Photos by Celeste Wells
“Once a percussionist who was touring with us when I was in One Dove did a bong hit in the hotel,” giggles a sheepish Dot Allison. “So we came back after being in town for the day and he had emptied out the entire hotel because he set off the fire alarm. It was like, ‘I don’t know you!’” It’s only a few hours before Dot is set to take the stage at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles and she’s been regaling me with touring stories. Since she’s been a figurehead in the electro-dance scene for over a decade she has quite a few. Dot Allison is so soft spoken and unassuming that it’s a bit odd to watch her speak of sitting on the beach with dream producer Andrew Weatherhall listening to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica demos, or how she had a problem with a drunken voyeur in her garden a few years ago. She possesses a Jackie Kennedy-like elegance not easily found in today’s world. As Allison sits on a couch in the green room of the Palace, her posture is as rigid as her skin is incandescent, and she beams with excitement while speaking about how she moved to Glasgow at age seventeen to be closer to acid house clubs. Was this meek Scottish princess with her sleek blonde bowl cut an early ‘90s hellcat on the dance floor? Allison is really too modest to elaborate, but she does say she frequented clubs in those early days at least three or four times a week. But to Allison it wasn’t the partying, the drugs, or the boozing that drew her there. It was the music.

“I just gravitated to that scene, and being in that kind of environment I ended up....well.” She ended up in a band. But not a traditional pop band. As a founding member of the early ‘90s acid-pop-dance outfit One Dove, Allison became a part of rave history. But that wasn’t ever a part of the plan. “We just thought we would record a single, and then Weatherhall picked up on it and offered us a deal, and we thought, ‘God, we’d better write an album!’”

What began as an obsession over the rebellious acid house music pulsating from the Glasgow clubs ended with Allison receiving a musical education through her experience with One Dove. As a child, she had been tutored by her aunt in the art of classical piano, but that wasn’t going to fly on the dance floor. “For me it was like, ‘I can’t do this classical piano thing.’ I just had to adapt, and at first it was kind of like feeling your way about in the dark inside the studio. I remember when I first sang. I was really, really nervous and really shy. I can’t say I enjoyed it that much. I think the need to express what I wanted to conjugate was stronger than nervousness, so that kind of won in the end.” Indeed it did, and Allison has been sampling, singing, and programming ever since.
It hasn’t always been easy, though. In fact, for Dot Allison the music industry has been something of a school for hard knocks since she began her career. After only one album, the demise of One Dove was messy to say the least. “I didn’t want to leave One Dove actually. We just had so many problems with our label. One Dove was signed because the music was interesting, but they still didn’t know what to do with us.” Contract litigations ensued, and Allison was soon left by the wayside until a friend at Boys Own Records persuaded her to move to London and pursue a solo career.

For her first solo album (the gorgeously subdued Afterglow) Allison began the practice of bringing in outside musicians to collaborate on her compositions (Mani, Kevin Shields, Mangus Fiennes). The results worked well, and she continues to collaborate with outside producers, musicians, and DJs today. Critically, Afterglow was a huge success, yet the record stalled on the shelves thanks to more woes with her record label. “Heavenly Records was a subsidiary of BMG, and it just so happened that three months after Afterglow came out, their relationship soured. So, everything on Heavenly got frozen.”
Undaunted Allison began recording a new batch of songs with producers Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) and Two-Loneswordsmen’s Keith Tenniswood at her newly constructed home studio in London. She signed to a new label, Mantra, and released her most ambitious album to date, We Are Science. The title of her new record is appropriate considering Allison majored in Applied BioChemistry at university. “I like the fact that it [the title] could mean human expression through technology, through electronic music. It could also mean the chemistry between two people or mortality. Are we a chemical reaction? And if we are then there must be a chemical explanation for the human soul.” We Are Sciencelistens like a concise overview of Allison’s career. There are the pop-rock-acid house numbers like “Substance” and “Strung Out” standing next to the legitimate avant-garde electro of “We’re Only Science” and the ambient “Performance”. To Allison, the new album is only a stepping stone toward future endeavors. She’s already written another album and has collaborated with Massive Attack for a few tracks on their latest set of albums.
Touring stories and label misfortunes aside Allison also candidly spoke at length on the subject of women in electronic music. “[As a woman] you’ve got this unconscious isolation thing where you are the only girl, or you’re very often the only girl. If you are a male, then you are identified with the male experience. So, simply by the fact that you’re a man, and this particular art is created by men, there will be a level of identification that a woman can’t have with that music simply because she’s not a man. I think that until there’s an equal number of male and female executives and an equal number of journalists and engineers and whatnot, you will always have people trying to communicate but can’t because they don’t have the same intuitive experiences.”

It’s a fact that the electronic music scene today is run like a boys’ club, but artists like Dot Allison are proving there’s room for the girls to play, too. Allison’s excellent conglomeration of techno, dance, and pop shows women have a lot to offer, but it’s still an up hill battle. If anything, Dot Allison is fighting the good fight in order to pave the way for future generations of women in the electronic scene. She’s been fighting the music business’s sexist regime for quite a while now, but you don’t have to worry about Dot Allison; she’s just getting started. “Everything I’ve ever done I’ve always wanted to do because it was sort of pushing my own envelope.” As long as she keeps pushing, we’ll all be a little better off.