Music

Dot Allison: ‘My name comes at the end of the credits – a bit of everyday sexism’

Scottish singer had her moment in the pop spotlight almost three decades ago, but her music continues to delight and inspire

Dot Allison: 'I’m proud to now own my part in that – I wrote those chords.'

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Ed Power
Sat Jul 29 2023 - 05:00

Watched today, it’s like something from a half-forgotten dream. In October 1993, singer Dot Allison went on Top of the Pops and played the part of natural-born pop star to perfection. She was fronting One Dove, an enigmatically groovy trio from Glasgow championed by super-producer Andrew Weatherall and signed to his super-trendy label, Boy’s Own Productions. Out front, Allison sang as if it was her destiny to light up this institution of British pop while bandmates Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven magicked up beautifully drowsy beats.

Top of the Pops would prove a bittersweet high. Two years later, One Dove imploded with just one album to their credit. Boy’s Own had been acquired by a major label, London Records, and the band grew frustrated with what they saw as corporate interference. They left behind a dozen perfect songs and that “did it really happen?” moment on Top of the Pops.

“I’m very proud of it,” says Allison as she releases a sublime new solo record, Consciousology. “I remember I went to Jim’s flat at the west end of Glasgow and presented him with that set of chords that became [One Dove break-out hit] Fallen. They got taken to the studio, and the next thing was we had this backing track. I went in and busked over the top of it. The next thing we had this song that was feeling quite magical. That was our breakthrough single.”

“Proud” but a bit slighted too. Allison composed Fallen’s melody. And yet the credits list her name last behind Carmichael and McKinven. “I’m proud to now own my part in that – I wrote those chords. My name comes at the end of the credits. A bit of everyday sexism. Oh god, it was horrendous when I think back. But I’m owning that.”

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Since One Dove, Allison has been a pop star hidden in plain sight. She has collaborated with Primal Scream (likewise championed by Weatherall), Massive Attack, Paul Weller, My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, and, unlikely though it may seem, cheeky chappie agent of chaos Pete Doherty.

She’s had her share of critical acclaim too. Mixmag praised One Dove’s first and only LP, Morning Dove White – co-produced by Weatherall and named after Elvis Presley’s maternal great, great grandmother – as “the ultimate expression of the bittersweet collapse of the comedown”; Pitchfork cheered its combination of “Balearic chill with Neil Young folkiness and arcing feedback”. Her solo work has received similar commendations: 2002′s We Are Science was hailed as “stunning and celestial”, while her 2021 long player, Heart-Shaped Scars, was heralded by Pitchfork for its “quiet, graceful collection of autumnal folk”.

Allison sees Consciousology and Heart-Shaped Scars as siblings. They represent her artistic reawakening after a decade away, during which she focused on rearing her children in Edinburgh, where she lives with her composer husband, Christian Henson. Both projects share the gorgeous dreaminess that was a One Dove hallmark, but their subject matter could not be further removed from the 1990s and the songs she wrote then about frustrated love and the stifling of youthful ambition.

Dot Allison: 'I never would not have been around my kids in the early years.'

The two records, taken together, are a lament for the natural world and the damage humanity is inflicting upon it. Heart-Shaped Scars featured field recordings of birds and rivers. On Consciousology, Allison taps into childhood memories of her father, a pioneering botanist and plant geneticist. “The family used to go to his lab at the weekend. We’d run around as kids. There would be fields of turnips, fields of kale. They were looking at trying to breed a type of vegetable that would be helpful for the Third World.”

She feels ambivalent about those memories. Her father wanted to make people’s lives better. But is it ever acceptable to tinker with nature? Across Consciousology, she reckons with that question – and concludes all living things, from microbe to Elon Musk, are interconnected: part of a large biological machine.

“There’s a wise lady called Vandana Shiva, who is an eco-feminist. We get offered two options: extinction and escape. She says there is a third option if we choose to take it. Which is to look at what we’re doing, change course, and heal the planet while we can. I did an eco-philosophy course online, and it was really interesting. Basically, they were saying that as long as we don’t turn the planet into sand, it is regenerative. We have to change course before we desert-ify the whole thing and turn it into dust. Where you’d have to almost start again.”

