Sophie's METRONOMY collaboration

Here's a bit from a Metronomy interview:

Relating to the wave of popstars Metronomian production love, I read that Sophie Ellis Bextor has a new album on the way with production slots filled by Freemasons, Calvin Harris (among others) & you? Tell us all there is to tell about this!

Well, one day i got an email from my manager saying that Sophie Ellis Bextor was interested in some Co-writing/production from me. I was rather surprised. I found out that it was actually Sophie herself that had wanted to get in touch. Quite often with these things it’s the managements idea and the artist just goes along with it.

Anyway, i thought that anyone in that arena who liked Metronomy was worth giving it a go with. As it happens, she was a pleasure to work with. She’s very intuitive, which for some reason I didn’t expect. So there you go, the whole thing was a very nice experience. The track we did is pretty good i think and a slight departure from what you might expect of her. As for whether it makes her album, I’m not sure. But, I’d be more than happy if it did.

Source: http://www.ohhcrapp.net/2008/09/interview-metronomy_13.html

Latest Q&A interview with Sophie from the Virgin Media website

Since being the voice on THAT Spiller track, Sophie Ellis Bextor has been a regular in the charts...She's also been the face of cosmetic brand Rimmel and she's just been featured in the short musical film The Town that Boars Me. We caught up with Sophie for a classic Living grilling…

Living... For The City
I live in London - always have and probably always will! I'm London born and bred! I've always loved the idea of spending a year in Paris but now that I've got a little boy I don't know if that will happen. I think it would be a good thing to go out of my comfort zone for a year of my life. Life just happens you know and it's good to try something new. That would be really cool - I love Paris.

Living... On A Prayer
Golly...I'm undecided I'd say. The quote by Nietzsche which says that 'the arrogance of man is that when he sees no purpose he denies there can be one' is good - I find that quite comforting because it shows how little we know. I think I'm quite open-minded.

Living... For The Weekend
It would definitely involve family and friends, me and Sonny and my husband. I'd go and see my folks and friends and probably go disco dancing and cook some nice food - all the standard stuff really, but those are all the things I want.

The Living… Years
Oh, definitely, now is the best time for me. I'm more content now than I ever have. Rich and I are really happy and we have our little boy and we are doing what we love to do. You have to try and just remember that it might not last forever

The Living… Daylights
I think I've only seen one Bond film all the way through which was that new one with Daniel Craig, Casino Royale. I like him. I haven't really grown up with Bond films so I don't really know about them. The Aha theme tune mentioned in the question is a very good one... Nobody Does it Better by Carly Simon is probably my favourite Bond theme tune though. Shirley Bassey did some good ones too.

Living… In A Box
The best present I have ever received... Rich actually gives me some good presents. The best one I think would actually my Chanel handbag which he bought for me last Christmas! The best present I gave you? (to husband Rich)
Rich: Every year…! No, she bought me some beat drums.
Sophie: Oh yeah, you love your beat drums!
Rich: Basically when buying for boys you can't go wrong with toys and gadgets. Sophie bought me a laptop one year which was great and last year an electronic drum kit - it's so much fun because you can make a racket without offending anybody!

Living… TV
I really like watching Dragon's Den and stuff like that and actually loved the programme Faking It on Channel 4. That was one of my favourites! I absolutely look to cook too -I'm a big foodie.

Sophie Ellis Bextor Live (analysis)

There are some artists who are just amazing live. Not just their vocal ability, but their stage presence, the way their concert is conducted, everything! Sophie, has a great voice, great talent, amazing looks and some of the best songs ever. And what about her concerts? Let's analyse...

PROS:

1. Sophie is singing. Which is great cos she never loses tune. She sounds perfect live
2. Her constant interaction with the crowd during and in between songs..
3. Her sexy dressing sense and her poise
4. Amazingly catchy tunes, cos the crowd can sing along. Sometimes she lets the audience to do a few lines on her song, which i personally think is a great thing to do. Songs like "Murder On The Dancefloor", "Groovejet", "Get Over You", "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie" and other covers, she lets the crowd sing along..
5. Sophie is always moving on stage (of late). She jumps around, walks around, dances, moves her hands etc,.
   
6. No lip sync (well at least 98% of the time)

CONS:

1. No back-up dancers. She's got dance tunes for god's sake. She can have a few back up dancers running around behind her, and she can join them every now and then
2. Lack of fireworks and lighting. I think every energetic concert requires fireworks, laser, regular spot light and other lights...and in Sophie's case, a disco ball as well!
3. Not well organised. I blame Wallace Productions for that. Haven't they seen a Madonna or Cher or P!nk or Britney concert?? Those people have some brilliant tours. I wish Sophie does one too.

