Sophie's Choice

Yes, she’s got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin, but she looks more like Audrey Hepburn than Eva Marie Saint. Not that Sophie Ellis Bextor ever needed a Pygmalion makeover in order to perfect her elocution. That came with the birth cert. And she never could stand bad grammar.

Perched on the windowsill of a hotel room in the middle of Dublin, Sophie looks like she walked right out of Blonde On Blonde, an English Edie, the society girl target of one of Bob’s broadsides. Except I can’t imagine her taking any lip from anybody, even Dylan.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the records though. Sophie Ellis Bextor is a smart girl who has hits with mostly dumb pop songs. In fact, you get the feeling she could walk away from this starlet racket at any time and not miss it too much – or maybe she’s just playing me that way. But look at the demure way she aproaches the pop monopoly, the I’m-here-but-I-know-I-don’t-fit manner in which she appears alongside all the other performing monkeys at gigs like the Childline benefit.

This is a girl in the wrong line of work. She should be partnered with Mariella Frostrup or Sarah Dunant on some late night BBC arts show, shooting the breeze with Martin Amis. She should be picking up Isabelle Adjani’s spare parts in ponderous French or Polish meaning-of-life arthouse movies.

She should, except that would be a waste of a rather comely singing voice, a voice that can almost (but not quite) animate the crummiest pop dreck. When Sophie’s got a good tune to work with – the most notable example being Spiller’s massive 2000 hit ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)’ – she does a fine line in the kind of dance-pop last in vogue when the IRS found the books cooking in the kitchens at Studio 54. The rest of the time she strays on the wrong side of the Euro-disco line. And alas, her Read My Lips album is mostly a testimony to squandered talent.

Case in point – the last single ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’, in which the artist badly fit the repertoire, a well-spoken London girl attempting hard-boiled disco inferno dialogue. But when I bring up the subject of her cultured tones, the long ‘a’ (as in “dawnce”) jarring with boogie nights vernacular like “gonna burn this gawdamn house right down”, Sophie says this:

“I just think it’s just a London accent. A lot of people think that if they sound American they sound like a proper singer. For me, the most affecting vocals are when it sounds like it’s coming straight from them, not through any process up here (taps head), very straight delivery, totally engrossed in the singing. So I wouldn’t change pronunciation just ’cos I’m singing, as if I’m delivering a speech or something.”

I agree in principle, but still doubt the songs. Still, if Anastacia is this year’s Tina Turner, then Ms Bextor is more Françoise Hardy – understated, never trying too hard.

It makes total sense that she never really considered singing as a career until she actually found herself handing a demo to a guy in a club, in classic Andrew Oldham-meets-Marianne Faithful tradition. The guy in question was DJ Billy Reeves, a songwriter in the process of forming a band called ‘theaudience’. Next thing you know, Sophie’s an indie darling.

theaudience signed to Mercury, had three minor hits and then split. The label had spent a million quid on them and made back roughly a fifth of its investment – the price of an education.

“I quite enjoyed the indie scene,” Sophie says, “my first music love came from My Generation, all the Britpop stuff, it was a really exciting movement. But then I found a lot of the indie world quite snide and cliquey and some of the writing in the Melody Maker and NME was like the worst sides of the English character, that not wanting anybody to succeed that much.”

After theaudience split, Sophie, who’d also done some guest work with the Manic Street Preachers (“I think you’re the first person to ask me about that in about three years”), kicked her heels awhile and started thinking maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to turn down that place at London’s Queen Mary College after all.

Salvation came in the form of Italian DJ Spiller, whose manager sent her a copy of ‘Groovejet’, already a club hit in instrumental form. You know the rest – Sophie co-wrote a vocal melody for the song and it became the fastest selling single of that year, scoring her a new deal with Polydor in the process. Did she suffer any indie traitor rubbish when she re-emerged as a dance artist?

“Not as much of it as I thought there would be,” she says. “The good thing about ‘Groovejet’ is that, at its core, it’s kind of from the right place. When I first did the song some people said to me, ‘You know, you might get a real backlash from fans of your band,’ so I was braced for it, but it didn’t ever seem to happen.”

