Sophie Ellis-Bextor: Dancefloor diva
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Buzzing from her showstopping performance in Strictly, singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor is set to dazzle us again with a new album. Here she tells Catherine O’Brien how the sequined experience, though ‘terrifying’, has ‘made me feel incredibly alive’
Sophie wears DRESS, Sophia Kah, sophiakah.co.uk
In these dark days of January, it’s hard not to miss the fluff and sparkle of Strictly Come Dancing. Detractors may loftily dismiss the show as fanciful froth, but we armchair psychologists watching at home have always understood its hidden depths. For us, the contestants aren’t just taking to the dancefloor, they are reclining on our metaphorical couch. No matter how high the sequin quotient, we are never too dazzled to work out what really makes them tick.
And to be honest, in most cases, it is not that difficult. There are several obvious reasons for appearing on shows like Strictly – to boost a promising career (Rachel Riley, Natalie Gumede); to revisit one that has long ago peaked (Fiona Fullerton, Pamela Stephenson); shameless attention seeking (Vanessa Feltz, Nancy Dell’Olio), or the good-humoured, nothing-to-lose approach (John Sergeant, Ann Widdecombe).
None of the above, however, quite explains Sophie Ellis-Bextor. That she made it to the finals (she finished in fourth place with the Glitterball trophy going to Abbey Clancy) is no surprise – she’s an impeccably poised and willowy pop star with a string of dance-vibe hits to her name. But few of us can deny having had a niggling suspicion at the outset that she was maybe just a little too cool for the Strictly school.
'I don’t think I could have got more out of being part of Strictly even if I’d won'
Now that it is all over, well, how wrong we were. Sophie, it transpires, was no longer the aloof, pouty chanteuse who out-Poshed Victoria Beckham with ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)’ – the number one single that beat the former Spice Girl’s first solo effort for the top slot back in 2000. She was quirky, hip and refreshingly down-to-earth, working like a demon in training, blushing at the judges’ compliments and taking any criticism magnanimously on the chin.
She agreed to do the series, she says, because, at the age of 34, ‘I wanted to shake things up and push myself.’ She found the experience ‘terrifying and nerve-racking beyond anything – but it also made me feel incredibly alive’. Her dance partner Brendan Cole was ‘the best, a brilliant choreographer, dancer and teacher – we had so much fun, and I don’t think I could have got more out of being part of Strictly even if I’d won’. In all, she concludes, ‘I had an absolute ball.’
I meet Sophie on a Friday afternoon – a blood-sugar-plunging moment for most. Her publicist has emailed ahead to warn me that Sophie is exhausted, but the woman sitting before me delving into a packet of almonds couldn’t be more perky. ‘I think I’m running on adrenalin,’ she grins.
She’s zoomed straight off Strictly into the launch of her new album, Wanderlust, which will be released tomorrow, followed by a ten-date tour. From a promotion point of view, the timing is neat but, in fact, Sophie insists, it’s a coincidence. ‘When I made the album last spring, I didn’t know about Strictly – that only came up in July after everything was recorded and finished,’ she says. ‘I’m not a strategist. I’ve never had a five-minute plan – let alone a five-year one. I am much better when one thing turns into another and I just follow my nose.’
DRESS, Patricia Bonaldi, from Harrods
From someone else, this might sound like rather artful nonchalance, but from Sophie it rings true. She is, after all, the girl who announced to her parents at the age of 18 – after seven years of cripplingly expensive private schooling – that she was going on tour with her new band rather than taking up her hard-earned place to read English and drama at university. ‘I could see some of my friends’ parents thinking, “Like…what!’” she says. ‘And although I was a rebel back then, I sort of get their disbelief now. But I was lucky – my mum and dad were incredibly cool.’
At 24, she unveiled another unplanned surprise – she was pregnant by the man she had been dating for just six weeks. ‘My mum said, “It might not be the right time, it might not be the right man, but it’s the right baby,”’ she recalls. In fact, it turned out to be the right everything. Ten years on, she and Richard Jones, bassist of The Feeling, are blissfully happily married with three sons, Sonny, nine, Kit, four, and Ray, 21 months.
Sophie’s mother is Janet Ellis, the former Blue Peter presenter; her father Robin Bextor is a film and television producer. They divorced when Sophie was four and it was, says Sophie, ‘quite a grown-up thing to have to deal with and something I wouldn’t want my own children to experience’. Thankfully everything worked out with her parents – both went on to have successful second marriages and families. ‘I know there are some children who begin to blame themselves when their parents split up, but that thought never occurred to me,’ she says.
