'I Want To Reserve The Right To Be An Asshole.'

During Paul McCartney's performance of Let It Be at Live Aid, the mic mounted to his piano failed for the first two minutes of the song. One way this story has been reported is that David Bowie, Alison Moyet and Pete Townshend, who were watching stageside, rushed out on stage to lend their pipes.

"No, we were on stage to sing with him," Moyet laughs. "It's funny, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I've heard that story before, but, no, no, he was doing Let It Be and he asked five people to go and sing it with him. And I was the only woman, which was really flattering, but there was David Bowie and Bob Geldof and Pete Townsend? I can't remember who else was there, but anyway there were five of us and he sang Let It Be and, yeah, the mic situation wasn't great anyway, but, no, that was prearranged. He invited us on for the encore, yeah."

Although Moyet admits performing at Live Aid was "amazing", she contemplates, "It was brilliant, but at the same time I'm someone that only ever has kind of one foot in the room, you know, in the sense that my mind is always wandering. So when I was asked about Live Aid, I was asked if I actually wanted to do a set and I wasn't really aware of what Live Aid was, 'cause I only had - as I say - half an ear on it. And I thought it was a charity thing, another charity thing, and, you know, if I can do charity things, I do and if I can't, I don't do them.

And it so happened I said, 'I don't have a band together'/'So do you fancy singing with Paul Young?'/'Yeah, I can sing with Paul Young,' but in my head I thought this was gonna be at Wembley Arena, which I'd headlined myself a few times. So I got in a car to go down there, and then there's a helicopter and I'm thinking, 'What the fuck are we going in a helicopter for?' you know? 'Why am I in a helicopter with Bono and David Bowie? Why am I flying over Wembley Arena?' And it's like I didn't have any sense of the enormity until that helicopter door opened, you know, at the arena, and I'm coming out and I've got Freddie Mercury blowing me kisses - MASSive! With all the fucking major big stars you can remember from the '60s and '70s that dwarf every star that's ever been since then, you know, because you're thinking about those reeeeeally massive bands like Queen and The Who and it was, yeah! It was phenomenal. And then to have Paul McCartney come to my dressing room and say, 'Would you come and sing backing vocals for me on the encore?'."

It's "just gone eight o'clock in the morning" in the UK and Moyet confesses, "So I'm still in bed". Even though it's been "30-odd years" since Moyet last toured Australia, she stresses, "Obviously in the UK and Europe I've been going consistently". Having dealt with "vocal problems" in the past, Moyet says that taking care of her voice is "about recognising it's a muscle". "I've gotta warm-up before I do it and I can't stay up all night drinking, you know?" she chuckles. "But the trouble is, I love being social, I love talking, but once I go there's no stopping me and, yeah! I'll just talk all night. So I just have to be circumspect, I mean, this very tour in Australasia: this could be the last one I ever do and I wanted to come for such a long time, and I feel I'm on the top of my game, so I need to concentrate on the work."

For these shows, Moyet is working with "an electronic line-up". "So there's me and there's two guys with synthesisers," she tells. "They both turn to guitars and bass on occasion, but on the most part it's a synthesised set, which means that I can go right back to Yazoo and to this current thing with a cool sonic theme; so it doesn't turn into a nasty karaoke or something." We're curious to hear about the foundations of Yazoo. Was the duo incredibly ambitious from the get-go or did it all start as a bit of fun and escalate from there? "Look, do you know? None of the above," Moyet enlightens.

"It was weird, because Vince [Clarke] had left Depeche [Mode] and, you know, there was a big cloud - this was his boyhood band and they sort of like fell out of love with one another, and he had a point to prove. So he'd written Only You. He'd offered it to Depeche and, quite understandably, they didn't wanna do it, 'cause, you know, 'Leave the band, you're not writing our songs,' which is fair enough. And he knew of me, because we all come from the same hometown and I was the first one out of all of our group to start playing live in bands. He wanted me to come and sing on his demo, so he called me up and I went over there to his flat, sang on his demo thinking, 'Great! So that means I'll have a demo for my own purposes,' you know. And then a week later he called me up and said, 'The record company has heard it and they think we should record it,' so, well, great! So we went into the studio to record and after recording and the record company hearing it, they said we should make an album. "So all of this stuff happened within a matter of, like, a fortnight. And Vince and I never had any time to really kinda get to hang out and get to know one another. I mean, I knew the other [Depeche] boys, 'cause I was in the same class with them at school, but Vince I knew the least and we never became friends; he was in this dark place, 'cause he was unhappy about splitting with Depeche, you know. It was a bit shocking for me, because I went from being the black sheep of the town to suddenly being really famous. And so consequently we burnt ourselves out really quickly, because there was no love between us. "We never even sat down and said, 'What kind of album are we gonna make?'

