"The Sport I can't Live Without"

May 2002 The Sunday Times Magazine Allure Unto Herself

Allure unto herself

Naked ambition has made Sophie Ellis Bextor a dance-floor diva at the tender age of 23. But the sassy songstress still has plenty more to reveal.

Words: Kathy Brewis
Photos: Jason Bell
Article printed May 2002 issue of The Sunday Times Magazine

Sophie Ellis Bextor's breasts will not be appearing in the new Bond film. Despite recent speculation, she will not be going topless, or anything else, in it. She met with a casting agent but "it didn't come to anything". And she doesn't give a damn, though many a movie career has been built on that. "I've never even seen a Bond film," she sais dismissively. "I've flicked past them. If I was offered the part now, I'd say no." She's direct but polite, assertive but sweet. She knows what she wants and she won't suffer fools. You'd guess from her album title, Read My Lips: she is not one to beat around the bush.
"I had a very stupid woman interview me for Italian telly," she says. "She had obviously done minus research; her eyes were blank. She went, 'So - have you been coming to Italy very much?' God, I thought, that's like a bad chat-up line. Then she said something to the audience in Italian and they all clapped and she said, 'I've just been telling them you're going to be in the new Bond film.' I had to say, 'I'm afraid there's no truth in that whatsoever.'"
Nor is there any truth in reports of a lucrative cosmetics deal or a part in Friends. No move into acting in the near future at all, she stresses; besides, what's the rush? She has only just turned 23. She seems older at times, then she'll make a comment about "my generation" and you realise she hasn't quite shaken off the self-importance of youth. "My big dread would be to do a film, then have everyone describe me as 'the actress and singer' in a year's time," she says. "It's such a cliché. Singing is my passion. I don't want to dilute what I'm up to."
What she's up to right now is a few small UK gigs, to "give the album a stretch" before a double-A-side single next month and a larger-scale tour in the autumn. She's also perfecting her tongue-in-cheek, bitchy persona - you've seen her cheat her way to winning a dance competition in the video for the No 2 hit Murder on the Dancefloor. She has consciously followed the example of singers whom she admires such as Debbie Harry, PJ Harvey and Björk, accentuating her image to give the music a style she says is an extension of herself: "passionate but quite witty, quite assertive, but uppity, petulant delivery. The more specific you can be, the less people can manipulate you."
Her savvy comes in part from her upbringing: her mother is the former Blue Peter producer Janet Ellis, her father is a TV producer, Robin Bextor. At an early age she showed a knack for turning situations to her advantage, selling Blue Peter badges in the playground ("What a brat!" she says). Did having a famous mum propel her towards the limelight? She says not; she wasn't one of those people who want to be famous for the sake of it. "My mum had gone to drama school and told me how wonderful it made her feel being on stage, but I never got it. I'm the only person in my faily to go into music. But my mum and dad worked in media, so I wasn't intimidated by that aspect. I'm pleased with how it's all turned out."
And who wouldn't be? Her first solo album has sold 500,000 copies in the UK so far and she was nominated as best female solo artist at this year's Brit awards. She has been noticed by all the right people (you know you've made it when French and Saunders do a spoof of you). And Esquire magazine has just placed her at No 4 in its list of the "40 most eligible women of 2002". Naturally, you hope that she's going to be one of those beautiful people who turn out to be odd-looking in the flesh. Sadly, she's mesmerising. And she can laugh at herself. Sitting Bambi-like, legs splayed, she's worried that the photographer can see her knickers. "It's so embarrassing!" Then she srugs: "At least they're nice pants."
The made-up artist dusts a highlighting sheen onto her chest to emphasise her breasts. "They don't need much help, do they?" she laughs. When she was younger, they were a positive hindrance. "Girls can't handle curves, can they?" At school, she was picked on for having a womanly body and a wide face. She only started to enjoy her looks in her late teens. "I felt so sure I wasn't one of life's beauties that I'd resigned myself to it: fair enough, I'll make the best of what I have." Then she started going clubbing, discovered make-up and everything fell into place. She knows how to look good for the camera. She admits her looks are a bonus, but that's all. "If people think you look attractive, great, but it's not worth making into anything more. It's transient. I'm going to get older." Indeed, she'll soon be in her mid-twenties. "You reach a point where you think, this is as good as it gets. I haven't got a bad body, I haven't got the world's best body, but sod it, get out there."
She's happy to use her looks to her advantage; whay not? "You've got to use every available tool to set the contact for your music," she says. So she's not averse to a bit of cleavage. "I don't really care. The worst thing is if the girl doesn't look comfortable. Kylie and Britney wear really revealing stuff but they look so comfortable, you don't feel you're looking at something you shouldn't." Besides, she says, if men are going to get excited over a picture of her in a short skirt, they could get excited over anything. "If you want to get saucy, I'm singing with a microphone in front of my open mouth - it's all fairly phallic."
