Bekky-Calver.jpeg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Sophie Ellis-Bextor on Saltburn, transphobia and Perimenopop: ‘Success is harder for me to navigate than failure or disappointment’ – UK Times")
Pop was a bit of a dirty word,” Sophie Ellis-Bextor remembers, of her first flush of real fame. “Every pop video seemed to be filled with blonde, tanned models, who had a group of other models who were their friends, or cute, smiling guys. And I just thought… no, I’m gonna be this absolute cow.”
Across many of her early releases in the Noughties – like the beachfront chill-pop smash “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”, or the chugging stalker bop “Catch You” – Ellis-Bextor embodied a sullen, blue-chip glamazon with cheekbones visible from space. Her videos saw her stalk and pose and terrorise. One moment she was a mannequin run amok, the next she was speeding maniacally down a Venice canal, like Don’t Look Now but chic. And while she didn’t explicitly murder her rivals on the dancefloor, she at least made them trip, fall and throw up in the bathroom.
“Playing the baddie was like a protective layer for me,” she says. “I thought, OK, if I present myself in this way and my career is over within five years, I can go away knowing that I didn’t really reveal anything about myself. It would have been so hard to deal with if I showed everything straight away and got rejected. But if I was lucky enough to have a long career, I knew I could then reveal more as the years went on.”
During the pandemic, Ellis-Bextor began inviting her Instagram followers into her home via her Kitchen Disco videos, livestreamed performances that reshaped her image into something a little warmer, a little more maternal. But nicey-nicey isn’t really Ellis-Bextor’s forte, either. We meet at a coffee stall cum garden centre in Chiswick, the aluminum furniture still damp from the September rain. Ellis-Bextor, looking immaculate in a floral blouse and autumnal jacket, is funny and accommodating – hot drinks are on tap, as are apologies every time a dollop of moisture lands on my notepad – yet there’s also a brisk assertiveness to her; a laser-focused pop star cool more Neil Tennant than Kylie. She speaks like someone who’s been at this a while, knows every trick in the book, and won’t suffer fools.
“If you’re not having fun writing a song, just put your pen down and leave the room,” she says, with force. “I’ve been to songwriting camps with all of these writers trying to crack the code of a perfect pop song and make a hit record, and it never works. I find it confusing and cynical and sad, and I’ve got no time for it.”
The best Sophie Ellis-Bextor tracks have always had a bit of poison in them – cameos by thrashing guitars or fire-alarm noises, or a crack in her vocals that screams real devastation. Is it any surprise that it was the 2023 film Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s flashing neon sign of cartoon sociopathy, that sent “Murder on the Dancefloor” surging back up the charts 22 years after she initially released it? And now, after three detours into spooky balladry and magical-realist art-pop – spanning her 2014, 2016 and 2023 albums Wanderlust, Familia and Hana – she has returned to the disco space with Perimenopop, a record that burns with kitsch and camp and icy menace.
The title stemmed from an early conversation about the record with the songwriter Hannah Robinson, who’s worked with Ellis-Bextor on various tracks over the years, including the glittering “Me and My Imagination”. Ellis-Bextor wanted to talk about her age – she turned 46 in April – and celebrate the fact that she’s been working in music for as long as she has. “Hannah just joked, ‘Oh, so it’s like perimenopop’, and we thought it was hilarious.” There were other album titles mooted along the way. For a while it was going to be called The Invisible Line, which she imagined as reflecting the connection between all the different chapters in her life. “But it was a bit dry, and I felt like I’d have to explain it constantly.” She started googling different slang words for “middle-aged woman”. “There was ‘biddy’, ‘spinster’, ‘Sheila’,” she recalls, while admitting that part of her would have loved to have called the record Sheila. But eventually, she realised it had to be called Perimenopop.
“The fact I’m in my mid-forties is so inherent to what this album is,” she says. “I just thought ‘sod it – let’s literally put it front and centre.’ And I quite like the fact that it’s not a very sexy or ‘pop’ thing to do, and that it’s given me complete permission to be exactly who I am right now.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “The only drawback to it is that I genuinely keep being asked about my menopause journey.” She cackles. “Like I’m not looking to get medical here…”
Ellis-Bextor is quick to explain that she’d been preparing a return to dance-pop long before Saltburn. “From the outside looking in, I know it looks like… ‘OK! Disco-pop train, where’s the next stop?’ But I was actually already making this record. I’m not very good at reacting to external factors. I can only do what my heart wants.” She gets antsy when she sticks in one lane for too long, which is why she evolved out of dance-pop in the first place. “Whenever something feels like it’s gotten comfortable, it’s time to pull the rug out,” she says. “I like the way it feels to be a little bit apprehensive. I need to feel excited.”
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In hindsight, she says, the Saltburn moment over Christmas 2023 – which saw “Murder on the Dancefloor” ascend to No 2 in the UK charts, and Ellis-Bextor reach the Billboard Chart in the US for the first time in her career – was overwhelming. She’d just released an album and wrapped up a tour, and out of nowhere she had one of the biggest songs in the world. “I remember everyone was getting very excited about numbers, and I had to tell them to stop letting me know about them because it was getting too much,” she says. “For me, success is harder to navigate than failure or disappointment. Especially in this business, you get really good at things not going well.” She breaks into a laugh, which is husky and bullet-fast. “So when all these offers were coming in, I had to just go away and sleep on it all for a minute.”
She turned down collaborations with newer artists “that made no sense”, or “had no story behind them”, she says. “I’d rather have had two weeks with a successful ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ than three months of success with a version of the track that I didn’t understand. I’m its mum! And I knew what I was talking about.”
The last time Ellis-Bextor released a pure pop album was in 2011, and she is keenly aware that Perimenopop is coming out into a very different world, politically speaking. She has a massive queer fanbase, and has witnessed first hand that many are terrified by anti-queer lawmaking and increasing transphobia both here and overseas. She also despairs at how rampant it is on X (Twitter). “These people make trans people their whole personality and spend their entire day checking their socials and being angry, whereas trans people themselves just want to be under the radar and live their lives,” she says. “There was a time when Pride felt like a celebration of all the shoulders that people were able to stand on, but now it feels like it’s an absolute political necessity. I suppose you have to be optimistic that things will get better again, but I do get very down about it.”
Her way of dealing with it is “turning down the volume” on people with homophobic and transphobic views, and amplifying the voices of others. “I had one of my girlfriends go on quite a weird flip, and it was really affecting me,” she says. “And you definitely do need to assert that you feel really differently, and then just find ways to support what you believe is being on the right side of history.”
On her podcast Spinning Plates, in which she interviews working women every week, she has welcomed trans mothers and charity workers, philanthropists and activists. “The women I have on are so eloquent and articulate, and I know they don’t always want to have to be the voice of reason, but they will take that on and be that beacon.” It’s the least she can do, she says.
And she also knows that pop music helps, too. One of her biggest takeaways from the Kitchen Disco was that many of those who tuned in were really hungry for respite. “My stepdad was having treatment for lung cancer at the time, and then we had this invisible illness killing people, and I desperately needed lift and escape and catharsis,” she remembers. “I didn’t know if other people felt like that, too. I was very worried I wasn’t reading the room.”
Hundreds of thousands of people ended up tuning in each week. She beams at the memory of it.
“I realised that pop is a really brilliant tonic for the brain. It serves a purpose, and it should be respected for that, too.”
‘Perimenopop’ is out now, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor is touring Europe and the US, with tickets available here
