Coming from a tiny rural community on the outskirts of Cognac, from a family that lived in the same streets as far back as the 1600s, my father, a printer, a semi-feral street fighter and a child of the fields, met my mother, a shy, insular English au pair who was working in one of the city's grand houses. They married and had a son, but my mother ached for England and so, reluctantly, my father followed her here. Eventually they came to live in Basildon new town, full of terraced council houses and postage-stamp gardens that were identical, left and right, as far as the road was straight. Soon after, the youngest of three, I, Alison-Jane, was born.
French culture has shaped my bones as surely as Basildon flattened my vowels. Each summer we returned to our Charente home, resonant with the incessant melodious shouting and arguing that sang out from every mouth. We would fall asleep listening to the musical rise and fall of those voices and wake up to them. When I am asked about what influences my work, it is this upbringing I think of. France taught me self-expression - the kind that is heated and shameless. It informs the sounds I make; the music I am drawn to.
Without television or a music system, the songs I first heard in France came floating over from the radio or from the voices that sang at their work. There was Edith Piaf for my grandmother; Jacques Brel for my uncle, and later, spilling from my father's car with its doors wide open, courtesy of his newly acquired cassette player, the ever-running scales and arpeggios of the accordion-led valse musette. This was the sound of my home. We owned nothing and yet these cadences belonged to us entirely.
A favourite was Brel's bilious Vesoul. It is a song that pulls you breathlessly along - the tale of a man finally turning on his lover, who has dragged him mercilessly to her beat - and is delivered in a torrent of syllables at a pace that beggars belief. As a child, I was unable to decipher the words, which flew by like peppered missiles. But it was the atmosphere Brel brought with him that drew me up short. This was a man whose songs had the dark stern men that were my kin mouthing his poetry with abandonment, their throats gluey with empathy. These hard men, with bare chests and livid scars, rarely offered up a gentle word, but Brel transformed them; made them laugh in recognition.
Brel's were not songs of make-believe. He levelled us with our own shared human condition: his Madeleine would never arrive, the clock would cease to tick for Les Vieux, and alcoholics like the tragic Jeff don't always sing a merry song home. So, in turn, my writing on my new album, The Turn, looks with adult eyes. In The Man in the Wings, the only romance left is that which is preserved in non-action. "I don't ache for some fleeting exchange in the dark, that will pass," I sing, the object of my attention being one I will never sully with intimacy. In Home - "From here on in tomorrow's canned, in each dear disappointed hand" - comes the voice of she who presides over every new generation of lovers certain that their affection will not sag with indifference. One More Time is perhaps the wisest of the three, and recognises that every pan boils dry if unattended and that endurance is the key.
French song gives me a stark lovers' language. It is neither blind nor hopeless and it rarely lies. And it is the honesty in the dark pictures of Brel's songs that instructs my own writing. I want to hold life up to a mirror that will not make a slender shape of it, but neither diminishes it. This is the theatricality that attracts me. It does not belong in a West End musical. And then there are the songs you can only write with more than half a life under your belt and some that you can never write or sing thereafter with purity again.
Today, I make music as the day suggests. My day, the one I wake up to. I will write about things that move me. I will sing like it matters, because it can matter. I will be the product of my 46 imperfect years, and as she whose body, like theirs, was built to work the fields, I want to be able to laugh with abandonment at the folly of it all.
· Alison Moyet's new album The Turn is out now on W14/Universal
