Sophie Ellis-Bextor: ‘I thought I might become a laughing stock’
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“I’ve always been much sillier than people thought I was,” says Sophie Ellis-Bextor from the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo, midway through her Christmas Kitchen Disco Tour. It’s a tinseltastic live show which sees the 44-year-old pop star belting out a glorious mix of festive and disco classics from astride a white plastic horse, telling cracker jokes with a martini in her hand and wearing such a glittering array of costumes she becomes a human bauble.
But, days later, Zooming from a back bedroom of the London home she shares with her husband Richard Jones, the bassist of The Feeling, and their five sons aged between four and 19, Ellis-Bextor admits that when she first became famous in the early Noughties, singing such hits as Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) and Murder on the Dancefloor, she felt “safer” hiding behind a poutier persona.
Looking back, she says, that aloof image “felt like a bit of padding around my real personality. It helped me feel it didn’t matter if my pop career didn’t last long, because I hadn’t given my whole self away. But it’s been really lovely to slowly relax and allow my public image to become more like my real self.”
Although the thawing of Ellis-Bextor’s icy image began with her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 (when she and her dance partner Brendan Cole reached the final), she only really melted into her true self during the pandemic. Her weekly live-streamed Kitchen Disco gigs made her one of lockdown’s national heroes. While Joe Wicks tried to make us do PE, Ellis-Bextor and her kids bopped beneath a mirrorball, karaoking through her own tracks and upbeat covers. I can still see her in leotard, fluffy koala mask and vertiginous white platform heels, trying not to slip on food dropped by her toddler, Mickey, while her other boys were visible through the patio door, bouncing on a trampoline in the garden.
Privately, she was grieving for her stepfather, who died in July 2020, while struggling with homeschooling – and “music just lifted the mood”. But she worried how the gigs would be received. “After the first one I thought I might become a bit of a laughing stock,” she says. “I didn’t know how other people were feeling. They might have thought: ‘What are you doing, putting on sequins?! That’s a bit inappropriate.’ But nobody ever said that.”
Born in 1979, Ellis-Bextor is the daughter of former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis and TV producer Robin Bextor. They split up when she was four years old. I ask Ellis-Bextor if – like so many British kids – she spent childhood Decembers making Blue Peter Christmas crafts, but she shakes her head. “My mum and dad separated just as she started doing Blue Peter, so my early memories of Christmas were figuring out how it was all going to work.” It took the birth of her half-brother – born to Janet and her second husband, TV producer John Leach, when she was eight – to mark “a shift into Christmases being really positive. Then my little [half] sister came along too. That’s when things became really warm and twinkly.”
Ellis-Bextor began her pop career in indie band Theaudience, recording songs with titles such as A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed. Readers of Melody Maker magazine voted her the Sexiest Person in Rock. It was all a bit of a whirlwind.
“I had a record deal at 18 and lost it at 20,” she says. After she returned as a solo artist in 2000, she was determined to do things her way, notably by singing in her own, slightly posh English accent, a rarity in the crowded field of dance-pop.
“Singing as I speak felt like the only way to do it,” she tells me.
“I don’t want to be one of those singers who’s singing about being really sad with a massive grin on my face. Changing my accent would make the emotion feel a little bit showbiz.”
Her crisp, slightly old-fashioned RP tones make her the perfect fit to sing the theme tune for Mog’s Christmas, Channel 4’s new animation of Judith Kerr’s classic picture book. It’s made by the same team as the adaptation of Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea which became Channel 4’s third highest-rating programme of 2019.
Ellis-Bextor is looking forward to snuggling up with her three younger sons (Mickey, four, Jesse, eight, and Ray, 11) to watch it on Christmas Eve. Her husband cooks a mean Christmas dinner – “he nails the roast potatoes” – and is “also really good at picking presents”; she has worse form when buying gifts for him.
“For our first Christmas together – when we hadn’t been dating that long but I was already pregnant – I panicked and got him an inflatable room.” She drops her face into her hands. “What was I thinking? I don’t think we ever even fully inflated it. We tried once. It took ages. We got bored. We gave up. It sat in my mum’s shed for a while and then got moved on.”
I imagine Ellis-Bextor and Jones have quite a musical Christmas but she scoffs at the thought. “We’re not a sing-along-around-the-piano kind of family,” she says. “We’ll have a playlist instead.”
Mog’s Christmas is on Channel 4 at 7.45pm on Christmas Eve
