Alison Moyet is back thrilling audiences – if only people wouldn’t go on about her weight loss, she tells Emma Pinch

ALISON MOYET has shed a couple of stone and looks great. But she admits to being slightly dismayed at the universal approval to her weight loss.

“To some degree, I would have liked it to be of no consequence,” she says wryly. “Ultimately, if I’m thinner, I’m not a better person for it.

“People have commented on my body since I was eight years old and I thought I’d love to be at a stage where it’s not about my body. To my mind, my body is only relevant to the person I’m sleeping with.”

Alison, 48, has never enjoyed being in the media spotlight, but she comes across as someone happy in her own skin.

Starting out as one half of Yazoo, the pop duo she formed in 1981 with college friend Vince Clarke, together they had classic hits like Only You and Don’t Go.

Following the band’s 1983 split after just two albums, she had a successful solo career, with six top 10 singles and is back centre stage now for a new tour which takes in the Philharmonic Hall, and the launch of The Very Best of Alison Moyet.

She explains that it’s the record company who have insisted on the retrospective.

She’s hoping it will kindle interest in her newer work, which she says have better production values and, to her mind, better songs.

“It’s not at all a swan song.

“I’ve been working constantly, but there are times you are at the forefront and times when people are unaware of what you are doing.”

Listening to her old tracks, like the soulful All Cried Out and Invisible has been a strange experience for Essex-born Alison, who you feel would be great to share a pint with.

“It’s really odd to see the person I was then,” says Alison. “I tend not to listen to my old tracks much because I’m looking forward all the time then touring. It’s like finding a diary you’ve forgotten. It’s like time travel, you’re going back to visit yourself at 21.

“Sometimes I’m doing really heartfelt vocals, but I look at the date and I know I didn’t spend most of my life then going ‘Oh, oh’.

“When you are singing as a 21-year-old, your ideas of passion are very different. My early hits with Yazoo were before I’d even split with anyone. I was playing a role. Now I can completely understand what it means. You can write songs that at that moment have no relation to your life and feelings at all.”

She grew up feeling different, she says, and finding herself suddenly and unexpectedly in the public eye reinforced the feeling.

“I was quite a haunted, insular, defensive young thing, I think. It had a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in a real peasant French family and I never had a doll or a dress, I hadn’t been taught those . . . niceties.

“People always had something to say about the fact I was odd looking, bigger than other people, that I was awkward. When I discovered punk, I bought into it. That look combined with being fat made me even less of what people thought a young woman should be.

“When I didn’t fit in, I created a hard front. Of course, as you get older, you recognise a lot of the trouble that surrounded you was brought on by a defensive, awkward nature.

“It was really difficult being in the public eye with all this going on.”