Sophie Ellis-Bextor has pretty much seen it all when it comes to the music business. Now, with her bombastic new album Perimenopop, she’s about to deliver a salient lesson to the industry, namely, that age is no barrier to great pop music. “Nobody cares how old you are,” she tells Music Week, as we meet the singer, alongside new label Decca and her manager Derek MacKillop of Wallace Productions, to unravel a story of survival, success and, of course, the small matter of that gamechanging Saltburn sync…
WORDS: ANNA FIELDING
PHOTOS: BEKKY CALVER
It is a Saturday morning in July and Sophie Ellis-Bextor is halfway through what she describes as a fairly typical working weekend for the summer months. She and her band have already played at the Galway International Arts Festival and performed a private gig at a wedding. Now, the tourbus is heading to Newbury, to play at the racecourse, which will be swiftly followed by Splendour Festival in Nottingham. A new tour, taking in the UK and Europe, will kick off this autumn.
“It’s the nature of the beast,” says Ellis-Bextor, who has just stepped off the ferry from Ireland to chat to Music Week. “I’ve got a holiday coming up and by the time that happens, I’ll have worked for the previous 12 weekends. Also, it gets more fun in the later summer [months] because our kids have broken up from school and they can come with us.”
The past two years have been extremely busy for Ellis-Bextor. She has headlined her own European and North American tours, played with Take That, Nile Rodgers and more, and followed her own Glastonbury set in 2023 by joining DJ Peggy Gou at the festival for a surprise appearance the following year.
A big part of the reason why is the use of her 2001 hit Murder On The Dancefloor in Saltburn. Now on 2,054,450 UK sales, it returned to its previous peak of No.2 and was 2024’s biggest-selling single by a British female act. The surge of interest came amidst Ellis-Bextor’s tentative plans for an eighth studio album and a return to pop music, having dabbled in indie with her first band Theaudience and subsequently house, Latin, folk and more through her career.
Due on September 12 via new label Decca, Perimenopop is fun, catchy and danceable, all the things you want from a good bit of disco-inflected pop. Many of the track titles – Dolce Vita, Glamorous, Freedom Of The Night – allude to the glittering escapism that has always been a part of the genre. But it isn’t juvenile, it’s not just for the kids. Sophie Ellis-Bextor is 46 now.
“I wanted something in the title that would really reference the age I’m at, the chapter I’m in, because I think it’s deeply relevant,” she says. “It’s part of the story of my relationship with music. I made pop albums in my 20s and by the time I was getting to the end of my 20s I felt there was an element of borrowed time. It wasn’t coming from me, but it was in the way it was being handled, in some of the comments I was getting… It has been quite fun to come back to it and realise that nobody really cares what age you are and that you can work with pop or dance at whatever age you’re at.”
Derek MacKillop of Wallace Productions has been managing Ellis-Bextor for 20 years, and he believes that this return very much proves that “class is permanent”.
“You never know when something wonderful is going to happen but you’d better be ready to react and capitalise!” he adds.
The team at Decca are just as excited by the campaign.
“How many other British female artists have had pop hits across the same period of time as Sophie and would still be relevant today?” says co-president Laura Monks. “What Sophie has achieved is a major feat and should be celebrated. Her place in pop history is firmly cemented now and her next album celebrates that with some of her best music to date.”
Co-president Tom Lewis praises the singer’s team, led by MacKillop, and says Ellis-Bextor’s creative ambition “shines as bright as ever”.
“We love that she is sitting at the table with us all, sleeves rolled up, leading the discussions and open to all ideas,” he enthuses. “She has such a strong sense of her mission – that age is no barrier when it comes to loving great pop music. We are thrilled with the reception to her new material so the future feels very bright.”
Ellis-Bextor wants those who listen to the album to be clear about her intent.
“I didn’t want to be like, ‘Oh, well, you can do it at whatever age you are at and that’s OK as long as no one really talks about it, as long as you still look really young,’” she explains. “I want to put it front and centre that I am in my mid-40s and, actually, I am very comfortable with it. I like getting older and I want to bring people along for the ride.”
Sonically, the ride is a joyful one. Ellis-Bextor has pulled in what she calls “a dream wishlist” of collaborators, including producer and songwriter Jon Shave, known for his work with Charli XCX and Sugababes, James Greenwood (aka producer Ghost Culture), Nile Rodgers, and Ellis-Bextor’s long-term songwriting partner Ed Harcourt, with whom she made her previous three albums.
“I think Ed only has an element of disco in his life because of me,” she smiles. “And I’m quite proud of that.”
The recording sessions were mostly done in the studio at Ellis-Bextor’s house and were, she says, “full of lots of upbeat energy” with her children and cats wandering about and everyone staying for dinner. The atmosphere infuses the album, which, again, was about something a little more than just wanting to have fun for the sake of it.
“I’ve felt, and I know my peers have felt, that you get to a point where all the algorithms start shifting towards perimenopause and it can feel a bit gloomy, looking at these ideas of what lies ahead,” she says. “Music has always been such a happy thing for me and I wanted the album to have something a little deeper about what being at this point in my life can mean, hence the pop.”
Every generation believes that they can define what it is to be young, that their discoveries will be the ones to shape the world. It is less talked about, but also entirely possible, that each generation also wishes to define middle age as they see fit and to do so very differently to their parents and grandparents.
