ALUNAGEORGE Aluna Francis is having a self-described “diva” moment. “It’s about fifty degrees in this car and there are four of us,” she moans. “They all had the windows open but it’s too loud so I asked about the air con but it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t.” As we speak to her, the singing half of chart-bothering r&B/dance hybrid AlunaGeorge is whizzing around a car park in Gatwick Airport, having just returned (with producer and professional other half George reid) from Benicassim. Given that the pair are now bonafide chart stars – their collaboration with Disclosure, ‘White Noise’, peaked at number 2 earlier this year, while their own ‘Attracting Flies’ buzzed its way into the top twenty – you could almost forgive her the outburst. But you get the sense that Mariah Carey-style diva strops aren’t the norm within the hermetically-sealed world AlunaGeorge have created around themselves. With most of their excellent debut album
“THE CONCEPT OF SELLING OUT IS COMPLETELY NULLIFIED BY BEING PAID zERO...” ‘Body Music’ recorded in George’s makeshift bedroom studio, and with no interference from outside producers, theirs is a close-knit, intimate working relationship. Miraculously, signing with a major label (Island) midway through recording the album hasn’t changed this dynamic. In fact, according to Aluna, the label was simply a means to get an actual album out. “Of course when you sign to a label the idea that somebody with the ability to release an album is supporting you is amazing. We’d been working alone and recording bits and pieces here and there because we knew we didn’t have the ability to release an album by ourselves. I think the label saw that if the-Fly.co.uk
they tried to tamper with us that they’d lose whatever was there.” So while the cash was flowing slightly more readily (Aluna gave up her day job just after they signed), they didn’t race to finish ‘Body Music’ in Abbey road studios, choosing instead to record it in a “pretty small, quite homey little studio”, where, as opposed to the bedroom set-up, “George could finally hear what I was singing with the music and not just hear my voice.” One outside songwriter was brought in to co-write the ridiculously catchy ‘Best Be Believing’, a song which, in another example of keeping things insular, features a choir made up completely of Aluna’s layered vocals. “I can do impressions of different people quite well,” she laughs. “each time in my mind I was conjuring up different people in the choir.” Tacked onto the end of the album is a cover of Montell Jordan’s 1995 banger, ‘This Is How We Do It’, a decision which seems to have caused much hand-wringing.
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