It was just a case of: he sat me down and, 'You got any songs?'/'Yeah, I've got some songs. You got some songs?'/'Yeah!' And so we just went into the studio and started working, and without discussion. I didn't talk to him about how I was gonna sing and he didn't talk to me about how he was gonna arrange, and we just did what we did. And then what we ended up with just happened to, you know, really catch the zeitgeist."

When told this sounds like a baptism of fire, Moyet allows, "Well it was and by the time we were touring we were already barely speaking - it really was a baptism of fire. I mean, Vince and I - we did a reunion in America and Europe in 2008 to play that second album live, because we'd never done it live, and actually it was a really lovely thing 'cause, you know, I'd chilled out, he'd chilled out; we were both in this place where we could be grateful for what we'd had and, yeah! So it was actually quite a loving exchange, really."

Moyet recently flew to Giske, an island off the Norwegian Atlantic coast, to record a duet of a-ha's Summer Moved On for the Norwegian band's MTV Unplugged album, Summer Solstice, which will be released any day now. "It was a fascinating place," Moyet recalls of Giske, before adding, "It's light all the way through the night time, the most spectacular vistas... I literally got there and my case'd got lost... But my clothes finally turned up half an hour before I was filming." It was "a real last-minute thing", according to Moyet. "I think I was playing Glastonbury the next day, so it was like a case of me, you know, flying in, singing, flying out. I was like, ''Allo. Bye' - it was weird."

A lot of bands are teaming up for tours these days, which poses the question: Was it a lot more competitive for bands back in the '80s? "Maybe people felt competitive with a particular band or something," Moyet ponders, "but, the '80s, you know, it was so much easier to do everything in the '80s in terms of making records, and putting them out, and being the freak that you are. I mean, now they do a lot of those kinda reunion tours, but I've always steered clear of those. Whereas I do '80s material in my set - obviously I do, 'cause it was a part of my career; it's not the only decade I've been a singer in, which is one of the most frustrating things about being called an '80s singer. No issue with the fact that I was singing then, it's just I've been playing in bands since the '70s, you know, and I've been doin' it every decade since and actually have really been making a learning curve, and progressive trajectory, along the way. I mean, in the last ten years I've gotten the best reviews of my life - that's kind of how it's been for me - so the idea of my just only ever being the act that I was 35 years ago every minute I'm onstage has no appeal at all. I'd just give up. I have to stay interested and when I'm on stage I'm engaged, and I only sing things I'm engaged with."

If you don't already follow Moyet on Twitter, you really don't know what you're missing. Does she enjoy Twitter? "I do like Twitter, yeah," she enthuses. "I like it for a coupla reasons: I like it because there's an element of sorta like just talking to someone over the garden fence or at the bus stop, like when you were kids. I can have conversations with people and I don't have to take the responsibility of them home with me, d'you know what I mean? You're not taking on new friends, you're taking on common new acquaintances. And also I love the fact that I can be ugly on Twitter. "I used to find it really difficult that people would put words in your mouth, that you were always subject to somebody else's whim about how you were gonna be represented, you know? And I want to be known for all of my colours and I wanna be an asshole; I want to reserve the right to be an asshole."

We tell Moyet we love that about her. "But do you know what I mean? There's kind of an element of: there you are, you're a middle-aged woman, you're known for body softness and there's this assumption that therefore you are asinine and you are just, you know, constantly living on a romantic narrative. And this is not who I've ever been and I've always found it really oppressive; I've found it really oppressive when someone is aghast that I swear, it's like, 'Mate, if you'd have been a fan, you'd have known that this is who I've been all my life,' you know?... I'd rather you know who I am and reject me [laughs] than force me to live in your box. "Listen, I grew up in a peasant family; we were scrappers, we were born to pull carts, you know what I mean? We were hard kids, haha, I am gonna offend people," she laughs, "and I'd much rather they save their money than get upset about it later."