A really good interview from InsideNokia
ORIGINAL POST- http://www.insidenokiamusic.com/2010/04/time-and-timelessness-an-interview-with-sophie-ellis-bextor/ ‘How cool is that?!’ exclaims Sophie Ellis-Bextor, a mix of excitement and disbelief in her voice, even though she’s heard the story before. I’ve managed to get 20 minutes of telephone time with the singer during the hectic publicity schedule preceding the launch of her new single, Bittersweet, on May 3rd, and we’re talking technology. Specifically, the fact that Groovejet, the single which catapulted her into the public consciousness in the summer of 2000, was the first track ever played on an iPod, on a prototype in Apple’s labs. ‘I love that story! Can you tell your friends that I don’t think enough people know about that.’ She laughs, an infectious sound somewhere between a giggle and a chuckle. ‘I think that’s really cool,’ she adds. A self-confessed gadget fan, she’s just bought her first Apple iPhone and is enthusiastically praising it when I mention that I write for the Nokia Music blog. ‘You know what, I’ve kept my Nokia, don’t worry,’ she playfully reassures me. ‘I’ve been using Nokias since I was 18, so there you go. 13 years of Nokia use.’
It’s also been 13 years since Sophie Ellis-Bextor first appeared in the charts, singing with Theaudience. That single, I Got The Wherewithal, and the subsequent self-titled album, didn’t make the impact the band was expecting. ‘Theaudience was very hyped when we first got together and then nothing really happened, so it was over before it began,’ she recalls. ‘No-one really knew about Theaudience. It was a wonderful time for me and a very steep learning curve, but I was aware that we didn’t really break out of music industry circles and the Camden scene.’ While it might not have been the success that Ellis-Bextor and her three bandmates had imagined, the then-18-year-old was able to learn from the experience. ‘That stood me in really good stead, so I can always take everything else with a pinch of salt. That’s meant I’ve kind of kept part of myself back, I suppose.’
Leaving Theaudience in 1999 to pursue a solo career, Ellis-Bextor was asked to lend her distinctive voice to a dance track by the Italian DJ, Spiller. Spiller’s label wanted to add a vocal to a track he had produced called Groovejet in order to make it more attractive for play on the radio. And the rest, as they say, is history. The track dropped in the August of 2000 and became an instant hit; Melody Maker would later name Groovejet its single of the year. Looking back on that time, 10 years ago this summer, Ellis-Baxter is reflective. I ask her what advice she would give her younger self, if she were able. ‘Well, I don’t know if I’d want to listen,’ is the immediate response, typical of her ready sense of humour. ‘I think I would say that success isn’t really like an upward, steady diagonal line going up on a graph. It’s more like a rollercoaster, there are peaks and troughs and you’ve just got to ride it out. You’re only as good as your last record, so I’d probably tell myself just to enjoy the journey.’ Her enthusiasm for creating music hasn’t dimmed and she’s enjoying her career still. ‘I don’t think I realised until it was happening, really, just how lucky I was to be doing what I do. Especially this year, with it being 10 years and everything, that’s pretty exciting and I still love it just as much.’
One thing that’s apparent when listening to Bittersweet, the new single, next to Ellis-Bextor’s older material, is how she avoids sounding of a time; in essence, that her music doesn’t seem to date. Bittersweet, with its ‘80s electro overtones (the synth intro particularly calls to mind Always On My Mind by The Pet Shop Boys), could have been released any time in the last 30 years. ‘It’s really hard for me to be objective, but all I would say is, I’m a bit like that with everything really,’ explains Ellis-Bextor. ‘I don’t know if I’m ever really someone who’s been good at predicting trends, I just know what I like and I stick to it, really. I’m quite a creature of habit but also I’m incredibly passionate about the things that I do like as well. It’s funny, it means that the songs I liked when I was four I still really like now. I’ve got clothes in my wardrobe that I bought when I was 18, and I still wear the same kind of thing.’ It’s a philosophy that has stood Ellis-Bextor in good stead. ‘With this kind of job, you have to play to your strengths and I think quite early on I realised, “I don’t really want to have to re-invent my style.” I experimented with blonde hair and that kind of stuff, but actually I love the things I love. Hopefully I evolve a little bit, and I know that I work with some of the best people around to keep things current and exciting.’ At the risk of sounding like I’m interviewing her for a job, I ask what she thinks those strengths are. ‘Golly,’ she says, and goes quiet for a second or two. ‘I’m too British to be able to answer that very well,’ she says laughingly. ‘I’m not very good at that normally. I do think my voice does suit an electro sound and disco, though having said that, after this album I might try something quite different to push myself.’
