Rocket

Album: Head First (2010)
Charted: 47
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Songfacts®:

  • This euphoric revenge fantasy was the first single from English duo Goldfrapp's fifth studio album, Head First. The song is about getting rid of someone. "I've got a rocket," sings Alison Goldfrapp, "You're going on it…"
  • Head First marked a stylistic U-turn for Goldfrapp away from the psychedelic-pastoral sound of 2008's Seventh Tree and towards a Hi-NRG synth pop sound. Alison Goldfrapp told The Independent April 16, 2010: "We wanted something that was unselfconscious, brazen and fun. When we came up with the keyboard riff for "Rocket", I started fantasising about doing star jumps off the drum riser."
  • Lead keyboards/synthesizer player and producer Will Gregory explained further to The News of the World how this was the song that inspired the musical direction of Head First. "This record seemed to arrive at a speed we'd never worked at before. Rocket was the first track we worked on and it came entirely out of the big synth stab that's on the finished song. For us, sounds usually come with their own little story or image or character and this was a huge, stadium-filling sort of thing that got us both very excited. As soon as we heard it, we could imagine all the musical parts that would go around it, we could even picture the costumes, the lighting - and the dry ice - that'd go along with it."
  • This was the single that the Goldfrapp duo didn't like. Alison Goldfrapp admitted to Mojo magazine: "I think with things like 'Ooh La La' or 'Strict Machine,' although there were poppy elements and a fun-ness to them, 'Rocket' was a step too far in a direction that was maybe too poppy, or something. That's why we (hisses) hate it."

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