A chorus borrowed from a trip to France, and a broken heel
The stomp is glam with the sequins still on. A guitar, unusual for them then, kicks like a boot, and Alison Goldfrapp’s voice stacks until it is both a woman and a small choir of machines. Ooh La La does not seduce in a whisper. It announces. The chorus is two words that mean almost nothing and, in her mouth, mean the want precisely. Under the glitter the lyric is sulky. She is not offering a romance. She is pricing an attraction, visual, a little cruel, a heel that might snap. The vocoder answers her in a robot courtesy that makes the human voice sound more deliberate, not less.
She and Will Gregory wrote and produced it for Supernature, released in 2005, working in a small rented house in the countryside near Bath, the same plain setup that kept the album from swelling into a studio spectacle. Goldfrapp told The Guardian the chorus stalled. They had just been to France. Ooh la la was what she had, and they wondered if it was enough, then kept it, layering the voice and adding the synthetic ones because the robo feel sat well beside the natural one. The words were personal, a relationship, the way she was feeling. A broken heel in the breakdown came from a 1950s film, a woman in a pencil skirt limping down a road. Baudelaire, a book that was lying around, got into the lyric too. Adrian Utley played guitar. The single went out in August and reached the British top five, a dirty homage to Marc Bolan that did not need to explain the homage.
On television the song looked like a transmission from a colder planet that had learned about platforms. She has remembered a freezing American studio, Simon Cowell a few feet away in a pink jumper, arms crossed, telling her it was all kicking off in America, and the fright that followed. The track has since been requested, often, for sex scenes. She finds some of the requests funny, and has said no plenty of times. Live, the stomp does the work the verse only sketches. You hear the heel. You hear the refusal to be only pretty. Supernature was the record where the duo stopped hovering and put a boot down.
I couldn’t think of a lyric for the chorus. We’d just been to France, hence the Ooh la la, but we wondered if it was sufficient. It felt good, though, so we stayed with it.
(Alison Goldfrapp, The Guardian, 2026)
What the glam frame conceals is how little the narrator is willing to promise. The French shrug in the title is not affection. It is a way of wanting someone without signing the rest of the evening. Goldfrapp’s gift is to make that shrug sound like a chorus you can shout. Gregory’s synths keep the edges metallic so the shout does not turn to camp, or turns to camp only as far as Bolan would have allowed. The house near Bath, small and quiet, is a funny birthplace for a song this loud. The quiet is why the loud could be tuned.
What remains is the two-word hook, still sufficient. Ooh La La does not need a third word. It needed a trip, a film, a poet on the table, and a guitar they had mostly denied themselves. The heel stays broken. The chorus stays up.
