100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #95 Goldfrapp – Strict Machine

Released: 2003

So the twentieth century rolled over into the twenty first, no computers stopped, no reactors went haywire and a load of aliens didn’t fly down from Uranus and turn us all into batteries. Mankind survived. Go us. That out of the way, at least some people turned their attention to we do best, given the planet’s ever growing population.

Alison Goldfrapp’s mononymously known venture with Will Gregory had been consumated with the Balearic triphop of Felt Mountain, but it’s follow up Black Cherry went more for the jugular or if you preferred, slipped below the belt. For Goldfrapp herself this meant throwing off her kaftan and playfully grabbing some diva pills, but it was the duo’s music that went through a more fundamental transformation, tripping out on synths and dirty bass with a decadent twist of glamour on the side.

Strict Machine managed to be as suggestive as possible whilst not quite going full Je T’aime on a horny nation. With a beat that sounded like something making contact with something, it’s sexy electroclash was played out over lyrics which read like they’d been written down off an old 0898 number: “I get high on a buzz/Then a rush when I’m plugged in you/ I connect when I’m flush”. Like the decade they now found themselves in, Goldfrapp were post-millenial and no longer scared of their own shadow. Now it was time for some fun.