Sophie Ellis-Bextor has been in the changing rooms of pop more than most. One of the genre’s great shape shifters, she morphed from sharp suited indie princess in theaudience to Ibiza invigorator with Groovejet before becoming a fully fledged dancefloor divinity on her first solo album ‘Read My Lips’ and, in a nod to her roots in Britpop, the sophisticated songwriterly siren with ‘Shoot From The Hip’.
After the arrival of baby boy, Sonny in 2004, [with husband Richard Jones, bassist with The Feeling] Sophie went back to the recording studio to work on her third solo album, a process with a deliberately long labour, writing at least 70 – 80 songs, and working with a number of top pop collaborators like Hannah Robinson and Fred Schneider of the B 52s. “It’s definitely the longest time I’ve spent preparing any of my music and I realised that everything else I’ve ever done in my career was reacting to circumstance whereas this was an opportunity to take my time and be objective. Luxurious!”
It was certainly circumstance that led to Sophie turning her hand to music. After meeting musician Billy Reeves at a Britpop disco and forming theaudience, discovering herself as a sharp suited female voice in an indie boy dominated arena. After the band split in 1998, she re-emerged as, at the time, the unlikely voice of Ibiza 2000, lending her vocal skills to DJ Spiller’s Groovejet’s (If this Ain't Love?), which went to No.1 across the world.
‘Read My Lips’, Sophie’s solo debut followed in 2001 with its eye firmly fixed on the dancefloor and its songs on the charts as ‘Take Me Home’, ‘Murder On the Dancefloor’ and the album all reached No.2. The album went on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide. 2003’s ‘Shoot From The Hip’ saw a shift away from the glitterball, the word “disco” banned from the recording sessions with Britpop heroes Alex James and Bernard Butler. Sophie marked her public return this year by becoming the face of high street chain Monsoon.
But enough with history! To now, and ‘Trip The Light Fantastic’ which Sophie, 6ft in heels and still fond of a nice frock for the occasion, says picks up where her debut album left off because she was in a similar mindset of not knowing what would happen. “I just did it for myself. I kind of feel that as I’ve got a life outside of my work, now that I’m married and I'm a mother, I am not so dependant on my career to make me happy but at the same time your work takes on a new kind of focus because everything that takes you away from home has to count for more. I am more driven than before but I know who I am more too.”
‘Trip the Light Fantastic’ is, says Sophie, “an invitation to dance”. It’s this year’s best excuse for letting your hair down and kicking off the high heels or slipping into them, should you wish. Lead single ‘Catch You’, penned by Cathy Dennis, combines guitars, zingy keyboards and a hook that burrows into your brain and stays there in a three minute spin that washes out nu wave angular guitars with nagging pop melody.
There’s back references to her Ibiza days in the sun on ‘Me And My Imagination’, a winking disco trot powered by twirling violins and a dizzyingly house groove, which Sophie says is the track most easily reconciled with anything on ‘Read My Lips’. Elsewhere, it’s the sound of the House of Ellis-Bextor but with a series of modern twists. ‘New York City Lights’ sounds like Kraftwerk introduced to guitars, immersed in the other worldliness of Scandanavian pop from Abba to A-Ha. ‘ If You Go’ sees Xenomania push a sunny samba rhythm behind Sophie’s perfectly precise vocals. On this, as elsewhere on ‘Trip the Light Fantastic’, there is lots of chat about catching the sun before it’s gone.
Fans of the camper end of the Ellis-Bextor oeuvre – from ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’ to the inspired cover, ‘Yes Sir I Can Boogie’ - need not fear that domestic bliss has done away with coy Broadway theatrics and crisply choreographed dance routines. ‘The Only One’ is the first of two collaborations with The Feeling’s Dan Gillespie Sells on which Sophie promises “to turn those tears into wine” in a honky tonk shakedown with a super sexy saxophone solo. ‘If I Can’t Dance’ is not Sophie’s fight against the Criminal Justice Act but takes the feminist slogan “"If I can't dance, I don't want any part in your revolution" and channels it, tongue lodged firmly in cheek, into a great big slab of futuristic pop rave up that sounds perfectly at home in clubs with no name on Kingsland Road to wine bars in Kingston Upon Thames.
Which brings us back to the shape shifting nature of the Ellis-Bextor. “I never felt like a bona fide indie kid, into the whole festival thing and getting muddy,” says the lady herself. “And I never felt quite cool enough for the whole Ibiza scene. It’s not meant to sound snooty – I loved my time in each camp – it’s more the case that I never quite felt that I belonged anywhere. Then again, show me a pop star who does feel like they fit in.”
‘Trip The Light Fantastic’ sounds like Sophie Ellis-Bextor knows where she really belongs – dragging us unto the dancefloor and running amok in big frocks. “I love the cartoony, bigger than life side of what I do. Pop music should be about extremes and a day glow version of reality. Who wants the mundane? It’s boring. Bring on the sparkly stuff please.”
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