The album she is referring to is her fourth solo project, entitled Straight From The Heart, and is pencilled in for an August release. While it sticks to Ellis-Bextor’s tried-and-tested recipe, it does introduce a new, slightly harder edge. ‘The album’s quite dancey, electro, upbeat and positive, but some of the sounds have got a slightly tougher sound. There’s a couple of ballads,’ she adds, before correcting herself. ‘Well, mid-tempo things,’ she clarifies. I point out that she’s probably the last person to be recording heart-rending weepies; they don’t seem to suit her. ‘Well, they do a bit. I did a song once called Today The Sun’s On Us, which I really love, but with this record, because some of the songs written early on were very dancey, it sort of set the scene. Actually it was nice to be very specific about what kind of record I wanted to make this time. I’m usually more like “I want to try a bit of this and now try a bit of that.” This time I was a lot more focused.’ Ellis-Bextor also recruited a roster of superstar producers to work on the album with her, including man of the moment, Calvin Harris, who she describes as a ‘super-talented and a very funny man,’ adding ‘I felt really spoilt.’ In fact, it says much about her grounded nature that most of Ellis-Bextor’s ambitions – though she’d never use the word – revolve around collaborating with the dance and pop artists that she’s a personal fan of. Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx are two she picks out, before declaring herself a fan of Florence And The Machine and La Roux as well. ‘There are all these fantastic dance acts and I love their sound,’ she says, noting without any hint of pretension ‘that it would be fun.’
Ellis-Bextor sums up her ease with her professional life in one line. ‘I’ve come to like the fact that I never know what’s around the corner, so I don’t make many plans.’ No career plans? ‘Just to do what I’m doing is fine. I don’t really have what you could call a career structure. I don’t think it would work very well if I did, anyway,’ she says, self-effacingly. I suggest this is, perhaps, good advice for younger artists, some of whom seem to get swallowed by the pressure that’s piled on them by others and themselves. ‘Yeah, but you know what? I think it’s also that I’m a product of my generation. When I was a teenager everything was very much about music and music culture, reading Melody Maker and NME and going to gigs. The teenage fixation was music-centred. So everybody at my school, if you’d said, “What’s your favourite kind of music?” they’d have an answer. Whereas now, if you’re a teenager it’s much more about fame and celebrity, and all the magazines they read are celebrity-based, so I think the topic of conversation has switched. I don’t think they’re necessarily to blame for that, I think it’s something that’s part of everyday life now. You see a lot of young artists now where they say, “Oh, actually, no I don’t want this, I’m going to do this for two records and then I’m going to do something completely different.” I think it’s almost a way of protecting yourself from wanting it, admitting you want it.’ She stops to consider her words. ‘That sounds really patronising, I don’t mean it. But you come to realise what it is you want out of life anyway, and you’re either going to want to keep making records or you’re going to do something else. Everything finds its place in the world, I think.’ Would she have wanted to release her first album in this kind of atmosphere? ‘Sure, why not?’ she responds lightly. ‘That’s what may be the difference in me. When I got to 19, 20, and all my friends went off to uni, some of them kept up with the music thing and for a lot of them they moved onto other fashions. But for me, it stayed exactly as intense, so I think I was destined to feel that way about music. And all that being said, there are some brilliant artists coming out now anyway, so I’m really encouraged and inspired by what’s going on in the charts.’