Probably because the verse melody alone in ‘Groovejet’ easily eclipsed her entire oeuvre so far, not to mention its tastefully retro groove and Chic-like rhythm guitar – a flashback to the impeccable songcraft of late ’70s Philly-disco.

“I think dance music has come full circle,” she reckons. “Early dance/disco was about the song and then they put the beats on top, and then it all became about the beats and the song element went further into the background, and now it’s come back full force. I suppose where pop and dance meet is songs like ‘Groovejet’, where you’ve got a melody and a singer and things you can identify with – and also beats you can groove to. I mean, I’m not really a clubber, I haven’t done that big rave thing, so I would always need something to sing along to.”

And sing she could, crowning ‘Groovejet’ with a gorgeously warm and restrained vocal, the polar opposite of house diva histrionics.

“I’m really lucky,” she says, “’cos I think I’m one of these singers defined by my limitations as much as by what I can do. I don’t really sound very good if I’m really pushing my vocal, and I think because I’ve experienced both sides of how music can work as a job, I’m not really desperate for it anymore – not that I ever was. Maybe people like that about the vocal: it’s not really desperate, pulling your hair out.

“It’s a fine line,” she continues, “because my job is doing what I love, but I think you have to feel in your core that you’re self-sufficient, especially as a young woman. I just felt like all the power was taken away from me when I was at Mercury, dangling it in front of me like a carrot, like, ‘You’ll do anything, won’t you?’ But I really didn’t feel like it was worth it at any cost.”

Which is precisely why a lot of people figure Ms Ellis Bextor as some kind of stuck up ice queen, when in fact she just seems comfortable and self-assured. But then the inkies – or what’s left of them – always preferred their pop stars to be starving proles who fought their way off the waterfront, maybe because much of the British pop press is still riddled with middle-class guilt.

It hardly helped that Read My Lips saw her working with a whole string of top-shelf producer/collaborators like ex-New Radical Gregg Alexander, Blur’s Alex James, Madonna producer Damien LeGassick, and of course, Moby.

“I didn’t really find that too much of a big deal actually,” she says of the latter. “I went to New York and he really made it quite easy for me, there was a tape waiting for me at the hotel with ten instrumentals on it, and luckily it was in February, it was snowing, and ’cos I didn’t really have anyone with me I did two or three tracks on the first night, doodling around in my hotel room. And then for a couple of days I’d go to his place in the evening and it was very, very easy.

“He hasn’t really got this big ego thing, so it wasn’t like I had to go through lots of assistants. It wasn’t like he was really precious, thank God, ’cos that can really ruin a relationship, when I get too hung up. He’s definitely got quite a punk sensibility, lots of opinions.

“I’m not sure what I actually think of them, but I really like the way he’s thought it all through, I find that really interesting.”

Some more things you should know about Sophie Ellis Bextor. She has the kind of lived-in speaking voice you’d expect from Bette Davis or Jeanne Moreau. She sometimes uses the general ‘you’ when she means the particular ‘me’. She can tie a knot in a cherry stalk with her tongue, just like Audrey from Twin Peaks. At five foot nine she’s much taller than you’d think. And she’s one of those people who is model-photogenic but could almost pass for plain in person – if it wasn’t for the near-oriental bone structure.

Sophie’s was a showbiz family – with a small ‘s’. Her mother Janet Ellis was a Blue Peter presenter in the late ’70s, her father a TV producer, but they split when she was four years old. I ask if she thinks that separation had any bearing on her chosen profession, wanting to be adored for a living, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “Maybe for a little while, but I’ve really surprised myself by the way I now view what I do. My perspective has totally shifted. I think I had a time in my life when I was quite unresolved with family things and stuff, but so much of it has completely come to rights, that kind of thing has gone away.

“If anything, I think the fact that my parents worked in television made me realise that doing a job like this is on a level pegging with any other job. When I was younger I thought if I was ever (going to be) a singer or actress I’d be going out to parties and that side of things, more a ‘love-me’ kind of thing, and I’m really not like that.