Of course, the worst part is she's done just one tour, and she's got three albums under her belt! Thats really really sad because two of them were amazing, and one was put off for pregnancy. I think Sophie must take the idea of touring seriously, work on a glam show, with back-up dancers, lights, crowd pullers, pole dancing (cos she was thinking of that) and maybe even filler dance acts by herself!

Hoping the tour for the fourth album has all these...

The Town That Bores Me review

It was supposed to be a short MySpace musical. Okay, i read that this was a low budget movie and everything, but THIS WAS JUST SAD!!!! The movie was pathetic, or beyond that... The idea seemed kinda dull initially, and how the movie was shot etc., omg!! The only reason i watched 15 minutes of boring was only because Sophie was in the movie for about one minute...half way through

Sophie's part of the movie was filmed at her house itself. She is playing a tune on her piano when the clock strikes 12 (i think..) and she hears the pig coming up to her door to take the heels she left out for it. She comes down the stairs all scared and leans onto her door listening to what the pig is singing. Then she makes this really cute expression of "what the fuck". When the pig's gone, Sophie leans her back against the door and exhales in relief.

Thats it! Thats her part... And she did it well. I'm impressed by Sophie's acting skills really. I think she's ready to take on some serious acting. Hopefully she'll get some more offers...

The movie thing...

Something about THE TOWN THAT BOARS ME

Now, shall I wear my electric-blue brogues? The high-heeled lilac boots? The traffic-light-red Patrick Coxes? The black python-skin? Hmm, no: let’s have the new patent-leather Joneses with pink edging and laces.

A journalist does not usually choose his shoes with such care, particularly when interviewing a 25-year-old neophyte director. But then Ben Charles Edwards is also a fashion and nightlife photographer, and his debut film is a 15-minute musical about a hybrid pig-boy with a shoe fetish who roams town by night stealing the high heels of local women — played, with fabulous casting, by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Kelly Osbourne, Zandra Rhodes and the drag queen Jodie Harsh.

“I always look at a person’s shoes first,” Edwards confirms when we meet. He approves of my shoe selection with the rather backhanded compliment that it’s “how the Child Catcher might dress if he had been a dandy”.

And before long, we’re dipping our elegantly-shod toes into deep psychological waters, namely that a love of heels stems back to your mother, seen as a baby from ankle-height. This had not occurred to Edwards before, but he confirms: “Mothers are what the universe revolves around, aren’t they? And you’re right, I’ve never seen her without high heels, except once when she hurt her foot.”

The genesis of The Town That Boars Me came when he was sitting in a café in his home town of Woking, appalled by the lack of sartorial ambition in the girls who passed by. The only acceptable reason, he decided, why none was wearing high heels would be if some creature was stealing them, making women scared to wear them on the streets. This alchemised in his fevered imagination with a childhood obsession with Animal Farm, and a love of musicals and exploitation flicks.

Mix it all together, and what do you get? Actually, no one’s sure yet, including Edwards. Though the film opens the Portobello Film Festival on August 28, he hasn’t yet had the all-important sessions with the professional film editor Nick Barnes. But you could bet your Blahniks it won’t be anything like most British movies: as Edwards says dismissively, “They’re either about football fans or some lout bashing people’s heads in.”

That’s how he attracted his stellar cast: they loved the idea — and Edwards himself. “He seemed so sure of what he wanted to achieve,” Ellis-Bextor explains later, “that I trusted him. And I liked the idea of this twisted little fairytale; it’s quite Tim Burtonish.”

It’s not just acting talent that Edwards has attracted: the songs are co-written by Steve Cradock of Ocean Colour Scene, with assistance from the film music composer Angus Havers. And all for love, not money — though Edwards has hopes, if the film is a success, of turning it into a feature, or perhaps a full-length stage musical. To garner more support, he will be putting the film on MySpace after its festival run. Big dreams for a lover of low-budget Grindhouse movies. “You can’t exactly call this Grindhouse,” Edwards laughs. “Grindhouse is low budget, and this is zero budget! So I’d have to call this council-house, not Grindhouse.”