Given Ellis-Bextor’s thoughts about our celebrity-obsessed culture and her stated love for all things timeless, I ask her if she thinks she was born 20 or 30 years too late. ‘I don’t know about that, because I love a lot of contemporary sounds. With Bittersweet I was working with Freemasons and Calvin Harris, who sound so phenomenal. I think I’d miss that if I had to leave it.’ But her musical influences are rooted firmly in the ‘70s and ‘80s. ‘I was born in ‘79 so I was listening to Squeeze, Elvis Costello, The Pet Shop Boys, Prince, Bowie and Madonna, and all that’s been hugely influential. I’m still just as likely to put on something like that now. In many ways I never really left it behind. There are things like the harmonies from The Beach Boys, I love their way their voices sound all together. Seventies music I like, proper disco music where it’s all live musicians, fantastic drumming, really funky guitar and disco bass. I love all that, Giorgio Moroder, Candi Staton. It’s just so authentic, you can’t knock it, it’s got real soul.’ That Ellis-Bextor is as big a fan of music as she is a passionate creator of it, is testament to the fact that she’s avoided diva-hood and retained much of what makes her so appealing to her fans and the public alike. She might try and keep part of herself back when it comes to the music industry, but she seems more approachable, more accessible than a lot of similarly-successful artists. ‘I do feel pretty comfortable in my skin and the more time’s gone on I don’t feel like anyone’s questioning my motives. I do what I do. I’m a massive fan of pop music so I try and do the best I can. I suppose I haven’t ever felt victimised by what I do. I’ve managed to keep my private life quite private, so haven’t experienced people being nasty to me. I suppose I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to worry about. Why wouldn’t I be nice?’
You can download the single Bittersweet from Nokia Music Store on May 3rd.
The album opens with a bang (literally - "bang, bang, it’s a hold up"). Revolution, the album opener, has Sophie attempting a monotone delivery for the second time in her career (check the middle-8 from "Making Music", Shoot from the Hip). The chorus is simple, repetitive and arresting; the "army" hook is catchy. Cathy Dennis, who worked with Sophie on her last top 10 hit Catch You (which was also a Denis/Kurstin collaboration), co-wrote the song - and in fact, came up with the self-referencing line in the song (the line in the bridge - "face to face its murder on the dancefloor"). Revolution is highly energetic and frenetic, but is very short. It feels like the song is in a hurry to be done and introduce what seems to be Sophie's best album yet. (9/10)
All those cymbal crashes in Revolution lead to this big crash in the very beginning of track two. Bittersweet is a song produced by Freemasons and Biffco. The song was Sophie's second single off the album, but failed to set the charts on fire. Nonetheless, it received an overwhelmingly good response from her fan-base and went on to become the Song of the Day on PopJustice. It even kept Sophie on top of the PJ Almighty for what seemed like an eternity. Bittersweet is enthralling - with flawless production sampling bits from "Fade to Grey" by Visage and "Blue Monday" by New Order; the song even draws influences from "You Spin Me Around (Like a Record)" by Dead or Alive. Sophie effortlessly mews over the production. The meandering melody in the chorus, the cut-up vocals in the middle-8, the whispering bits and that incredible close to the chorus (the heavenly "oh-oh-oh-so here I am" bit) - all these make Bittersweet the ultimate pop/dance song that most solo female acts would kill for. To sum up, the song is a modern classic. (10/10)
Off And On, the planned-to be-sixth single off the album, is the first of the two songs with no lyrical contribution by La Bex. Originally written and demo-ed for Roisin Murphy's 2007 album, 'Overpowered', the song was handed over to Sophie to promote the then-planned Greatest Hits compilation. Fortunately, recording sessions proved fruitful and now we have the 4th album instead. Off And On is a commercial electro-pop number, which has been edited since its original premiere on Sophie's MySpace several years ago. Could this be the first top ten single from the album - I sincerely hope so, but only commercial radio can give this song the exposure it deserves. (9/10)
