Sophie Ellis-Bextor: ‘I heard myself saying No, but it didn’t make any difference’

The singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor became an unlikely beacon of hope during lockdown. Her “kitchen discos”, weekly performances from her kitchen live-streamed on Instagram every Friday night, somehow became the perfect antidote to the anxiety and fears wrought by the pandemic. The fact that the half-hour performances were semi-chaotic with unplanned cameos from her five sons rambling in and out of the frame only added to their charm.

The popularity of the "discos" sparked something of a career renaissance for Ellis-Bextor, and the past year has seen her publish her autobiography, Spinning Plates, presenting her own podcast, and most recently becoming the face of Brown Thomas's Those Who Shine Christmas ad campaign. With her love of disco balls, sequins and old Hollywood glamour, you can see how Ellis-Bextor is perfect for a sparkly seasonal campaign.

“I love Christmas,” she says in her husky voice. “I’ve always thought of it as a season and not just a day because my parents separated when I was quite small so they always told me that I had two Christmases and two birthdays. I think it’s quite healthy to think of Christmas as a season because if you just think of it as a day it’s quite stressful.”

Ellis-Bextor’s parents, the Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis and film producer Robin Bextor, split up when she was four years old. Both went on to remarry and have more children and so, for Ellis-Bextor, Christmas is all about family. This year will be bittersweet for her as she lost her stepfather, John Leach, to cancer in 2020.

Champagne to add sparkle to Christmas and New Year

---

A homemade biscuit box for family and friends

---

Christmas biscuit gift box

---

“Because of Covid, my brother [the drummer Jackson Ellis Leach] and I weren’t touring so we got to be around a lot more than we would have been and in a way that was quite good. But there were also a lot more restrictions in terms of spending time together, so that was challenging. So you had some bits that made it easier and some bits that made it harder.”

She says the loss of her stepfather and the various restrictions around getting together over the past two years have made her realise what is important to her. “To be honest, last year was pretty difficult because in London they essentially cancelled Christmas with a few days to go. Up until then, all I had been focusing on was at least I get to have my brother and sister and my mum with me on Christmas day because we hadn’t been able to have her over.

“And then at the last minute that changed, so that was really challenging and I know it was for a lot of people but yeah, I think it does really make you appreciate that all you really care about is being together. The other stuff is lovely but it’s just a set dressing because when it really comes to it you just want to be together. So yeah, this Christmas is going to be extra special for sure.”

For Christmas, she says she loves doing the same things every year. “It’s nice having these traditions, I love it. It has a real flow to it now. My mum lives 10 minutes away so we always see her. On Christmas Eve we’ll go to the local crib service. We’re not a religious family but it’s a really good one because they do a kind of the greatest hits of Christmas carols and the nativity has a new baby so we all really like that.

In her autobiography, Ellis-Bextor covers her decades-long career and how she has changed from an insecure girl starting out in music to the confident woman she is now

“Christmas day itself is really lovely – everyone comes around here. It’s really busy, lots of us squished around our table, lots of yummy food, but what I’ve always liked about it is it’s quite a big generational spread, so everybody can find different people to speak to about different things. If you just want to crash out on the couch and watch a black-and-white film that’s fine, if you want to make mulled wine martinis in the kitchen that’s fine, if you want to play around with fake snow in the garden that’s fine too. On Boxing Day we always go for Dim Sum in Chinatown in the centre of London.”

Born in London in 1979, Ellis-Bextor knew by the time she was a teenager that she wanted to be a singer. By the time she was 17, she was already the lead singer in the 1990s indie band Theaudience. When the band were dropped by their label after their first album, 20-year-old Ellis-Bextor thought her career was over.

By 2000, however, her number-one hit, Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) had transformed her into a bona fide pop star, and she cemented that status the following year with the release of her hit single Murder on the Dancefloor.

In her autobiography, she covers her decades-long career and how she has changed from an insecure girl starting out in music to the confident woman she is now.