“I’m still not sure what I think of all the fame side. I love it when people say they like what I’m up to, buying the album or whatever, but the other side of it… I’m not sure what my relationship is with the audience, when I’m singing to them.”

A candid admission, particularly when much of Sophie’s audience are probably not sure what their relationship is to her, a practical cat who switched from indie-cindy to dance-pop without too much agonising. Although, after her band split up and she did a brief stint as a model, there was a period when she suffered panic attacks and weight loss. What was the source of her anxiety?

“Actually it was before I was modelling,” she corrects me, “it’s when I was in the last year of my deal, I was just totally freaked out by how flabby the project had become. It was just that, at that time in my life I wasn’t happy ’cos I’d had the rug pulled from underneath, my record company had completely… I suppose up until that point I’d always really relied on all the people I’d met, maybe a little bit too much. I thought that all these bods at the record company, a good deal older and supposedly wiser, were going to help take responsibility a bit for what had happened and it was the first time I’d noticed that there were these grown men acting like kids, not returning calls, making decisions that didn’t have any thought in it, just to be seen to be busy.

“It really threw me, ’cos I’d always been a bit of a coaster in life I suppose. I’d never really, really pushed myself, just ’cos I’d always been a bit scared of what happens if you really lay yourself on the line. I guess that’s when I realised that was exactly what I had to do. So yeah, I just felt really out of control, which was when I started getting panic attacks.”

Did the modelling help, or was it just something to do?

“It was something to do, and in that respect it totally helped. It was all it was ever going to be. I had a tiny profile from the band so I didn’t really want to go work in a pub or something, and I thought modelling was quite a cool way to sidestep it, like in a similar sort of industry, something that I fitted.

“But I was really wrong. I didn’t really understand what modelling was like; it was really crummy. I’d done umpteen more shoots with theaudience than I ever did as a model. I didn’t realise it but you don’t really become a full time working model until you’ve been at it about two years. The first six months to a year, you’re just getting your face seen, so I hardly did any shoots really.”

Is it true that at this time she also “doodled” around with a novel?

“Yeah, I did about three chapters, a semi-autobiographical thing about a young girl just when she’s leaving school. I found it quite a weird time when me and all my friends were 18 through to 21, where we felt like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to know what we’re doing’ and suddenly all of us felt a bit freaked out by how many options we had and that kind of thing.

“All of it, the modelling, the novel, all of that stuff was just a way of trying to get my head back into discipline, ’cos I’d let it go really crummy with the last bit of the band. I was living like a student with no lectures, getting up really late and watching daytime telly. But then, (a) the money started running out, and (b) I realised that wasn’t me at all.

“I was actually far more work orientated than I thought. So that’s why I started getting a structure together, modelling was part of that nine to five thing, and in the evening I was auditioning band members and getting another band together, before I met Spiller.”

A year or so later and she’s duking it out with Posh Spice for the number one slot, with her image squeezed between David Beckham and Geri Halliwell in the magazine rack hall of mirrors. Something of a head trip, no?

“I suppose I just find it quite… basically if I had that much money in my bank I swear I’d make music that was so weird and self indulgent that probably about three people would buy it. I wouldn’t have to do that sort of thing anymore. Not that you’re doing it for the money exactly, but I’d feel really liberated, like, ‘If I’m totally unshackled, where do I want to go?’ It’s funny where they release similar sort of songs, chasing after the same thing, I don’t really understand that.”

But can she understand how people get hooked on seeing their own image in magazines as proof of their own existence?

“No, because I often feel a bit queasy, if

I’ve bumped into myself too much. It’s like a

relationship: if I’m going to be working as a

singer for the next ten years, then I don’t need to worry about people knowing everything about me immediately ’cos I want some things to be saved back. And if in two years or 18 months I’m not working as a singer, I don’t want everyone to have known about me, because then they’ll think, ‘Aw, she showed us everything and I still don’t like her’.

“It’s something my mum would teach me. What was it she used to say? ‘Don’t let your boyfriend see you brush your teeth for the first year,’ or something. And I know exactly what she means and that’s what I feel. I’m still getting to know everything about it and people are still getting to know me. Why rush it? This is the best bit.”