Rehearsing for her Strictly charleston with Brendan Cole
Sophie grew up with her mum and stepfather John Leach and their children Jackson, now 26, and Martha, 22, in London, but frequently visited her father, his second wife Polly Mockford, and their children Dulce, 16, and twins Maisy and Bertie, 15, down in East Sussex. Rather than feeling she was bridging two families, she relished being embraced by both. ‘Someone once said I must have felt the odd one out, and I was, like, OK, I suppose you could look at it that way, but I don’t, and actually I feel sad if people describe my siblings as my half-brothers and sisters because whenever I think of my family, it feels very whole.’
That said, she acknowledges that children of divorced parents often strive harder to create their own families and there is probably an element of that within her. ‘I think there would have to be,’ she nods. Family matters enormously to Sophie – shortly before marrying Richard in Umbria in 2005 she had a heart inscribed with the word ‘family’ tattooed on her right arm. ‘My mum had a hummingbird tattoo when I was around six, so I’d always told myself that when the moment was right, I’d have one, too. And that was my time,’ she says.
By then she had lived through the stressful birth of Sonny, who had to be delivered by emergency caesarean two months early in April 2004 after Sophie suffered from pre-eclampsia – the high-blood-pressure condition that can lead to dangerous complications in pregnancy. At four months old, Sonny contracted meningitis and was saved only thanks to the quick thinking of NHS doctors.
Pre-eclampsia struck again when Sophie was expecting Kit in 2009, and he was delivered nine weeks early. Spending time in special care baby units made her realise ‘there’s always someone having a worse time than you’. And when Ray arrived full-term weighing 7lb 15oz, which was more than the other two put together (Sonny had been 3lb 8oz and Kit 2lb 6oz), ‘I totally appreciated what it was to be holding a lovely chubby baby,’ she says.
One consequence of creating an almost instant family – Sonny’s early arrival meant that ‘comically we became parents when we had only been going out with each other for eight months’ – is that she and Richard, 34, never had footloose and fancy-free time together as a couple. But becoming parents doesn’t have to mean becoming middle-aged and boring, Sophie points out, and with their lifestyles, perhaps they were never going to be a conventional Mr and Mrs anyway.
They met back in 2002 when he auditioned to play in her band. He told an interviewer recently that ‘the chemistry was incredible – like nothing I’ve ever experienced’. But it was complicated – both were bound up in other relationships at the time. After they started dating and Sophie discovered she was pregnant, they had a couple of holidays together and then Richard moved in. She says he’s made her ‘a lot kinder’. He says he couldn’t function without her.
Today, they live in a five-bedroomed detached house in Chiswick, West London, which, thanks to Sophie’s Ebay addiction, doubles as a theme park – visitors report an arcade slot machine, a giant plastic ice-cream cone, and disco lights and a smoke machine in the kitchen, while in the garden, alongside the trampoline and ping-pong table, she has installed one of those coin-operated wobbly trains you normally see outside supermarkets. ‘It’s chaos, obviously, but I can’t resist a bit of kitsch,’ she confesses.
With husband Richard Jones and son Sonny
With mum Janet Ellis
Bizarrely, appearing in Strictly was one of the most routine jobs that Sophie has ever had. While not exactly nine-to-five, it did provide her with regular hours – between Monday and Friday she was able to do the school run in the morning and spend some time with Ray before heading to rehearsals with Brendan in a studio just ten minutes from her house. She was home again in time for tea, bath and bedtime every evening, except showtime on Saturday (the Sunday night show was always recorded directly after the Saturday edition).
Now that she is back to gigging and touring, the schedule is more erratic. Her work takes her around the world – she’s massive in Eastern Europe and Russia – but wherever she goes, she’s never there for long. She recalls a recent conversation with Strictly dancer Kristina Rihanoff: ‘It turned out I’d been to her home city, Vladivostok, for a gig. It was a 13-hour trip each way, but I am always on the last plane in and the first plane out because I’m desperate to get home afterwards.’
Richard is often away, too – The Feeling released their fourth album Boy Cried Wolf last October – but he and Sophie have a rule that they never spend more than two weeks apart. ‘And luckily, we are not the kind of people who need decompression time,’ she says. ‘I know musicians who need days to find their place in the world again after being away. Richard and I can come straight in from the airport, chuck down our bag, and say, “OK, it’s Sunday morning, let’s get our day back.” And we’ll scoop up the kids and get out, or pick up a piece of meat and I’ll cook a roast.’
Rather than expending energy on pointless working-mother guilt, Sophie is a big believer in nurturing her support network. Her mother lives just ten minutes away and often helps out, as do the rest of the family. The children’s ‘brilliant’ nanny has been with them for nine years.
