"The Sport I can't Live Without"

Arena As Nasty As She Wants To Be
December 2001

Sophie Ellis Bextor hates rudeness, Americanisms and being thought of as sexy. So we hope she'll forgive us when we say: 'Ain't she a hottie?'

Words: William Shaw
Photos: Simon Emmett
Article printed December 2001 issue of 'Arena' magazine

In the bustling room, clad in corset and tights, Sophie Ellis Bextor stands statue-still. She is concentrating hard. The photographer works around her. It's obvious how seriously she takes her work. In her head, she's pretending she's not looking at the camera at all - but from the printed page, at the person looking at her in the magazine.
The black corset pinches her waist. She's hoping that the imaginary person looking at her corsetry on the page is thinking, say, Marilyn Monroe in The Prince And The Pauper, rather than Christina Aguilera in the Moulin Rouge video. 'It's not that I reckon myself. I think it's very unsexy, to think of yourself as sexy,' she says. Which, it turns out, is a very Ellis Bextor-ish thing to say. She has finely defined notions of propriety. The idea that she might be a sex symbol is, frankly, something she cannot be bothering with. 'What? So someone fancies me that I've never met. I don't really know how to make that part of my day,' she says dismissively.
She's been shooting for hours and her muscles are starting to rebel. It's hard, keeping the focus. Knackering. She idly wonders what the time is and she finds herself peering at the photographer's watch - upside down. And the concentration evaporates. A break is called. Sophie exhales. On heels that raise her five-foot-nine frame to a magnificently Amazonian six feet, she totters awkwardly across the studio floor. 'Owww,' she wails. The totter turns to a hobble. 'I have,' she announces, with mock-drama, 'a posing injury.'

The great attraction of Sophie Ellis Bextor is that in the cookie-cutter world of singers on dance records, she is her own girl. Her records burst with idiosyncratic joie de vivre. She is the pop star who has released the most lascivious record of the year - 'Take Me Home'. And last year she was, famously, the public school girl who out-poshed Posh with Spiller's 'Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)'. 'I don't think that poshness thing is a bad thing to be tarred with,' she declares. 'Even if it's not particularly true.' She may not be as blue-blooded as the double-barrelled name suggests, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have her standards. Publicly she fretted about the awful grammar of her first hit. '"Ain't" is simplt not an expression I would use,' she says.
On her current album Gregg Alexander co-wrote a tear-'em-up anthem for her called 'Murder On The Dancefloor'. She loves it, but the chorus he wrote includes the line, Burn the goddam' house down. 'It's not really the sort of line I'd pine myself,' says the linguistically picky Ms Ellis Bextor, who sings it gamely enough anyway. But she refuses resolutely to sing in the faux-American accent dance singers are supposed to employ. The length of her Bosanquet-ish vowels on the world 'dancefloor' are a marvel in themselves. 'I don't do the transatlantic thing,' pronounces Sophie. 'It's not like I think I'm clever, I just do what feels natural.' As a result the track has its own startling, indelible Ellis Bextor-ishness about it. Poshness is her cachet. She plays on it deliberately, knowing it makes her distinctive. And if some people loathe it, that's fine. At least she knows she has ledt her mark. 'I want to be someone that people really hate, as well as really love,' she proclaims.
For a 22-year-old, she has extraordinary self-possession. In her polite, and pleasantly spoken way, she knows precisely what she wants. Her background has obviously helped. She grew up media-savvy. As the record has shown many times, her mother was Janet Ellis - the Eighties Blue Peter presenter. Her father, Robin Bextor, is a producer who worked on That's Life around the same time. She bridles slightly if you suggest there was anything out of the ordinary about her upbringing - about having That's Life's Chris Searle as a lodger, or about coming back from school to find The Liver Birds' Nerys Hughes bustling in her kitchen. 'It wasn't that surreal,' she says. 'I mean it wasn't like we have the people from Wackaday coming round all the time.'
As a four-year-old growing up in west London, Sophie had two imaginary friends, Emily and Charlotte. She would disappear to her room and talk to them. Emily and Charlotte were a bitchy pair. Soon Sophie noticed that the two of them were always ganging up on her, giving her a hard time. With the benefit of hindsight Sophie realised that Emily and Charlotte's horrid behaviour coincided with her parents splitting up. A psychiatrist might say she was using them to dramatise the tension in the Ellis Bextor household. However, Sophie didn't let Emily and Charlotte's bad behaviour get her down. She simply got rid of them. Sophie is the sort of robust English girl who gets on with it. When her parents split, she decided that two families were infinitely preferable to one, and refuses to see he parents' divorce in anything other than positive terms. 'I still talk to myself now though,' she grins. 'Only I don't call my voices Emily and Charlotte any more.'
Her parents coughed up to send her to the mildly unconventional girls' public school, Godolphin and Latymer, where Sophie prospered, leaving an A in History of Art, and Bs in English and History. So she emerged a nice middle-class teenager who - it's true - talks a bit posh. She is the sort of girl who has never been in trouble with the police, and is, in her own words, 'quite into manners'.
Finding herself in the pop business, she's appaled at how badly behaved so many of her colleagues are. 'I've met some singers and musicians and they're really badly brought up,' she frowns. She watches them bossing their assistants around without bothering with the usual Ps and Qs and is horrified. 'Oh, they're just shy,' people tell her. 'No,' she contradicts, 'they're just bloody rude. Why should they be allowed to get away with it?' If Sophie wants to cut someone dead, she does it in the most refined way possible: she simply makes a point of getting their name wrong.