“For me it’s been a real unexpected joy of getting older, actually, my relationship with my body, my image, all those things. Nothing has really changed insofar as the things that used to make me feel self-conscious still do, but I just don’t care as much and it’s really, really nice.

“I would also credit the discos and the podcast and the book and all those things because they’ve been incredibly comforting for me. It’s been really nice to have those outlets and I’m really appreciative that I had those spaces because I’ve loved it. They’ve kind of made all the difference between me going completely doolally and not. I don’t know what things would have looked like without all that, really.”

This kind of relaxed openness and easy honesty is one of the reasons people gravitated towards her kitchen disco performances, where she made no effort to hide the chaos of family life behind the perfect filter of Instagram. Her biography is written in the same open tone, whether she is describing an early dysfunctional relationship or her experience of rape as a 17-year-old virgin or her experiences working in the male-centric music industry of the 1990s.

“I didn’t mind sharing that at all,” she says. “I thought it was a nice chance to put things out there, and if there’s anyone who has gone through anything similar in terms of crises of confidence or finding themselves in relationships where the dynamic isn’t that healthy or any of those things, there’s no shame in it. It can happen to anybody and it’s still possible to find yourself a happy ending even if that’s where you started.”

'For me it was quite powerful to be able to go back in time and give myself a voice now when I didn't feel like I had one then. I could go back and  publicly put that to rights'

She said the experience of writing about her rape was empowering. As a sexually inexperienced 17-year-old, she went back to an older man’s house. “I heard myself saying ‘No’ and ‘I don’t want to’, but it didn’t make any difference,” she writes.

“I wasn’t squeamish talking about any of those things because happily for me they’re all a long time ago now. For me it was more quite powerful to be able to go back in time and give myself a voice now when I didn’t feel like I had one then. It was more like I could go back and finish that scene, where however you felt at the time, decades later you can actually publicly put that to rights. And I think that’s quite powerful, actually. And it’s a privilege because not everyone gets the opportunity to do that. I think a lot of people have experiences like that and they just live in their memories and just pop up every once in a while. I was able to address it and put it on a public platform and call it out, which felt quite good if I’m honest.”

She’s been with her husband, Richard Jones, bassist in the band The Feeling, for 19 years now and she doesn’t rule out having more children. “I think I’m just one of those people who can’t say I’m done.”

In her book, she writes about the couple’s eventful beginnings when, just six weeks into their relationship, she discovered she was pregnant with their eldest son. Neither of them was certain things would work out, but they did. Still, she’s reluctant to take credit for the longevity of their marriage.

“I wouldn’t want to come across as a smug married type, because really, what do I know?” she says with a laugh. “I always feel like I should only really answer these questions when it’s been 60 years. Nineteen years is good but life is long. From my point of view I definitely feel the fact that we like each other is a really good thing because I think when you’re a relationship and there’s all the romance and everything is going well that’s great, but I think on a day-to-day level it’s really brilliant if you actually just like each other so that even when you’re just dealing with the minutiae or all the noise and chaos of raising a family and the busyness of work and all that stuff, if you’ve just got a good grounding where you have a fundamental respect for each other that definitely helps.

“And for us, we’ve always enjoyed sharing stuff so he’s in my band and he’ll come away with me sometimes when I’m on tour so we’ve had some adventures along the way, so we keep in step with one another really.”

“How does she do it?” is a question that springs to mind when looking at her busy family life and all that she has achieved in her career. She says her podcast, also called Spinning Plates, speaking to high-profile women about motherhood and career, was a way of trying to figure that question out for herself. “Part of the reason I started the podcast was I was still looking for help in giving myself permission to give my work the space it needed and how to alleviate guilt.

'Everything that grew out of lockdown was totally born out of keeping myself busy and distracted and trying to find little seeds to grow'

“I’ve always been fascinated by people who don’t really give much space to the guilt. That’s so inspiring. I’m rubbish at that.”

