My kitchen looks like a low-budget game show, and I love it!
Her family disco videos made her a lockdown heroine. Now Sophie Ellis-Bextor is getting the glitterball outup again for a Christmas knees- — after a year when she lost her stepfather and barely hugged her mum ...
SOPHIE Ellis-Bextor is talking about natural highs and that feeling when you think you hate exercise, but actually drag your body out on a run and find — surprise! — that you almost enjoy it.
Except she’s not talking about sporting matters, not really. She’s talking about Christmas, and the astonishing mood-enhancing magical power of . . . tinsel.
‘ I think there are endorphins involved. Like lots of people this year, I was feeling a bit gloomy about Christmas, a bit “I- can’tfind-the-festive-feeling”, but once I started to decorate the house, it was amazing how quickly it tricked my brain. It gave me the right sort of endorphins, or whatever. I’ve noticed quite a lot of people doing the same thing, and going bigger and brighter with everything.’
In her house, she’s been going bigger and brighter with the tinsel. You might have read that tinsel is considered a bit passé, that all the uber cool folk have ditched the tinsel because it’s a bit common. Nope, says Sophie, 41. Her enthusiasm suggests we all need tinsel.
This is not a time for our decorations to be muted. ‘I discovered these really amazing tinsel strands which are 30 ft long. They are fantastic. They are something I will use year on year, by the way, so I AM being ecologically minded, but the point is they look incredible.
‘It’s all blue and lilac and rose pink and it just looks . . . exciting. My living room is more coordinated but my kitchen looks like a game show set, a low-budget game show at that. I get very happy when I see it.’
Which is nice, because we need happy. Sophie has been decorating her house mostly for herself, her five sons (aged one year old to 17) and her mother (the former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis, who lives five minutes away), but also for the rest of us.
On December 18, she’s going to be throwing one of her famous kitchen discos, this time a Christmas one. Everyone is invited — in the virtual sense. She started them early in the first lockdown, throwing one every Friday and they quickly became a hit — a burst of surreal fun in an otherwise THEY dismal period.
turned Sophie into one of the unexpected stars of the pandemic. Pre - Covid, she had tried to keep her professional and private lives separate, but, during the pandemic, she thought again. ‘Who cared about that?’ she reflects. So she ended up giving gigs in her kitchen, leaping around among the Lego with a toddler on her hip.
There was an anything-goes vibe to her parties. Sometimes the kids appeared in hats or fancy- dress costumes.
With sequins and feather boas, Sophie often looked as if she’d emerged from the fancy- dress box too. ‘ I do have one,’ she admits.
I ask if the original wave of kitchen discos were about her trying to retain her own ‘normal’ in a very abnormal world. ‘I don’t even think it was anything about me being an entertainer,’ she says. ‘It was a more instinctive, human, thing, I think. I wanted to connect with people.
‘It felt like it was important to have this space where nothing was being asked of anybody. It was just about fun. None of the elements of our kitchen disco were things we invented — the power of music, the power of being a bit daft, bringing joy when everything is a bit dark and heavy — but they were something that helped our family cope.’
One thing that wasn’t perhaps appreciated during the initial wave of lockdown discos was about how turbulent a year the whole family were having. At the start of lockdown, Janet’s husband John Leach — Sophie’s much adored step- father — was having treatment for stage four lung cancer. His chemo was postponed, then restarted, but sadly John died in July. His death ‘wasn’t unexpected but cruel’ said Sophie at the time.
Things are still raw, she admits. ‘It’s been four months, which seems a bit of time, but it’s not really.’
They are still adjusting, but when she says that ‘the earth has tilted this year’ it seems like quite an understatement.
She acknowledges that there’ll be an empty chair at the table for Christmas dinner, but she’s focusing on the fact that the rules will allow her mum to be there and possibly her siblings (she has a stepbrother and step-sister, Jackson, 33, and Martha, 29), but probably not her dad (the film producer Robin Bextor).
‘ For our family, this was always going to be a strange Christmas, with a sad undercurrent, but the most important thing is togetherness.
‘ I think as the child of divorced parents — my parents separated when I was very little — I got very used to the fact that Christmas was never about one day, or one particular way of doing things. I always grew up aware that you don’t always have to have the people you love together in the same room.
‘One of my most memorable
was spent at a theme park with my dad. We went to Universal Studios and ate turkey in Florida on Christmas Day. I was 11. I kind of embraced that idea that Christmas can be about many things.’
