One Dove We Love: Dot Allison

Dot Allison: former biochemistry student turned blonde Scottish electro queen circa 1993 and 2002. Ring any bells? How about if we namecheck Death In Vegas? Or Massive Attack? Pete Doherty? For someone who’s been a solo artist since 1996, Dot Allison comes heavily packaged in collaborator tape. She sang on Death In Vegas’s ‘Dirge’, spent two years on tour with Massive Attack and went on both of Babyshambles’s 2004 tours (where as well as playing with the band, she ditched her electro gadgets in favour of an acoustic guitar and a cover of – coincidentally – Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’).

As the singer in ‘90s dance group One Dove, she scored big popularity points with the Q and Select readership, then still gripped by their obsession with St Etienne. Their 1996 album, ‘Muted Dove White’, met with “muted success”. As Wikipedia explains, this turned out to be a poisoned chalice: “Other critics expressed disappointment that the album’s title had been changed at the last moment from the original working title, Sound.” For Christ’s sake.

Far from churning out the nerdy, hardworking sort of music that usually accompanies such nitpicking, Allison’s ethereal voice is now being used in more singer-songwriter bent. The reason you should care about her, aside from her collaborations, is that she’s far more than the sum of her parts. In appropriate name terms, the title of her new EP, ‘Beyond The Ivy’, isn’t too far from the truth. When not attached to a bigger name, Allison has a steely quality that balances out the breathy folk of her voice; every effect on the EP was recorded manually, and as a whole it’s surprisingly strong for something that initially sounds as forceful as a really cute puppy.
 
It’s still a big step away from the acid chillout of her 1999 album ‘Afterglow’, or the corrosive melodies that filled her Fischerspooner-esque LP ‘We Are Science’ in 2002. In fact, the timing is just plain weird. Electro is such big news now that she could have made a mint by re-releasing the Felix Da Housecat remix of ‘Substance’. So why go down the delicate female route? “It's partially a taste thing,” she says, curled up on what may well be the world’s squashiest sofa inside the Soho House library. “My tastes for the last album were what I was DJing, and it was something I wanted to express within those parameters – but your headspace changes. I've always loved Neil Young and Gram Parsons. Even when I was in One Dove I was writing guitar tracks, but it's taken me this long to release them in that format.”

That Allison has had the luxury of time has been partly due to her ongoing collaborations with other artists, all of whom have been men. “There's just so many of them around, in music,” she says, shrugging off the idea of some great conspiracy. “I've worked with female engineers and producers, and I'd like to sing a duet with a woman at some point, but it's still a very male dominated area when it comes to producers. There's not a lot of female producers or guitarists.”