The CDs she has brought along to play in the background reflect (perhaps deliberately) a mature taste: Pulp's latest album, a Pet Shop Boys singles collection, Burt Bacharach's greatest hits and Blondie's Parallel Lines. She's planning on doing a cover version of the track One Way or Another. "I like it because it's quite predatory," she says enthusiastically. "I like women like that, that thing where you don't give men a choice: I'm going to have you. And then you say, 'Actually, you're quite boring.'" She laughs. You wouldn't have wanted to run into her at the school disco.
Her singing career got off to a great start. While she was in the lower sixth, at the west London fee-paying school Godolphin and Latymer, she gave a demo tape to a 33-year-old songwriter, Billy Reeves, who DJ-ed at one of her favourite clubs. They joined forces and their group, theaudience (sic), was born, and after eight gigs, just before her A-levels (she got an A and two Bs in history of art, history and English), they had a record deal. "It was stupidly easy," she says. "Britpop was on the wane and people were looking for something with a bit of stance." The band had three top-40 hits and released an album. Robbie Williams invited them to suppot him on tour. They declined. Ellis Bextor described him as "a cabaret singer" (and, later, "a Butlin's Redcoat"). This was an early taste of how sharp her tongue could be. Williams retaliated by saying, if they ever met, she would leave the room in tears. Unlikely: it's hard to imagine her being intimidated by anyone. "I did lay into him a bit, but I was 18," she says, refusing to take any of it back. She wishes everyone would let the subject drop. "It isn't like for my party trick I'm going to slag off Robbie Williams."
The future looked bright: theaudience's catchiest tune, If You Can't Do It When You're Young, When Can You Do It?, reached No 25 [Wasn't that I Know Enough (I Don't Get Enough)? - S-E-B.com Webmaster]. Then it all went horribly wrong. Reeves "started to lose it", unable to handle the pressure. "It was scary. He didn't suit the stress of it. He cared about it a lot, it was almost like sabotage. I was cross with her for a long time." He left, and the rest of the group disintegrated. "The last year of being signed was horrendous. I had this naive idea that the band would keep going, but we pulled in different directions. I send them Christmas cards and nobody sent me one. I felt quite dejected."
Looking back, she can confidently claim that the experience was good for her: "A bit of failure does wonders for your modesty." At the time, however, seeing her dreams crumble (the record company, Mercury, swiftly extricated itself) meant panic attacks and deliberate weight loss. "I'm not bothered about being a big bigger - I've always had a tummy - but I wasn't feeling so good, and I thought, I'll start by cutting out things. Then it was the classicthing where everything else isn't working so you take excessive control over it. I love my food, but I was having the leanest meat with no mayonnaise, no oil on my salad... I got down to under eight stone and I'm 5ft 9in, so I was tiny." Her friends winced when they saw her. With the help of a hypnotherapist (she approves of this because it encourages you to be self-reliant - she wanted to get better herself, without medication), she got back on track. But it seemed as though her promising career was over.
"It was a realistic possibility. So what if you've been in a band that was signed? Join the club. I'd always had this feeling that everything was going to be all right, then I thought, maybe I'm wrong." Still, she decided not to let it stop her, started singing again, and in the summer of 2000 was sent some demos to record vocals for. One was a dance track by an Italian DJ, Spiller: Groovejet (If This Ain't Love). This would be her comeback.
The single was due out the same day as Victoria Beckham's solo effort. Ellis Bextor's tendency to articulate her opinions in public worked to her advantage. Beckham was meant to have asked her record company to change the release date of her own single, lest the compeition prove too great (which, in fact, it did). The ensuing "catfight" between Beckham ("the multimillionairess") and Ellis Bextor ("the unknown singer"; "the real Posh Spice"), though hyped up to the eyeballs, was helped along by her calling Posh "petulant" and making comments like: "I did consider saying my boyfriend plays for Man City and we've got a kid called Chiswick." "We tried to make fun of it because it was a bit ridiculous," she says now. Hence her wearing that T-shirt with the "Peckham" logo? "That was just a joke." Her single notched up 220,000 pre-sales orders, hit the top spot and got her the solo record deal.
She's still unhesitatingly frank in her opinions, however; the music industry, for example, "might do well to have a committee of young men and women who let them know what's really happening. At Mercury it was you sad bloke in his sixties going, 'This simply isn't appropriate.'" So far, her new label, Polydor, has got off lightly. "I feel like I've got a lot of respect - but then again, they did sign me after I'd had a No 1."
She learnt to hold her own early on. "Because I was an only child up until the age of eight, I always sat at the dinner table with the grown-upw, so I was brought up to think I had to add to the debate or go and play with toys. I always liked sitting there and having conversations with people. Maybe that's why I spend a lot of time with people who are older. I like to chat." One of these older people is her boyfriend, Andy Boyd, 11 years her senior. "I have an older boyfriend. That doesn't mean I have a 'thing' for older men," she chides. But the issue has crossed her mind. "I don't think it's becaise I'm mature or anything, but my priorities are different to a lot of young women. I like to stay in and be settled." Her friends are all travelling the world; the idea doesn't appeal to her in the slightest. "I don't want to be somewhere with a backpack, I don't want to be travelling on coaches across Australia. I like my home, I'm happy sorting out the bills, having a quiet drink and a meal."