Heartbreak (Make Me A Dancer) was also made to promote the GH compilation. The original demo is significantly different from the final mix that was released as a mutual single by Freemasons and Sophie back in 2009. The song charted just outside the top 10, but stands as the highest charted single from the album (in the UK) and has become one of her most popular songs since Murder on the Dancefloor. Described as electro-dance monster, the song will have you moving along to the loud synths and the big beats. This song, along with Bittersweet, proves that the Bex Monster and Freemasons are a match made in pop heaven. The Freemasons have always had brilliant and glittery production on their songs; their two songs on this album are no different. Their production brings out the emotion and drama in Sophie's voice - something that is absent in your regular commercial dance songs (yes Guetta, I'm talking about you) (9.5/10)
Not Giving Up On Love, the fourth single off the album, is a trance song, with a simple piano loop, great synths, some live drums thrown in here and there and, of course, Sophie's ever-so lush vocals. Miss E.B. is no stranger to melancholic melodies - what some fans consider her forte. The song is a collaboration with Armin Van Buuren, who is the voted #1 DJ of the world. The song was a big success in several countries across Europe but had no impact on the UK Charts. Vocal trance is a new field for Sophie, and I look forward to more trance DJ-collaborations in the future. The full length club edit is so much better than the hurriedly edited radio version, but you simply cannot have a 6+ minute trance track in the middle a pop album - still, it is worth listening to. (10/10)
The next song, Can't Fight This Feeling, is a collaboration with upcoming French DJ Junior Caldera. This is his biggest success across Europe, and in fact the song got a lot of attention from Sophie's fanbase in Russia and some other countries across Europe. On my first listen, both track 5 and 6 stuck out like a sore thumb. The song isn't bad at all. It is very commercial sounding, very 2009-10. Its weird because her songs almost never sound 'current'. Its very hit or miss really. I liked the song a lot when it was released as a single before Bittersweet, but the shine has worn off now. Sophie has recently written another track with Junior Caldera. Lets hope that song sees the light of the day in some form. (7/10)
If I have to sum up the next song in one word, I would only say "heavenly". Starlight, produced by Richard X *screams* is straight out of the 80's. Starlight is released as the 5th (overall) single from the album, the 4th in the UK. You can watch the video, directed by her father, Robin Bextor, right here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDlkxDu06OU
The song has a melancholic feeling, and is slightly ethereal and lush. This is definitely one of the best songs on the album. I'd love for Sophie to work with Richard X *screams* again. Starlight is positioned in the perfect place - and feels refreshing to listen to after 6 dance songs that play back-to-back! You don't know what heaven feels like until you have heard this song. Everything from the slick production and the poetic lyrics to the lush vocals are perfect. One thing that will really grab your attention is the almost-Madonna-esque middle-8; "We are one". (10/10)Sophie performed Under Your Touch last year on the Album Charts Show and I was really looking forward to listening to the studio version of the song. It is produced by long time collaborator Liam Howe of the Sneaker pimps. The song begins with eeire strings, which brings to mind Madonna's "Sorry". The song has a very busy production, with loads of sounds building up as the song progresses. Sophie sounds fantastic. The mechanised vocals in the song were a nice surprise. It might sound slightly filler-ish on the first listen, but after a couple of listens, the song grows on you, and you tend to put this into a long list of songs that should be singles. (8.5/10)The title track, Make A Scene, is unlike anything that she has ever done before. The song begins with some clunky notes and a strange beat, and soon builds into this really bouncy jam. The chorus is phenomenal and has Sophie screaming "come on now" as she makes a scene. The almost spoken verses, the saxophone, the really weird drum sequence that sounds a little off-track in the first few seconds, Sophie screaming in some places - in theory this will seem like one of the worst ideas ever. But it all comes together so well - everything feels so disjoint, but at the same time, its all very 'together'. One must give sufficient credit to Joseph Mount, of Metronomy, who helped co-write and co-produce this song. You can definitely hear some 'Nights Out' influences in this song. You might even say that this song sounds like something off Roisin Murphy's 'Ruby Blue' album, crossed with production by Basement Jaxx (now that is a collaboration that should happen!). I'd love to see more Sophie-Metronomy songs in the future.