At 17, in a Camden nightclub, Sophie pressed a tape of herself singing into the palms of club DJ, Billy Reeves. Reeves was forming a group called theaudience - and so Sophie dropped by Mercury and it looked much like Sophie's brief career in the music business was over before it had ever begun. For a while the normally self-confident woman went into an untypical deline. She is not the sort to contemplate such abject failure. She lost weight, had panic attacks and sulked in her room. But then, being Sophie, she bucked up. Sitting around wasn't going to get her anywhere. So she got herself a modelling agency, wrote three chapters of a novel (never finished), and formed another band. It was around this time that Italian DJ Chistiano Spiller sent her a tape which he hoped she'd add some vocals to (the grammatically objectionable 'If this ain't love...' chorus was added subsequently by hack songwriter Rob Davies). Though she didn't rate the track much at first, she thought she'd give it a go...

Sophie un-corsets after the photoshoot, and goes for a drink to make herself feel human again. When she returns home to her new maisonette in Swiss Cottage she's thrilled to find she's had a delivery from Argos. It's a bathroom space-saver. For all her alleged poshness, she likes shopping at Argos: if you buy over £100-worth of stuff, she'll tell you, delivery is free. And you can get bamboo blinds for, like £6.99. Next morning Sophie wakes with a fuzzy head. One drink too many last night. It's untypical. She rarely drinks to excess. Likes tipsy, hates drunk.
She shares the flat with the 33-year-old boyfriend she has been going out with since she was 17. Today though, she's rehearsing for Sophie Ellis Bextor's first gig. She hasn't sung live with a band for three years - since her days with theaudience. 'I've been aching - literally aching - to do this,' she says. In rehearsal rooms north of King's Cross, she's been putting a band through their paces. She stands facing a blank wall, which substitutes for an imaginary audience, and runs through tracks from her debut CD Read My Lips, pulling the mic stand back towards her and thumping her heels into the floor in rhythm with the music. They're booked in until 6.30. They finish on the dot.

A short but revealing conversation about love and flirting: Your version of 'Take Me Home' (sample lyric: It's going to happen anyway/I know what's good for you) is possibly the most flirtatios song ever sung.
Isn't it? I think flirting is really funny.

