“You could almost imagine everyone watching this tiny sparkly madwoman”
Sophie takes her disco on tour
Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s lockdown Kitchen Disco warmed locked-down hearts around the world in the worst depths of the pandemic. As Sophie says, it tapped into the huge catharsis of music, the sheer escapism it was able to offer at a horrid time for all of us. It also brought us, as she says, a fun “caricature” of family life, with all its chaos. For all those reasons, it became immeasurably special to Sophie – who is delighted at last to be able to hit the road with it. She brings her Kitchen Disco from the screen to the stage with her Kitchen Disco Tour 2022 with dates including Wednesday, March 16, Guildford’s G Live (sold out); and Thursday, March 17, Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion (sold out). During the first lockdown, underneath the family’s sparkling kitchen disco ball, Sophie, her husband Richard Jones (who also plays bass in Sophie’s live band), and their children, with all their exuberance, put a smile on the face of the hundreds of thousands watching live on Instagram. The individual videos of songs from the performances also gained millions of views on Twitter. The shows led to Sophie’s second greatest hits compilation Songs from the Kitchen Disco which was released in November 2020 and went top ten in the UK album charts. The natural next step was to bring it all to the concert stage, bringing together all of the camp and frivolity of her original show to live stages across the country. “This just feels like a really special thing to do for me and also for Richard. The tour is something that we have been been talking about for a long time now. We just thought it would be nice if we could take the Kitchen Disco on the road.” It signals the long journey we have all been on. “It was a mad moment when the first lockdown happened,” Sophie recalls. “We just felt that everything was on pause and that everything would get back and that we would be going back to the same old things again, but the longer it went on, the more significant it seemed and the more you realised that things would be different at the end. “I was about to go away (when the first lockdown hit). I was supposed to go away to Australia for quite a long tour and Richard and I were saying that we had started the year amazingly. “I had a really packed diary which is not always the case for a musician and we were feeling really excited… and then the pandemic happened. “But obviously it was not just me. A lot of my friends are musicians or work front of house. “It was everybody involved in all those sorts of things but I think just in the nature of what we do as musicians, we know that things can always change at the last minute and I think maybe you are prepared for that.” To an extent perhaps musicians are more resilient: “But I think you just learn to go along with the flow and you realise that the things that you really fight for are not necessarily the things that end up happening. “You’ve got to be adaptable in this business. “I think that’s the case with anyone who has a relationship with music. You’ve just got to go with it and do what you can do. “Obviously, the lockdown was a bit of a mixed bag. Some bits were surprisingly lovely. “If you get to spend a lot of time with your favourite people and the sun is shining, then that’s great but other times were more stressful and there would be lots of tension. “You just have to get on with it.” And for Sophie and Richard getting on with it meant the creation of their very own Kitchen Disco. “It was Richard’s idea in the beginning. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I just felt at a bit of a loss really. I wanted to reach out to people and connect in some way but I didn’t feel I had the ability. “I didn’t continue with my piano lessons or guitar lessons. I was not able to accompany myself and I guess I just felt I was a bit mute. “But Richard said ‘Why don’t we do a disco from home?’ “Richard and I both found elements that we could focus on in the disco that really distracted us. “He has always been really brilliant on the technical side and he was able to focus on that while I was thinking about what I wanted to sing and what I wanted to wear. “We just did the first one and we had a much better response than I could ever have imagined. “I thought it was going to get people saying ‘What on earth is she up to?’ “But it was a really lovely warm response and so we did another one and then another one.” It was weekly at first and then in the second and third lockdowns it was perhaps every two to three weeks. As Sophie says, like Mary Poppins, it came back when it was needed. Sophie and Richard would work out ahead of time what they would do but there was always an element of spontaneity which was always a big part of the Friday night charm. “And I just can’t tell you how important the whole thing was to me. “It just gave me something else and the lovely thing was that you could almost imagine that everybody was actually around your house watching this tiny sparkly madwoman! “I’m not very good at being objective about these things but I think maybe it worked because there’s an element of it being a caricature of family life, the chaos of it, and the bits that I loved most about it were the bits that you could never plan. “You never really knew what was going to happen and you just realised that music is good for escapism and good for catharsis and that it is just such a great stress reliever. When you can jump around to songs that you love for half an hour, it is just brilliant. Everybody was allowed to be silly. “There were just no expectations, absolutely zero.” And now the lovely thing is, of course, that it’s transferring to the stage for the tour. “That’s the glorious thing about it – that we can evolve it into something where we can actually see people. “It took up too much of my heart to put it on a shelf and not go back to it. I just wanted to be out there with it and to keep enjoying it and all the fun.”
The tour
The Live Kitchen Disco Tour will bring the virtual to life, cooking up classic glitter ball staples and Sophie’s own dancefloor-beckoning bangers from across her seven albums, as well as a variety of well-known classics including Our House by Madness and My Favourite Things from the Sound of Music, in a thoroughly domestic Studio-54 sensation for disco divas of all ages. Sophie latest album, Songs From The Kitchen Disco, collects the songs that soundtracked her lockdown kitchen disco. It features all of Sophie’s biggest and best-known disco hits in one place for the first time ever. Available on various colourful and collectable formats (CD, double vinyl LP and tape) the album includes six top ten hits, including Murder On The Dancefloor and Take Me Home. Sophie also recently launched her new podcast, Spinning Plates, with each one hour episode featuring an interview with another working mother about the difficulties and joys of a work/ life balance. With episodes so far featuring Fearne Cotton and Caitlin Moran, the podcast has already become Apple’s number one Parenting podcast everywhere from the UK to Greece to Ecuador.