'You have to play to your strengths – no one wants to see me naked on a wrecking ball!'
Sophie is also a big believer in nurturing her marriage ‘because that’s the glue that holds us all together’. She and Richard carve out time for date nights, and until Strictly came along they were running a sideline DJ business as Mr and Mrs Jones, ‘just as a fun way of hanging out’. He was in the audience to support her almost every week during Strictly, ‘and I always looked for him because he is my reminder that whether or not I can cha-cha-cha doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things’.
What really does matter to her is the new album. The tracks on Wanderlust are a complete departure from ‘Murder on the Dance Floor’, ‘Take Me Home’ and her other indelibly catchy electropop hits. ‘I love dance music. It’s heady, it is the right now, and it deals with the great surges of emotion, but it doesn’t allow you to be wistful or reflective,’ she explains.
After Ray’s birth in April 2012, she found herself composing softer, down-tempo ballads with themes centred – as the album title suggests – on roaming and exploring and being part of a bigger world. ‘I’ve no idea what my fans will think, because it is a curve ball, but I needed to do this for me.’
She recorded it in collaboration with singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt, a musician friend who has worked with The Feeling and also bands such as Snow Patrol and REM. But there has been no record company to dictate the tone. ‘It’s my present to myself. I’d made enough money to be able to finance it and that feels really cool – I’d much rather indulge myself with this than a sports car.’
On the album cover and in the accompanying video she looks as delicate as a porcelain doll, with jewel-like green eyes and sugar-pink lips. Her choice of dress – a high-necked white lace frock – seems bravely demure when pitched against the outré outfits of stars such as Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, but she says she is not remotely tempted to engage in pole-dancing or twerking antics.
‘You have to play to your strengths and I don’t imagine anyone wants to see me naked on a wrecking ball,’ she laughs. ‘My children definitely don’t, and nor does my dad. I would never be judgmental, but I would always say that you have got to do what works for you. It took me nine weeks to get ready to rumba on Strictly, so don’t put me on a wrecking ball, please.’
DRESS, Natalia Kaut, nataliakaut.com. BELT, Black & Brown, from asos.com. RINGS, Sophie's own
Arguably, as an established artist she has less need to feed off the demands of a voracious recording industry. But would she have succumbed as an ingénue? She shakes her head vehemently. ‘Definitely not. It’s just not me. I grew up on Madonna and she pushed boundaries, but it always felt like her own agenda – when I looked in her eyes, I never got the impression that she was having a conversation with anybody in which she said, “What did you think of that?” or “Was that OK?” She thought, “This is me and I can deal with that.” With some artists now, you still see that, but with others you don’t, and that is why we wince, because we know they are vulnerable.’
Look into Sophie’s eyes and you see a woman who is bien dans sa peau. ‘I feel like I know who I am and what I’m about,’ she says happily. ‘But I am not someone with unfaltering confidence.’ She recalls at school being bullied by other girls who, jealous of her famous mother, went so far as to form an Anti-Sophie club.
She is ethereally beautiful now, but claims she was no looker as a teenager, ‘which in a bizarre way was a blessing, because it meant that I never relied on my appearance to get me anywhere’. She doesn’t worry about ageing, ‘because youth is only ever on loan – it’s not a characteristic, it’s a bonus’.
And getting older is a bonus, too. ‘Starting my family liberated me,’ she says. ‘Since having the children, I’ve sharpened up because whatever I am doing, it has to count for more otherwise I would rather be at home.’
She has no idea whether they will have another baby. ‘Everyone assumes when you have three boys that you must want a girl. But Ray is still so small I can’t even think about more babies yet. If it happens, great, and if my family is complete, well, we are incredibly happy as we are.’
Being a non-strategist, she has no clear idea either of what 2014 will bring. ‘All I know is that being in your 30s is a wicked time – so much cooler than your 20s. It’s a great decade for us women to find out what we are really capable of.’
Wanderlust will be released tomorrow
OH-SO SOPHIE
What makes you cry?
Any parenting milestone. Watching Kit start school last September was a bit of a moment. We took him into the reception class and he ran off without a backward glance, but I sobbed all the way home.
What keeps you awake at night?
The same stuff that keeps any mother awake. Sometimes I find myself imagining the most awful scenarios – like they’ve got out of bed and fallen out of the window, when really they are tucked up and asleep.
What makes you happy?
We like a party, but I also love a quiet night in. Richard and I sometimes play Scrabble in front of the fire with a glass of red wine after the kids have gone to bed. I usually win, and then I am that horribly annoying person who turns his tiles around and tells him what he could have done to beat me.
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