Alison Goldfrapp, co-member, writer, producer

This song was an ode to glam rock. My older sister was really into Marc Bolan and her passion for him and his sound really rubbed off on me. I love the vocal effects and drum sounds on those old records.

I couldn’t think of a lyric for the chorus, though, and I thought to myself: “What do I need?” 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 and kept layering the voice and then added these vocoder voices. We liked the synthetic robo feel alongside the natural voice.

The lyrics were personal, about a relationship and how I was feeling. I like to use visual metaphors. The breakdown section, about breaking a heel on a shoe, came from this old 1950s film I’d seen on TV. An image of a woman, walking along the road in a tight pencil skirt, limping because the heel had broken. That stuck with me. I had a book of Baudelaire poems hanging around, so I got him into the lyrics somewhere, too.

Portishead’s Adrian Utley, a friend of ours, came in to play guitar, which was quite a departure for us because for ages we wanted to stay clear of guitars. He’s so instinctive the way he plays, incredibly lean with the notes. He got the right tone immediately.

For the video, I thought it would be fun to have an imaginary glam rock band. Dawn Shadforth was director, the late Cathy Edwards the stylist. We had some good budgets back then, there was plenty of time to do it all carefully with detail, no rushing.

The song gets used in many places. Some requests are pretty funny – often sex scenes. We’re not too precious but we have said no many times, too. I remember performing the song on US TV, being in this freezing cold studio waiting to go on air, and Simon Cowell was standing about six feet away with his arms crossed, doing that thing he does on The X Factor, a rather disapproving expression. He was wearing this pink fluffy jumper, which I became fixated on. “Wow!” he said. “It’s all just kicking off for you in America, isn’t it?” I was already so nervous and him being there and saying that made me freeze with fright.

Will Gregory, co-member, writer, producer

I was listening to Ooh La La again recently for the first time in ages and was surprised at how little is actually in there. The whole thing hinges on the claps – it’s just claps, bass line, vocal, and a few little stabs from synths and guitars.

We used to have this thing of renting spaces – usually slightly chintzy holiday homes – over winter when you could get a six-month let. The more lo-fi, the better. It felt more satisfying than being in a flashy studio. And not being in London was important. A lot of great music comes from that isolation.

The song was an outlier because every time we tried to change the chords, we thought: “Why don’t we just stay as we are?” So it’s literally a one-note piece. We were delighted that we’d somehow sidestepped all those complications that usually come with songwriting. I made this mistake one day when I was playing the riff – I’d left a microphone on, so when I played it back, I got the sound of the bassline but also the clatter of the keys. I couldn’t get rid of it because it was all on one track, so it’s in there.

I’m old enough to remember the 60s and thinking in the 70s: “Oh no, it’s all over, it’s all gone wrong.” I absolutely hated it after the Stones and the Beatles, but Alison was very good at educating me. I remember her playing me Joan Jett. I needed talking round, but I got it.

I didn’t appear in the video. That was probably a mutual choice. Alison has always had this great visual side. I would have looked like Ron Mael, the synth player from Sparks. He used to do nothing – and I always thought I could relate to that.

We got Mark “Spike” Stent interested, this amazing mixer who’s had millions of hits. We ended up camping in his studio while he was mixing and we were still writing. I felt like such an amateur – I couldn’t even get a bass track together without splitting it into a mosaic of different parts. But it was exciting, a real whirlwind.

The track still seems relevant, partly because of the synths and the simplicity. It doesn’t bed itself into an era particularly, because it’s got this mixture of things boiled down to something without putting a foot too far into any identifiable genre.

• Supernature by Goldfrapp 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out now