And probably better, yes, I meant to say that as well

And not just because, you know, I work for you, it's true

Well, you know, it's a funny thing, 'cause it's like, you know, my age

Every single time I go on tour, every single time I go in studio

I start with the, "Oh, I might not be able to sing this year"

You know, 'cause that's gonna happen, you know what I mean?

Well, of course, it's gonna happen

So it's like, it's not until I'm in that

Situation that I find, "Oh, it's okay"

You know, I can still do it, and then

One day I won't, and then I'll stop

So anyway, yeah, you were saying?

When the song's like a bonafide classic like "All Cried Out"

And one that you've done throughout your career as well

It's one that you've still had, you've related to the lyrics of

How does that affect you approaching a reworking?

I mean, I find the best known songs the hardest ones to do

And you know, "All Cried Out" is interesting because we've reworked it

Several times over the course of my being in the Moyet band

So I joined the band in 2013, when

John Gardiner was the musical director

And so we had quite a different version of "All Cried Out" then

It was more like a sort of, almost

Like a waltz time thing in the verses

It had more of that feel to it

And then it gradually evolved over time

And we would change the programming, and change the programming

And change the programming

So having been through that process, there was a slight sense of like

"Oh God, what do I do now?"

'Cause you still need to have some fealty to the original

But it needed to be its own beast

One thing I think that we have done very effectively over the years

Doing this live is sorted the structure out

'Cause if there is one thing that the Alph album's guilty of

It's of like, slightly wayward song structures

Things go on for like a long time

And it's like, "Guys, can you, you know

Get the scissors out a little bit?"

Except for, you know, you have to understand that this was at a time

When I was kind of hot property

And the record companies were desperate to get this, you know

They were pulling this album out of my hands

Which is why we only got nine tracks

So maybe it was a way of them, you know, giving it a bit more time

Maximising value

Yeah, just getting enough minutes on the album, yeah

But I felt like the structure that we've gotten it down to live

Is sort of, the sort of platonic ideal

Of how "All Cried Out" should sound

So then it was just a case of, well, now what do you do?

And I struggled with this one slightly

So, I built it up from the bottom

So I put some drum loops against the vocal

'Cause I worked on this with vocals

That I basically ripped from the original tracks

And sort of time-stretched to get them into the tempo I wanted

And I just started with, I did an unusual thing with this

Was I started just layering percussion loops and things

To get an idea of where the groove should go

And then once I had that, that sort of gave me an in

And then it was just always, always back to the synthesizers

It's always the programming

I mean, one thing is that I don't think I'm even

In like the top 10,000 synthesizer

Programmers in the world or anything

I dispute that fact

But I think it's really, one thing that bothers me

About the modern process of music making is

It's sort of like an advanced process of bricolage

Where you just have, you know

An infinite choice of pre-prepared drum loops

And an infinite choice of pre-programmed synth sounds

And if you lock them all together in the right way

You get a sort of simulacrum of a song

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing

I think the democratization of that technology is not a bad thing

I do think that it often lacks personality

So one thing with me on this record is that every single synth sound

Apart from one sound on "Love Resurrection"

I made it myself, I programmed it myself

That may have taken me two minutes

It may have taken me a couple of hours, but every sound is me

Because it's an, making those sounds

In the same way that a guitarist feel on the fretboard

Is an extension of their voice

You know, what I do with my hands on the synthesizer

Is an extension of my voice, and I wanted that to be really clear

And I wanted it to feel like effort and time had gone in

To make sure that you could feel that personality

In all of the songs on Kie

And so with "All Cried Out", once I had that rhythm track in place

It was just a question of building the synth sounds around it

And that sort of, coming up with the

Parts and coming up with the sound

They dovetailed together into a sort of blurry process

That's hard to separate one from the other

And then all we needed to do was get a great vocal on it

Which obviously, you didn't struggle with

Having sung this one so beautifully so many times over the years

Well, it gets into the muscle memory

But I have to stop you there and ask you what a simulacrum is

A simulacrum, like a kind of

It feels like the real thing, but it isn't really

It's like something that looks like

Sounds like, feels like, but isn't

Okay, yeah, no, it is one of those songs

That is firmly embedded in terms of muscle memory

It is one of the songs that I have managed

To find a way of staying engaged with

It's a, you know, a universal message

And it's kind of physically quite pleasurable to sing

Now that I've dropped the key, because again

It suffered in, for me, as an act of pleasure

In the early key, because it was all designed to have me screeching

And yeah, just to be grating the sound

You know, which I'm not really into

Has this one changed key?

Yeah, oh yeah, it would have changed key before you came in

Hasn't it?

I'm not sure it has, you know

Don't you think?

No, I have a feeling, don't quote me on this

I have a feeling it's in the same key as the record

Oh, shock or error, I'm not just singing down an octave

Might be the, I might be doing

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

All Cried Out

Alison Moyet

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