(10/10)Magic is the second of the two Richard X *screams* songs on the album. The song is, as the title suggests, magical. It begins with simple "ooh ooh"s and builds up into this 80's influenced, scratch that, 80's epic. A simple-but-massive chorus takes centre stage; the production really brings out the best in Sophie's voice. I'm a sucker for anything Richard X *screams*, but this has to be one of his best productions. Lyrically, the song is very poetic, much like Starlight. The middle-8 contains whispers again. Sophie brought whispers back in fashion - I'm not even sure if whispers went out of fashion, but I'd love to give Sophie credit for putting whispers on two (thats right, TWO) songs on the album. Well done Sophie. Well done Hannah. Richard X *screams*, I salute you! (10/10)The next song is a historic moment in pop music (or so I think, don't burst my bubble). Sophie is probably the only popstar in the world to have used the word "politicise" in a song. And as a fan from PopJustice once said, she is also, probably, the only popstar in the world to have written an electro-pop number about a text stalker. Now THIS is your quirky pop song. The almost story-like lyrics describe Sophie's attitude toward her text stalker. One line in particular - "when you're lost at sea, I'm on land" - is like a slap-in-the-face-get-a-life type of situation. I love the general bitchy-ness about the song. Dial My Number is produced by Liam Howe and co-written with Hannah Robinson. The song, like the other Howe production, is very busy sounding, and quite loud. This was probably the most anticipated song on the album - and it could end up becoming a fan-favourite. (9/10)
Homewrecker is such an amazing-title for a pop song. You'd expect swearing and cursing on this song - but surprisingly, there's no swearing or cursing... or is there? The lyrics of the song are intentionally blunt, but also very witty. The “ho..ho..homewrecker” bit caught everyone by surprise. Its right there, she’s actually swearing, but its so wonderfully hidden beneath the apparent hook. Only Sophie Ellis-Bextor could swear and still sound so posh, take notes Ke$ha. The song is produced by Greg Kurstin, and has some similar production gimmics. The organ in the beginning of the song make this song seem almost-demented in some ways. Well done, Sophie, well done! (8.5/10)
Now is that point in the album when you're pretty much done with dancing and jumping around, and you just want to sit down and listen to some good pop music. And Sophie knows that. Synchronised, is the first of the two ballads on the album; the second song with no lyrical contribution by Sophie, and is truly immense. The song sounds very commercial - kinda like "If You Go"'s moody little sister. The song focuses on Sophie's vocal power, and that is, essentially, what makes this song a masterpiece. Sophie's vocals have never sounded this good and emotive. Here is solid proof against all those people who claim that Sophie cannot breathe life and emotion into a song - IN YOUR FACE, HATERS! (10/10)
Cut Straight To The Heart is the perfect close to a perfect album. The song features lyrical contribution by the infamous Ed Harcourt. Sophie sounds very vulnerable, and the general feeling and production of the song can be compared to one of her older songs from her second album - "I Am Not Good At Not Getting What I Want". The track has beautiful instrumentation, and also samples the drum sequence from Placebo's cover of "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)", which is also, not so surprisingly, produced by Dimitri. The song might be slightly over-shadowed by the amazing-ness of its predecessor, but is no less brilliant. Sophie finishes the album in style. (10/10)
...yes, this is exactly how I feel about the release. Its finally here, and it is flawless. Make sure you legally purchase a copy (or two) of Make a scene.
