MOYET IS VOCAL ABOUT HER ‘OVERSUNG’ VOCALS

Alison Moyet and I were having a weird argument the other day. The topic was her debut solo album, “Alf,” on Columbia Records.

To me, it’s a terrific pop album, with a guaranteed position on my year-end list of the year’s best. Here’s the switch. She doesn’t agree. I’m more impressed with the album than she is. I was defending it while she was rapping it.

My argument was that the songs, which she co-wrote with producers Tony Swain and Steve Jolley, are first-rate. Depth and innovation aren’t the strengths of the material, but other pop essentials--melody and slick production--compensate. It’s Moyet’s performance, though, that makes the album click. Also, her voice is a marvel--deep, robust, bluesy and emotional. “Invisible” (the first single) and “All Cried Out” are exceptional pop-rock pieces. But mine is a minority opinion among critics.

Moyet, a dedicated vocal fan who listens carefully to vocals, often to the exclusion of all else, has her own gripe about the “Alf” album. (“Alf,” incidentally, is her nickname.)

“I like some color and shading in vocals,” said Moyet, in town from England on a brief business trip. “There’s not enough on this album. Everything is oversung. You don’t have to sing strongly and intensely just because you can. But when I start singing in that loud, emotional style, the producers like it. Sometimes I really wanted to bring my voice down and reach something that was deep and rich. But that didn’t happen.

“I don’t like the sound of my voice on the album. Maybe my voice is just too close to me. I find it embarrassing to hear myself.”

“Alf” doesn’t pass Moyet’s crucial test. “My ultimate achievement is to make a record that I would go out and buy,” she said. “In the case of ‘Alf,’ I’d buy some of the songs, but that’s it. I’m still striving for that ultimate achievement.”

Many critics don’t like the album either. The common complaint is that the material, production and arrangements are routine and too flimsy for her elegant voice. Said one detractor: “It’s like putting a diamond in a cheap setting.”

“Alf,” a million-seller in England, wasn’t as nearly big in the United States, selling 300,000 copies. Still, that’s quite respectable for a new artist. It’s just that, given her record sales in England, a bit more was expected.

Columbia Records hasn’t given up. The first single, “Invisible,” did fairly well, but the follow-up, the racy “Love Resurrection,” didn’t. Now Columbia is counting on the third single, “For You Only”--due out in early October--to resurrect the album.

It’s a good time to make the effort. Many American pop fans saw Moyet for the first time in the Live Aid concert on TV. That had to generate considerable interest in her. At the moment, she has no specific plans for an American tour, though she certainly promises to do one when record sales warrant it.

A fast-talking charmer, the 24-year-old Moyet is colorful and candid. Interviewers love her because she’s so quotable. Yet, she dislikes interviews and does as few as possible.

“Writers think they can understand you and get a complete grasp of your personality by just talking to you for an hour or two,” she said. “That’s a very arrogant way of thinking. I’m too complex to be put into some capsule version.”

Moyet, a commanding presence, is built like an opera singer--tall and very hefty. Chatting about her weight didn’t seem to bother her. She readily and matter-of-factly referred to herself as fat. Part of her bulk is explainable. Four months ago, she had her first child--a son--and hasn’t had time to lose the weight. She was, however, big before her pregnancy.

Motherhood and Moyet wouldn’t seem to mix. She’s the independent, boisterous type who goes to pubs and uses X-rated language--certainly not the stereotype of the dutiful, saintly young mother. The adjustment, she pointed out, hasn’t been easy:

“Having a baby has really cut down on my social life. After I finish work, I go and spend time with my son. We don’t have a nanny. I don’t like the idea of handing him over to an outsider. My husband travels with me. He looks after the baby while I’m working.”

The baby, she admitted, was an accident: “This wasn’t a planned thing. It really surprised me and my husband. That doesn’t mean I love my baby any less. It just means a slight change in plans for the next 20 years.”

Moyet is determined not to let the baby interfere with her career. “He won’t change things for me in terms of my music,” she said. “A lot of parents tend to dedicate their whole lives to their kids. So when the kid is 15 or 16 and leaves home, the parents are lost. That will never happen to me. I’m a mother but that’s not my role in life. I’m a singer. Being a mother would never be enough for me. Though I’ve always wanted to be a mother, it’s never been an ambition of mine to be just a mother.”

To Moyet, spending every moment with her baby isn’t necessary either: “A lot of mothers think that’s necessary or you don’t love your baby. That’s ridiculous. I can cope with him being away. I’m not sitting here pining for him. I’ll see him in a few hours.”

Her approach to motherhood, she explained, is more paternal than maternal. “I’m more like a father in relation to my child. Fathers don’t stay home with the kids all day. They have their careers and they’re away from home a lot. But they can still have strong bonds with their children. That’s the way I want to be. If I was just staying home with the baby and not singing, I’d go crazy.”

“I’ve been singing ever since I’ve been 15 or 16,” noted Moyet, who’s from Essex in southern England. “Every week I met someone who was a manager or in the record business who would promise that he was going to do this or that and nothing would ever happen. I was playing in clubs and waiting and waiting for my break. Then it happened. It was the first time someone said they would do something and they actually did it.”

This exception was Vince Clarke, a songwriter-synthesizer player formerly of Depeche Mode. Looking for a singer to record a single with, he zeroed in on Moyet, whose club performances had impressed him.

By then she was in her blues/R&B; period, having graduated from her punk beginnings, which were inspired by the oddball punk singer Poly Styrene. “I had blinkers on then,” Moyet admitted. “R&B; was the only music for me. Anything else was trash.”

Yazoo, the duo she formed with Clarke, played “trash”--better known as synth-pop--which was beginning to boom in England in the early ‘80s.

The two Yaz (as the group also was known) albums, “Upstairs at Eric’s” and “You and Me Both,” established Moyet as one England’s best singers. The duo was a big hit commercially and critically. That synthesizer backing was a strange setting for her robust, masculine vocals. Part of the music’s appeal was rooted in the tension between those two elements.

Moyet became a star but wasn’t happy in Yaz. For one thing she didn’t like most of the music. “The production was wrong on some of the tracks,” she recalled. “I sounded dreadful half the time.”

Clarke was more concerned with music and arrangements. “Nobody gave a damn about the vocals but me,” she said. “I got sick of that.”

Since Clarke never cared for publicity and promotion, Moyet got stuck with it, which annoyed her. Defending Yazoo’s songs, she griped, wasn’t so easy:

“I was totally ashamed of some of the songs. For example, on the first album, there was a track ‘I Before E Except After C.’ We had huge arguments about it. I didn’t want it on the album. It was terrible. Of course, I lost the argument. When I was out there doing promotion on my own, everybody thought I was responsible for a lot of things--like that stupid song--that I had nothing to do with. I was taking the rap for crap on the album--and here I thought a lot of it was awful.”

Yaz was doomed. In early 1983, after the release of the “You and Me Both” album, she and Clarke split up. “I was fed up,” she said. “I needed to stretch out, to try different music and different producers. A solo career sounded very appealing.”