And this year it’s going to be a very Covid Christmas — where a glitterball will take centre stage, as will the bitter-sweet memories of the last year.
The Friday night kitchen discos may have ended in the summer, but the glitterball stayed put. Now Sophie’s added baubles, ordered a giant plastic horse (‘ which has a Ziggy Stardust stripe on it’) and has even created her own colour- changing tipple with Pink Marmalade Gin in time for the festive season. ‘It’s a tonic — literally,’ she laughs.
She’s also taking requests for music for this festive kitchen party on the 18th, which will be livestreamed at 6.30pm.
Somehow it seems silly to be talking about tinsel and our favourite cocktails at a time like this, but perhaps not. She insists that the alternative — sitting around moping — is not really the solution either.
‘I think anybody who has lost someone significant will know that you’ve got to have your own way of handling it. We’re not the only ones to experience loss this year. It’s a very complicated time. At times, some of it has felt relentless, but people are complicated and life is complicated and this year has been absurd in lots of ways. But we just get on with it.’
They sound like an incredibly close family. In some ways — and she acknowledges there is an element of ‘ trying to find the positive here’ — it was good they suffered this bereavement in this of all years. ‘ If it had been a “normal” year, Richard and I might have been away for work. At least we were here for Mum.’
She won’t talk about how her mother is doing — ‘that’s not for me to say’ — but admits she suffered a huge loss, too. The stepparent and child relationship can sometimes be complicated, but not in this case. Sophie has described John as ‘funny, smart and solid’. It’s clear she loved him dearly.
‘I did feel — and continue to feel — incredibly lucky that when we were all going through it, either when John was unwell and in hospital, or the times when we’ve been together since, there were never any question marks over how we all feel about each other, how much love there is.
‘Even when John was dying, I didn’t feel: “Oh there’s something I need to say here or something I need to hear from him.” Everybody knew how they felt. That’s quite a special thing, which helps you through the really horrible times, I think.’
John and her mum married in 1988, and Sophie wrote the song Young Blood about their enduring love affair. It sounds like everyone involved worked hard to make the new family set up work, though she insists that, from her vantage point, ‘it never felt like work’.
‘John was just part of that unit of people who raised me. The blood relation side is only one aspect and I’ve never seen it as massively relevant to who I call family.
‘The nice thing, if I’m honest, is that most people don’t make that distinction between blood family and step family. Maybe that’s because it’s much more common for families not to be the mum/ dad/ brother/ sister. For most people it’s complicated and sprawling and varied.’
‘Sprawling’ is an apt description. People are always staggered to learn Sophie — who still looks about 28 — has five children, not least because she almost died after having her first, who was premature. Ditto her second. ‘It got easier after that,’ she laughs.
Her early kitchen discos are a reminder of how fast children grow — and how much grandparents miss when families are separated.
‘My little one, Mickey, was crawling back in March and now he’s a chatty, nearly two-year- old, the physical embodiment of the time that has gone by. It does bring it home. And a lot of the contact with my dad has been on FaceTime, or whatever, so that’s been special. Chaotic — there is always someone yelling — but special.’
She is very much a take- everything-in-her-stride mother, or certainly she has learned to be one.
NOTfor her home schooling schedules and strict chore rotas. ‘They are pretty rubbish with chores,’ she says. ‘We’re not one of those families who have a rota system. My mum and dad were quite relaxed with me so I don’t really mind. There is plenty of time for that.’
No great parenting revelations from this year then? ‘I think I did have it reinforced to me that you’ve really just got to do what works within your four walls.
‘I think my most miserable bits of the year, in terms of how to manage the family, were when I was worrying that somewhere out there was a family very similar to ours who were just nailing it, and getting everything achieved, with the house looking amazing, and the kids all doing their schoolwork.’
‘I aspired to that, but then I thought: “Who am I kidding?” Eventually, you have to focus on your own family and what was making them happy.’
Of course, we were all looking at your family and thinking ‘ gosh, they know how to have fun’.
‘Ah well, that bit is easy. I didn’t invent fun. Every family knows how to have fun, but sometimes you just need a bit of permission. It’s all doable, so just grab an animal mask, put some music on and have a jump around. You’ve just got to bounce your way through it.’
Sophie’S Christmas Kitchen Disco will stream live on December 18 at 6.30pm on her instagram which is sophieellisbextor.