‘If I can’t be bold, what’s the point?’ MUSIC
The patron saint of Noughties bops Sophie Ellis-Bextor is releasing a new album. She invites El Hunt into her kitchen disco
STEPPING into Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s house — a colourful pad with charity shop finds and walls plastered with felt-tip masterpieces by her five children — sparks a hard-to-place sense of deja-vu. As she potters around the kitchen, I spot the makeshift stage created for her now-legendary Kitchen Discos. Originating in the earliest days of lockdown, the often chaotic shows featured the singer clambering over her breakdancing offspring and removing nearby hazards as she belted out her own hits and feel-good pop covers in an array of glittery costumes. Her husband, The Feeling bassist Richard Jones, could occasionally be spotted dancing in a horse mask.
It was a much-needed glimmer of silliness, and after 20 virtual editions it has since evolved into a full-blown live tour and spin-off cookbook. “You’ve been here before!” Ellis-Bextor beams. “It really did feel like everybody was here.” She actually thought people might make fun of them — “or me, more specifically,” she laughs. But with schools shut, the kids stuck at home, and her diary empty, Ellis-Bextor felt she needed to let off steam. “Putting on a sequinned catsuit isn’t really a normal response to a national situation like that, but something in it made sense to me.”
This month Ellis-Bextor — who has also been touted as a contender to represent the UK at next year’s Eurovision — took the disco to Liverpool. She also has new music on the way: HANA is her first fulllength studio album in six years.
Though she’s now seen as a patron saint of Noughties bops, known for dance-pop hits such as Murder on the Dancefloor and Get Over You, Ellis-Bextor’s first step into the music industry was as the vocalist in Britpop outfit Theaudience.
“At heart, I’ve always been an indie kid,” she says, swigging tea from a Dolly Parton mug. Growing up in west London, Ellis-Bextor remembers feeling like she was at the epicentre of something special amid the Britpop explosion. Her bedroom walls were plastered with posters of Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Elastica, PJ Harvey and Björk. Equally, she was a devoted reader of Smash Hits and loved Eighties pop.
“When I started, pop was quite a dirty word, really — in the early 2000s, it was just seen as very throwaway, very manufactured,” she says. “I was always quite keen to give pop a good name.”
Emerging in the late Nineties, Theaudience were nominated for Best New Band at the NME Awards, but were unceremoniously dropped by their label following their one and only album. Ellis-Bextor feared she’d lost her chance of becoming a professional singer, but then the Italian DJ Spiller came knocking.
The resulting collaboration, the house-inflected Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), became “the song that changed everything”. It went to number one, after being pitted against a newly-solo Victoria Beckham. Ellis-Bextor released a trio of major label records. For 2011’s Make a Scene she amicably parted ways with Universal and began releasing music on her own label, EBGB; a nod to legendary New York punk club CBGB. “I was 34 at the time, and I thought, I just need to do something a bit more bold.”
2014’s strange and wiry Wonderlust, then, was a concept-heavy album that took influence from the Slavic folklore figure Baba Yaga. Familia, in 2016, was inspired by her travels in Mexico and HANA — once again produced by collaborator Ed Harcourt — draws on a trip to Japan in early 2020.
Those expecting another dose of Kitchen Disco might well be taken aback by HANA’s psychy, swirling take on prog-pop and the generous explorations of grief on tracks like Until the Wheels Fall Off. The song borrows the words of her step-dad John, who passed away in July 2020.
Following his death from lung cancer, the family were given a letter John had left behind, recounting his happy memories of drinking expensive wine on ordinary days and wringing out every last drop of life. “You know, when someone’s given you a posh candle, and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to burn it, because then I’ll have used up a really nice candle?’” she says. “Just burn the candle!”
Elsewhere on the album, Ellis-Bextor recounts a disorientating but beautiful trip to Tokyo in a song of the same name. It was a holiday choreographed by John; when it was
When I started, pop was quite a dirty word, really. I was always quite keen to give pop a good name
clear he was too unwell to take the trip, his step-daughter took his place. “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to come, but it happened that the fates, they had their fun,” she sings. Beneath the dark, looming clouds of Everything is Sweet, sawtooth synthesisers grind and squelch; Kitchen Disco this certainly is not. “I could have done a poppy dance record,” she shrugs. “But that wasn’t really where my heart was at.
Following the release of HANA, Ellis-Bextor hitts the road, with a headline tour and sets at Pride Cymru, Brockwell Park’s Mighty
Hoopla, Latitude, Isle of Wight, and Y Not festival. She’s looking forward to it but she admits being disappointed by another year of male-dominated line-ups. Is there — as Glastonbury’s Emily Eavis argues — a “pipeline problem”? “What does that mean?” she says, incredulously. “Women are stuck in pipes?!
“I think it’s just not something that’s thought about much at the planning stage,” she says. “I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me because I’ve got a lovely summer, but sometimes I’m the only woman, or there’s just not that many; It is across the board, it’s not just the big [festivals].”
As I leave, she tells me she enjoyed “the indulgence of making this record.” After more than 20 years of shapeshifting, Ellis-Bextor seems to be in a place where she can pursue whatever fulfils her creatively, from full-blown party-mode to the gnarled intimacy of HANA. “If I can’t be bold,” she says, “what is the point?”