Eco-politics aside, Consciousology is a thrillingly woozy listen – where Allison’s folk-horror vocals flutter within the womblike interior of grooves and strings (arranged by Irish electronica composer Hannah Peel).

Throughout, theme and texture are in perfect synthesis: Shyness of Crowns draws on the behavioural patterns of the trees; on Double Rainbow, she captures the vibrations of a plant and converts them into musical notes. It’s shoegaze for the climate crisis generation, songs of loss and lament that carry themselves lightly and with a twinkle of hope.

“We’re in a living quantum system. There is an intelligence ... You only need to look at how you cut your hand and you heal,” Allison says.

“We’re not responsible for that process. We’re in something. You can’t turn off nature, can you? There’s a way that things live and breathe. We’re not in charge of them. It’s almost like a cognitive dissonance – we’re part of a network, not dominating it. There is almost like a species supremacy. Elephants have just as much a right to live as us. Why do we think we’re the supreme species on the planet? When we flatten a forest, we destroy all the non-human habitats. Why do we think we’ve got the right to do that? We interrupt systems that we don’t understand. We cut down the Caledonian forest and then create these mono pine forests.”

She’s enjoyed coming back to music. But she doesn’t regret the decade she spent away. “I never would not have been around my kids in the early years,” she says. “I’ve read a bit about attachment. I think attachment is everything. I could not have gone off. It’s me: I’m taking time off, I want to do that. I’m lucky that I was about to do that, which I’m very grateful for. In that period of time, I did miss music. Not in the initial bit but a few years in. The ideas never stopped coming.”

There was something about Andrew that people connected with that was authentic. Everyone that came into his world felt a connection with him

In early 2020 Allison was working on Heart-Shaped Scars when she saw a tweet from her friend, Anton Newcombe of Brian Jonestown Massacre, expressing his condolences to the family of Andrew Weatherall, following his sudden death. Her blood ran cold. She and Weatherall had not worked together extensively since One Dove. He was nonetheless a massively influential figure and someone whose kindness and generosity left a lasting impact.

“I was really upset. There was something about Andrew that people connected with that was authentic. Everyone that came into his world felt a connection with him. He was one of those people. I was devastated to be honest. It was such a shock.”

One surprise in her catalogue is her association with Libertines hell-raiser Pete Doherty. Allison’s music is stately and thoughtful, his splotchy and snaggletoothed. Yet they have collaborated on stage on many occasions and have guested on each other’s recordings (Allison on Doherty’s Sheepskin Tearaway, Doherty on Allison’s 2009 album, Room Seven and a Half). There were even rumours they were going to make a duets LP.

Dot Allison: 'Anyone who is interested in music, I try to keep them interested by doing different things.'

“There’s a juxtaposition there,” she says. “In the way with like, say, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood or Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. There is something quite nice about the polarity of the elements. It creates a bandwidth to the piece, somehow.”

She prefers not to dwell in the past, feeling that, as an artist, she must constantly put one foot in front of the other. Others are more nostalgic. When One Dove’s Ian Carmichael posted their Top of the Pops performance on YouTube, he lamented that the spot never aired in their native Scotland because entertainer Andy Stewart died that day, and local channels cleared the schedules to broadcast a tribute to him instead.

“The rest of the line-up on that week’s show was pretty dire. The only interesting band was Lemonheads, and Evan Dando was so out of it the whole time he could hardly speak,” he continued. “There is, of course, the famous story of how we almost got ejected from the BBC and not allowed to perform on Top of the Pops at all, when we stole on to the set of EastEnders after our rehearsal and graffitied the Albert Square pillar box with our name.”

What memories to conjure with. Does Allison ever play her kids that performance on Top of the Pops – to show that their mum was once a pop star? She shakes her head. While glad to be associated with One Dove, she sees it as a staging post on a longer journey.

“It’s something I’m really proud of. But because I’ve been in my own exploratory thing, it’s not something I’ve focused on.

“Anyone who is interested in music, I try to keep them interested by doing different things. And to keep myself interested as well. I want to be always evolving. It’s the opposite of stagnation. You’re constantly exploring new areas.”

Consciousology is out now