Having quietly owned the 90s electro scene with One Dove, done that singing on Death In Vegas's 'Dirge', collaborated with Massive Attack and moved onto solo projects in the early 2000s with albums 'Afterglow' and 'We Are Science' and EPs like 'Strung Out' and the Felix Da Housecat favourite, 'Substance', Allison is breaking away from electro for a more guitar-y sound on new EP 'Beneath The Ivy'. She's toured with everyone from Babyshambles to Massive Attack so we grabbed her to ask about her festival past before her new album turns up this autumn.

What's the best festival you've ever been to?

"Probably... we headlined Berta in Belgium with Massive Attack.  It's bigger than Glastonbury, it's very big."

What's the worst one?

"Good question... probably Reading.  Just because everything on the stage was running really late and the guys that were doing the stage were quite grumpy.  It wasn't such a good experience, but the crowd were brilliant."

Ever seen anything really weird at a festival?

"I'm sure I have, I can't remember."

Essential?

"A friend."

That's lovely.  Everyone else says toilet paper or whatever. What's the best band you've ever seen at a festival?

"Radiohead, Bertha, they were on the night before us.  I was thinking 'FUCK!  We've gotta be there tomorrow night'."

Read on for the full story of Dot Allison's new sound and what it's like to work with, er, Pete Doherty. Beneath The Ivy is out on Universal on August 28.

Dot Allison: former biochemistry student turned blonde Scottish electro queen circa 1993 and 2002. Ring any bells? How about if we namecheck Death In Vegas? Or Massive Attack? Pete Doherty? For someone who’s been a solo artist since 1996, Dot Allison comes heavily packaged in collaborator tape. She sang on Death In Vegas’s ‘Dirge’, spent two years on tour with Massive Attack and went on both of Babyshambles’s 2004 tours (where as well as playing with the band, she ditched her electro gadgets in favour of an acoustic guitar and a cover of – coincidentally – Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’).

As the singer in ‘90s dance group One Dove, she scored big popularity points with the Q and Select readership, then still gripped by their obsession with St Etienne. Their 1996 album, ‘Muted Dove White’, met with “muted success”. As Wikipedia explains, this turned out to be a poisoned chalice: “Other critics expressed disappointment that the album’s title had been changed at the last moment from the original working title, Sound.” For Christ’s sake.

Far from churning out the nerdy, hardworking sort of music that usually accompanies such nitpicking, Allison’s ethereal voice is now being used in more singer-songwriter bent. The reason you should care about her, aside from her collaborations, is that she’s far more than the sum of her parts. In appropriate name terms, the title of her new EP, ‘Beyond The Ivy’, isn’t too far from the truth. When not attached to a bigger name, Allison has a steely quality that balances out the breathy folk of her voice; every effect on the EP was recorded manually, and as a whole it’s surprisingly strong for something that initially sounds as forceful as a really cute puppy.

It’s still a big step away from the acid chillout of her 1999 album ‘Afterglow’, or the corrosive melodies that filled her Fischerspooner-esque LP ‘We Are Science’ in 2002. In fact, the timing is just plain weird. Electro is such big news now that she could have made a mint by re-releasing the Felix Da Housecat remix of ‘Substance’. So why go down the delicate female route? “It's partially a taste thing,” she says, curled up on what may well be the world’s squashiest sofa inside the Soho House library. “My tastes for the last album were what I was DJing, and it was something I wanted to express within those parameters – but your headspace changes. I've always loved Neil Young and Gram Parsons. Even when I was in One Dove I was writing guitar tracks, but it's taken me this long to release them in that format.”

That Allison has had the luxury of time has been partly due to her ongoing collaborations with other artists, all of whom have been men. “There's just so many of them around, in music,” she says, shrugging off the idea of some great conspiracy. “I've worked with female engineers and producers, and I'd like to sing a duet with a woman at some point, but it's still a very male dominated area when it comes to producers. There's not a lot of female producers or guitarists.”

One of these not-female guitarists was Pete Doherty, with whom she’s recorded a couple of tracks in addition to touring with him. In the usual PR precautions we’ve been instructed not to ask anything about him that isn’t music-related. Is there anything left to ask? Well, yes, now we come to think of it. How do you end up working with someone bundled up in that much of a media circus, which was gaining some serious momentum even back in 2004. Two poets walk into a bar, or what?

“It's like serendipity sometimes,” Allison says. “He submitted a piece of writing for my brother's fanzine 'Put Me In An Empty Sports Bag', so Pete was contributing short stories and poems to that. Ian was in touch with his manager as a result, so there was a conversation between Pete's manager and my brother that we should get together.” Hang on, isn’t that like how Hollywood goes dating? She shakes her head. “It's kind of the poetry scene.”

How was working with Pete? The tabloid neon sign around his name flashes and she shoots a carefully blank stare that states, ‘Don’t mess'. “It's a very interesting process,” she says deliberately. “You get to learn how they work, and it’s enriching you on a songwriting level.”

Fair enough. Allison and Doherty are avid poets, with the former taking an unusual attitude towards the ubiquitous MySpace blog. If you want a bitch-fest a la Lily Allen, or a video diary, you’re out of luck. Picking a day at random, “…between each charged refrain / my every breath my every sigh / blushes with meaning / of only you / of only you” was part of what she blogged on April 13. Dot Allison posts poems. Or song lyrics. What are they? “They are what they are,” she offers. “There are no rules. Some of them start off as poems, and I might plunder parts of them.”

Does it bother her to have such personal things put up for anyone to see? “I think that it's like a gift, to just put it out,” she says. “If it brings anything to anyone, great, but at the same time they're quite opaque.” Does she still enjoy making music? She thaws for a millisecond. “Yeah, definitely, I'm making the best album I've ever made. I love it. I don't think I could have made this album 10 years ago. I think you need experience to take you where you are.”

And what about that One Dove experience? How does it feel listening to the album 10 years on? “I feel very proud. Very proud. (It’s) the kind of album that seems quite timeless. I was a biochemistry student, and I met one of the guys in One Dove, and we decided to start a band together, pressed our own single, and put it out on white label, and (producer, Andrew) Weatherall picked up on that, and offered us an album deal based on that one single, and that's how it all started.”

Hmm, chemistry versus music. Would she ever be tempted to go back? “Probably not.” She smiles in that careful way, and you see why she’s releasing singer-songwriter stuff when it’s not fashionable, why she’ll always collaborate, why she gets away with releasing an album every three years: “I've never looked back.”