Are you at all like the person singing the song?
[Dubiously] Sometimes. But not generally.

Do you remember the first time you fell in love?
[Hurriedly] Yes. It's only happened once.

With the man you're with now?
Absolutely. I'm a lucky girl.

When you write songs like 'Take Me Home', he doesn't fret about your fidelity?
No. He's very calm about all that. I'm lucky.

Where did you meet him?
[Takes a breath] I don't really want to talk about him - but only because I made a decision to do what I do, but he hasn't. So it's not very fair to talk about people who never asked to be... And people don't want to know about that.

Oh, they do...
I didn't realise at first that if you talk about people in print it always gets back to them. I don't really like writing about love either. I suppose that's why I've written stuff that's quite coquettish... because... you're not really giving yourself away.'

Tonight, Sophie sits in a pub drinking Bloddy Marys. No ice. She doesn't like her tomato juice cold. 'You also get more liquid,' she counsels.
Off stage, tired from rehearsals, she is still striking. Heads turn. Her wide-faced beauty is something she had to learn to love. 'I used to really hate my jaw. Incredibly, I used to think about plastic surgery. I really like it now because it's not like anybody else's.' She pauses for a sip of Bloody Mary. 'People are incredibly rude,' she declares. 'So presumptuous. I was on Patrick Kielty's show and he did that think of pulling the skin out from each side of his face and making fun of me.' She pauses. 'I mean he'd got a weird-shaped head and I wasn't going to remark on that.'
Four things she loves. First: singing along to CDs at home. That last one? 'I think an old Michael Jackson one like Thriller, or Off The Wall.' Second: cooking. She has a passion for Nigel Slater's cookery writing. She has a mixture of high-class and plebian tastes. 'I love oysters, I love lobster and I love champagne. But I also like pickled onions and those baked beans with chicken nuggets in them.' Third: talking about books. She read Lolita when she was 14, because she thought it was 'a bit naughty' and likes it still. Other books she likes are The Go-Between and Far From The Madding Crowd. She's also in a book club with her mother and several of their friends. Recently they've read The Secret History and she's currently half way through Perfume. She gave up on Flaubert's Sentimental Education because she found it 'really boring'. When it came to her last turn to choose a book she chose Patrick Hamilton's gloomy noir English noir Hangover Square. Everyone else hated it, but it remains one of her ten all-time favourites. For her age, she's remarkably well-read. She quotes the book liberally, from memory. Ahd finally: clothes. Lots of them. 'Being a boy,' she says, 'you'd probably say that the thing I have too much of is shoes. But you have to understand that they all serve a purpose.' In her defence she pleads frugality. 'I feel I'm allowed to buy three skirts from Warehouse,' she says, 'because it's still less than one from Prada.' One thing that she hates: door hinges. She has a phobia about them. It started when - as an eight-year-old - she saw another girl crush her fingers in a door.
She's late. I've kept her too long and she's been too polite to mention the time. But now she's looking at her watch anxiously. Tonight she was supposed to meet four old Godolphin school chums - 'my best friends' - for dinner in Soho at 7.30pm. It's now 8.30pm and she's still sat down with me in a pub. She says she'll have to stop the interview and phone them to apologise. I tell her to use me as an excuse: 'Say you're doing an interview.' She looks at me like I'm an idiot. 'Oh no. That'll make them think I've really lost it. "I'm sorry I'm doing an interview,"' she mocks. She's not like that. Instead, more sensibly, phones and grovels that she is 'still working'.
On the way out, one of her team asks her if she thinks she needs more time to rehearse. 'Are you alright? Or do you need another day?'
'No, I think we're okay,' she says.
'Good. I'm glad you're so confident.'
Suddenly Sophie lifts her eyebrows, makes a panicked face that seems to say 'Eeek! What am I doing? Being so cockily confident about my first solo gig ever? What right have I to be doing all this anyway?'
She's just joking, of course. 'It'll be fine,' she smiles.

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