She has been with Boyd for five years; they livein her flat in north London. He's also her musical collaborator and, it transpires, her manager, though for some reason they both try to hide this. She won't talk about him at all, in fact. "I know it's awkward," she smiles apologetically, nice-girl power working overtime. "He doesn't enjoy reading about himself and I respect that. I'd get told off." She laughs. She says she finds quiet self-assurance sexy. It's certainly hard to imagine her being impressed by a boy of her own age. Added to which, having seen her parents' marriage disintegrate when she was very young, she values stability. "I never liked the idea of dating lots of people for the sake of it. If I was single I'd only be looking for someone like him. I enjoy a kind of bliss I don't think a lot of other people have." But no wedding bells yet. "You know that thing of divorced children blaming themselves? Never crossed my mind. My parents always made me feel I was loved. But it's still really unpleasant. I come from a generation where most of my friends have separated parents. You either don't want to go anywhere near marriage, or you want to get it right. As you get older it starts to seem like a nice idea. But I'm too young just yet."
She doesn't want to feel disloyal by discussing her parents' relationship in detail. "Sometimes I find it a comfort that they were married because it makes me realise that once they loved each other enough to. I would say - in case they're reading this, with their bacon sandwiches - that they both got married to people who are brillient step-parents, when I was about six. Now they've got children with those people and my little sister will come and stay with my other sisters and brother and I've ended up with the best situation." (The array of siblings comprises Jack, 14, and Martha, 11, on her mother's side, and Duke, 5, and the twins Maisy and Bertie, 3, on her father's.)
So all's quiet on the home front. Professionally, though, she's facing a challenge: this is the first live tour she has done in 3 and a half years. She calls the music "sophisticated pop". The album has a 1980s feel, lots of keyboards beneath her nicely enunciated vocals. Live, it's rockier; there are even a few guitar solos. Ellis Bextor's stage presence is, as ever, minimal: no dance routines, no grand displays of emotion. After a one-off show in October, one critic described "an aloof figure who sang with a detachment bordering on frostiness"; an "unapproachable duchess". "I am," she says. "People are used to singers going, 'Love me, love me', it's refreshing to have a change." Besides: "What's wrong with mystique? I saw Madonna on the Drowned World tour and she was really strong and hard. That's more impressive than watching S Club 7 grin their way through everything."
So it might not look that way but, she says, she's giving it her all. Here's proof: after a gig, her head turns to blancmange and she is "completely spent. I like that feeling. It means I've really worked hard". She has had singing lessons recently, so she can hit the high notes and be able to speak after performances ("I used to boast about the fact that I hadn't had lessons, then one day I thought, 'God, I'm such a moron.'"). But she's happy to handle criticism: "I'd be doing a bad job if everyone loved what I was up to. I like getting under people's skin. Good luck to them! The nastier, the better."
It's easy to get under her skin too. One way is to remind her that she used to be a model, if only for a few weeks. "I did hundreds of photo shoots for theaudience and only eight as a model - it's virtually irrelevant," she snaps. She was spotted in Topshop by an agent during the gap between the break-up of theaudience and the launch of her solo material. "I started thinking of other things to make money: I started writing a book, I did a bit of modelling, I started writing music for television - anything, really. I didn't enjoy any of that stuff, because it wasn't what I wanted to do."
The video for her new single, Get Over You, features her as a bridal mannequin breaking out of a shop window and tearing off her dress to reveal a neon outfit beneath. Obviously, there's no dancing in it - we know from her previous videos that she's got two left feet. "I can dance!" she protests. "Last time I was in Paris I did some pole-dancing. I think I'd had a bit of champagne, actually." Not entirely convincing, but she adds that if she hadn't been a good dancer, none of this would have come about: "Me dancing in a club when I was 17 was how this guy spotted me to say, 'If you can sing as well as dance, I've got a friend who's looking for a singer.' But I don't need to show all my tricks after three singles. It's interesting if people don't know everything you're capable of yet. But I'm not relaxed," she hastily adds. "There's miles to go."
So when, last night, she dreamt that a clairvoyant was telling her she hadn't got long to live (the result of eating peking duck late at night), she was horrified. "I said, 'I don't want to go yet! I'm not finished!'" Will she last the distance? "I haven't decided yet," she says cockily. Either way, she isn't likely to fade into the background. "I went to a school that encouraged us all to be assertive young women, ready to take on the world," she says. "It's never occurred to me that everything's not there for the taking."

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