Edwards is refreshingly free of pretension, though he is articulate and questing, conversation ranging freely from evolution through semiotics to star signs. If he has a visual philosophy, it’s that he loves the intersection of “glamour and filth” — hence the pig creature and the shoes. But in the end, he’d rather we just relaxed and enjoyed the show. “It’s like those dandelions that you blow on; when they’re in that state, their only purpose is to reproduce. And that’s what we are, in a sense. We’re all so preoccupied with enjoying luxuries and thinking we’re better than we are, and we’re not, we’re still animals. That’s why this film isn’t that serious — nothing in life is.”

Sophie's weekend

Sophie likes Katy Perry's song!! (At the end of the article)

SCHOOL friends said her visage resembled a rhombus while Robbie Williams cruelly jibed that she looked like a satellite dish, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor has ignored all her detractors to have an enduring pop career.

Having started out doing her best to ignite drab indie group theaudience, she effortlessly came out as a clubber with Groovejet (If This Ain't Love), which won a chart-based pouting war with Posh Spice back in 2000, and kick-started her disco-pop solo stardom.

Like all the best pop stars, there's something faintly preposterous about her. In an industry obsessed with maintaining street cred, she smashed through pop's class ceiling, with her distinctive crisply enunciated RP vocals. We catch up with her as she's awaiting a flight to a gig in Barcelona.

"You get to the point where you feel you've done pretty much everything in Europe in the name of promotion," she admits.

"Though I think singing Murder On The Dancefloor in Holland on a podium in the middle of an ice rink with skaters going around me was a highlight. It was just me and Leo Sayer on that show."

Last year, she "fell in love" with Manchester, courtesy of a tour with Take That. "I had to do most of my Christmas shopping there," she admits. She scrapped her own headlining gigs to support the Manband.

Magic tricks

"We had a couple of really good Christmas parties,'' she recalls. "My favourite was the one where we all had to do a 'turn'. Gary and his wife did magic tricks and we all did a pantomime.

"It was a version of Blind Date, and I played a cross between Cilla Black and the Fairy Godmother."

Currently, she's working on album number four - the follow-up to 2007's Trip The Light Fantastic - with a retinue of blue-chip hit-factory writers, including Cathy Dennis, Richard 'Biff' Stannard, Calvin Harris and The Freemasons, as well as more leftfield talent such as Devon electro-poppers Metronomy.

Married to Richard Jones, bassist in The Feeling - with whom she has a four-year-old son, Sonny - the 29-year-old is "delighted" to be headlining Manchester Pride.

"To be honest, I mostly go out to gay clubs," she comments. "I think most women prefer them because the atmosphere is much better and all the blokes dance with you."

In fact, she even runs her own gay club night in Soho, called Modern Love, alongside husband Richard, DJ-ing under the brilliant guise of Me & Mrs Jones.

Arguments

"We're still ironing out arguments over what to play," she laughs. "I'm quite a good barometer because if we're in a disco, I'm more likely to dance than he is. He'll try and play a really cool Soulwax remix of You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones, and I'm more into classics like Toni Basil's Mickey."

Furthermore, she's made an appearance in a new John Waters-esque horror musical called The Town That Boars Me, alongside Kelly Osbourne, Sadie Frost, and drag queen scenester Jodie Harsh.

"It's a dark little fairytale about a boy who's made a pig and goes around this little town stealing women's' high-heeled shoes. It's quite fantastical."

As this is our Pride special, CityLife has to probe: Sophie, have you ever had a lesbian experience?

"Well, nothing serious. I think I can kind of relate to that Katy Perry thing, you know," she replies. "It's something most girls can relate to when you're 15 or 16. But I've never taken a girl home to meet my mum (famed Blue Peter MILF Janet Ellis), if that's what you mean."

What do you make of pseudo girl-kisser Perry, whose No.1 chart single, I Kissed A Girl, has uncorked the ire of both Christians and some homosexuals?

"It think it's good fun," she says. "And it's a great song. And it's by Cathy Dennis, who really can do no wrong."

Sophie performed at the last ever G-A-Y

Sophie was one of the performers at the last ever G-A-Y saturday night. Sophie has been performing at G-A-Y ever since her first single came out, and it was her favourite stage. Anyway, Sophie performed her new song Heartbreak Make Me A Dancer (which might suggest that its the new single from the 4th album. Click here and here to watch snippets of the video) and Murder On The Dancefloor (of course, like she would miss this one out. Click here to watch the full video). She also did a duet with The Feeling - Video Killed The Radio Star (Click here to watch the full video).

Except for that tacky outfit, Sophie seemed to perform well on stage and the crowd loved her as usual. Looking forward to more duets with The Feeling...