Has she managed to reduce the guilt? “Weirdly, I think lockdown forced my hand a little bit because up until then I hadn’t given [my work] huge amounts of space in my home. I’d always go out to work and then I’d be very accessible and available when I was home and then obviously, once we were supposed to be working from home, that didn’t work as well. So there was definitely a big struggle about how to give work a bit of respect in my head and in the home as well.

“I think it’s ongoing but I have become a lot less apologetic about going to work, because it was so long when I didn’t know if it was going to happen at all. So for the kids it was like, no, I really want to do this, and I enjoy it and it makes me a better mum, so I think it has helped, actually. It’s still a work-in-progress but I think for anyone who’s essentially freelance it works that way.”

Considering how much her profile has increased over the last year, I wonder does she feel pressure to capitalise on her newfound popularity in what is a notoriously fickle industry.

“I don’t think about that because I don’t think that’s how it works. You can’t work like that. I absolutely adore what I do for a living, that’s the kernel from where it all starts.

“Everything that grew out of lockdown was totally born out of keeping myself busy and distracted and trying to find little seeds to grow. The thing about a lot of the projects I start – and this is a common trip with me – is the success of them is determined by how I feel about them at the beginning. It’s not actually the commercial success. It’s just driven by ‘does this feel like the right thing for me to be doing right now?’, and quite often the best answer is ‘No’.

“I think the things that make you excited and make you feel like you can give yourself over to it . . . there’s no way of doing half a job. Everything you do you have to give it the same amount of effort and commitment, so I have to feel like what I’m doing is worth it in the moment, no matter what. That’s probably the thing that’s kept me in the best stead. So whether or not you can look back and say ‘that did really well or didn’t’ is sort of not the point. That’s what keeps me really in love and engaged with what I’m doing. [The industry] is fickle and you’ve got no control over any of it, none of it, so you might as well just be having a nice time and be dedicated.”

'The abstract cruelty of not being able to hug the people that you instinctively want to hug when you're going through something tough is very hard to get your head around'

She is taking her kitchen disco on the road next year and plans to release the album she was working on when the pandemic stalled things, but apart from that she has few plans.

“I don’t really look very far ahead. I think I can see pretty much to next summer and that’s as far as my head gets and even then it’s kind of hazy. It’s always been about just putting another metre on the plank, you know, get the next album shipshape and sounding good and see where it takes me.”

Being locked down and losing a close family member while at the same time experiencing a surge in career success must have been a bizarre experience met with mixed emotions.

“I can’t disentangle one from the other,” she says. “And I don’t think that’s really just my story. I feel like that’s what happened to everybody because what happened with lockdown and this pandemic has been really quite traumatic.

“I’m quite suspicious when people say, oh I didn’t mind it and it’s been quite lovely and I quite like being home . . . I think it’s absolutely fine to say that there’s aspects of it that have been surprisingly nice, and of course I’ve loved having extra time with my family and not travelling as much, but essentially the abstract cruelty of not being able to hug the people that you instinctively want to hug when you’re going through something tough is very hard to get your head around.

“I think the discos obviously came out of how to deal with the stress and heaviness of the news, but it was also a local thing because it was something that was going on all through the time that my stepdad was very ill, and when he died and then beyond that, so it’s all kind of interwoven. But then I very much feel like our story was just one story and everybody had a story. We’ve all had stuff that’s been taken away from.”

Spinning Plates : Music, Men, Motherhood and Me is published by Hodder & Stoughton

Main image
Sophie Ellis-Bextor wears Balmain Star Detail Mini Dress, €3,490, at Brown Thomas
Photographer: Perry Ogden, assisted by Catherine Walsh
Stylist: Darren Feeney, assisted by Roisin Haines
Hair: David Cashman, assisted by Evan Cahill
Makeup: Christine Lucignano