There’s a familiarity in the chaos of domesticity and we could all be together for a little while and collectively put everything down for a minute and stop worrying and be daft, just for half an hour.
Singer-songwriter and lockdown sensation Sophie Ellis-Bextor is bringing her Kitchen Disco to Yorkshire next month as part of a national tour. Duncan Seaman checks out her groove.
They were a glimmer of hope, back in the darkest days of the Covid pandemic. Thirty minutes of cheerfully haphazard musical escapism broadcast weekly on Instagram by Sophie Ellis-Bextor from the heart of her home, surrounded by several of her five children. Now, two years on, the singer is attempting to recreate the magic of her Kitchen Discos in concert halls around the UK. “I actually thought people were going to laugh at me, saying ‘what are you doing?’” says the 42-yearold, explaining that the success of the glitterball karaoke events far exceeded anything she had dreamt of when she posted the first one in the depths of lockdown on March 27, 2020.
“On the first one, my youngest was 13 months, crawling around the floor. I’d put on a sequined catsuit, we got the sound a bit wrong. They were all chaotic, but this one was extremely chaotic, I didn’t know if people would even respond to it and enjoy it. But what happened with the discos became such an integral part of what has been going on for the last two years, not least for what it did for me in an emotional way, really.
“It gave me something good when it was all wonky and wobbly in the news. For me personally, in a really selfish way, it was something I needed.”
Aside from coping with the pandemic, Ellis-Bextor’s stepfather, John Leach, was gravely ill with lung cancer. When he died in July 2020, she paid emotional tribute, describing him as “kind, good, funny, smart, subtle, solid and clear”. Today, she admits the Kitchen Discos were a “coping mechanism” during such distressing times.
“I already knew that some of the elements were things that always made me feel better. Performing and dressing up and getting lost in a song have always been things I’ve loved, but I think it kind of went into caricature during the lockdowns just because of what was going on,” she says.
“It was really quite scary and intense, especially raising a young family when I didn’t know how to explain things because we didn’t know what was going on either.
“There was a lot of talk to suggest that normal life as we knew it was gone forever and it was a lot to deal with. And yes, my stepdad was really ill and sadly he did die during 2020 as well, so there were lots of things going on, but I know that everybody’s got their version of what’s been going on for the last two years. We’ve all had something.”
Ellis-Bextor thinks the simple fun element was what connected with people. “Firstly I think it was a place where we were actively encouraging being a bit silly in contrast to the heaviness of the news,” she says. “I felt there was a lot of expectation of ‘oh, you’ve got a lockdown, why don’t you learn a new language or take up a new skill?’ I personally found it certainly didn’t aid creativity.
“I found I was a bit paralysed with my creative thoughts, so for me having the distraction of the discos and learning lyrics to songs I didn’t know that well was really good. Then hopefully community, the fact that it was happening in real time and maybe other people recognised elements of what was going on and what was happening in their lives, particularly if they were living with young kids.
“There’s a familiarity in the chaos of domesticity and we could all be together for a little while and collectively put
everything down for a minute and stop worrying and be daft, just for half an hour and then back to whatever you’re thinking about.”
While the venues on her Kitchen Disco Tour – which include Sheffield City Hall and St George’s Hall in Bradford – might be much larger than her own kitchen, the singer hopes to recreate some of the celebratory aspects of the original shows.
“We’re going to bring a set that’s a bit like the kitchen, we’re going to do a mixture of my songs and old and new singles and cover versions of songs and change the set list a little bit every night, just have that spontaneity and a bit of a party atmosphere,” she says. “Just get everybody feeling good – that’s my intention, anyway.”
Among the many spin-offs from the Kitchen Discos is a regular show on BBC Radio 2. Last November Ellis-Bextor raised more than £1m from a 24-hour danceathon for Children in Need. While the skills she learned while competing in the 2013 series of Strictly Come Dancing might have come in
handy, all her preparations could take her only so far when it came to such a test of stamina.
“Really the pressure is all mental,” she says. “It’s endurance, you can’t dance it any faster. Doing better moves does not make the time go quicker either, so really it was just about pacing myself and trying to relax and be in the moment rather than thinking ‘oh golly, I’ve still got eight hours to go’ or whatever it may be.”
In July the singer and her husband, Richard Jones, who plays bass in The Feeling, are due to release a cookery book. Love. Food. Family: Recipes from the Kitchen Disco stems from an idea she had five years ago but it was rejected by publishers at the time. “Cooking is a really big part of our lives,” she says. “Richard is the son of a chef and I grew up helping my mum (Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis) in the kitchen and my stepmum. I’m just one of those people who gets very excited about what I’m going to eat next, whether it’s talking about food, thinking about food, making myself something, being cooked for, whatever it may be.”
It will be the second book that Ellis-Bextor has released within a year, following her autobiography, Spinning Plates: Music, Men, Motherhood and Me. In the frank tome, she revealed she had been raped by an older musician when she was 17 years old, and told of another early relationship which became abusive.
She feels it was good to share all the aspects of her life, good and bad, with her family. “My mum read it and my dad. We’re quite open and quite communicative anyway,” she says. “I think if it was something like ‘for the last three years I’ve felt like X’, that would be different but we’re coming from a point where the book begins with a happy ending, I’m where I want to be with the people I want in my life. I think it’s more for me looking back over all the strands and hopefully reassuring people that you can end up feeling really good about yourself even if you haven’t always been treated the way you wanted to be. That for me was the most important thing and actually my kids. My 12-year-old listened to it all on Audible and great, I don’t mind, we can talk about any of that stuff. I don’t really have secrets like that, and the littles ones wouldn’t really know anything about it anyway, but it’s okay, I’m not really squeamish about having more difficult conversations because my job is to raise five people to articulate those emotions anyway. It’s kind of my responsibility, I feel, to pass the baton on.”
■ Sophie Ellis-Bextor plays Sheffield City Hall on March 12 and St George’s Hall, Bradford, on March 23. sophieellisbextor.net