“There’s certainly an element of wanting to do it our own way,” says Ellis-Bextor. “But at the same time I also want to be aware that I’m not really reinventing anything because there are so many amazing women who have gone ahead of me from all walks of life. That gives me confidence. But the other side of it is that I don’t feel emboldened in my own self a lot of the time. When I’m writing music it’s often like a diary entry, a private conversation with myself. I didn’t realise how I was feeling [about getting older] until I thought, ‘No, I’m going to go for this title.’ It gave me permission to be my own version of someone this age.”
Even outside of Ellis-Bextor’s personal experience, Perimenopop is a timely title. Perimenopause is, forgive the pun, so hot right now, as is its older sister, menopause. Celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama have spoken openly about their experiences of hormonal change, while workplaces are developing policies that cover the health of midlife female staff. Companies selling everything from beauty products to medtech have realised there is much to gain by focusing on this life stage.
Perimenopop is in no way cynical, but the album title’s celebration of a previously hush-hush topic shows Ellis-Bextor’s ability to catch the zeitgeist. She had been part of Theaudience from the age of 16 and the band were signed when Ellis-Bextor was 18 in 1997, splitting up two years later as interest in Britpop dwindled.
“I feel it was quite defining, now,” she says of the period which culminated in the band being dropped by Mercury. “It was a baptism of fire and I was a teenage girl.”
Retrospectively, she says, it obviously wasn’t a long period of time but there was a lot condensed into it.
“It probably made me work harder when I did have opportunities, because you know what it feels like when you don’t,” she says, noting that it probably made her a better person. “I often say I would have been pretty hideous if everything had been a bit too easy.”
But by 2000, she had pivoted (“although it was somewhat accidental”), adding her vocals to a track by the Italian house producer Spiller. The resulting track, Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), went to No.1 in multiple countries including the UK, where Ellis-Bextor was pitched against Victoria Beckham’s first post-Spice Girls single in a confected chart battle. Now standing on 836,050 sales to date, Groovejet… was also the first song ever to be played on an iPod, an Apple prototype from 2001.
Ellis-Bextor went on to spend the 2000s as a pop star, releasing three albums, two via Polydor and one on Fascination (her debut, Read My Lips, hit No.2 in 2001 and has 854,282 sales to date). The expected look for young, female pop stars was so homogeneous at the time that she “felt quite rebellious, just for having brown hair and not being blonde.” But by the time she hit her 30s, she was ready for change again.
“My first solo album had done ever so well, but by the time I’d got to my third and fourth, things were getting harder,” she posits. “In a way I was fortunate because my music had started to take off in other countries in Europe and I’m a simple creature, really. As long as I have things in the diary I can put my energy there and put one foot in front of the other. But I realised I was perhaps getting a bit too comfortable, turning up to gigs and singing these songs that I’d been playing for ages. I needed to get out of that comfort zone: 34 is too young to get comfortable.”
The result was a self-funded folk album, 2014’s Wanderlust, written with Ed Harcourt and released on her own EBGB’s label. This change of tack generally pleased critics and, for Ellis-Bextor, meant a shift in how she worked.
“The success that album had still means the most to me of pretty much anything I’ve ever done,” she says. “I kind of started again in many ways, doing the grassroots venues and standing at the back signing bus tickets and things, just to show how grateful I was that people were still interested in what I was up to. It was really significant and really, really quite healthy. And I look back on it as a really, really gorgeous time, too.”
The house Sophie Ellis-Bextor lives in with her husband, The Feeling bassist Richard Jones, can often be seen on her social media, a cheerful eruption of bright walls and cushions, children’s toys, feathers, sequins and the occasional cat.
The house, plus Jones and their five children, were also part of another point where Ellis-Bextor almost inadvertently captured the mood of the time with her Covid lockdown Kitchen Discos. The combination of upbeat karaoke and a glimpse of a happily chaotic home was a balm to many and a community of fans formed around the weekly events. Two Kitchen Disco-themed albums followed, one greatest hits and one live (released via Cooking Vinyl, who also put out 2023 solo LP Hana) and a BBC Radio 2 show of “two hours of feel-good music”. There was a cookbook, a memoir of sorts called Spinning Plates, and a hit podcast of the same name where Ellis-Bextor spoke to other working mothers.
In the midst of all this, Ellis-Bextor had been thinking about the album that would become Perimenopop, putting out feelers for collaborators and starting talks with Decca (“for my third romance with Universal”). But no one, certainly not the singer herself, could have predicted what was to happen next.
“It can be a little dry when you get an email about someone wanting to use your song; there’s a little bit of description and synopsis but not that much,” she offers. “But I was a little bit excited [about Saltburn] because I saw the director was Emerald Fennell and I’d really enjoyed her first film, Promising Young Woman.”
Fennell’s second film was Saltburn and Murder On The Dancefloor was the final song, soundtracking a dark, triumphant moment as Barry Keoghan’s Oliver danced naked through a stately home. The effect was like rocket fuel.
“Universal organised a screening of the film in October 2023 and it was apparent to everyone in that room when we watched the closing scene that this was an extraordinary opportunity,” says Derek MacKillop. “When the streaming numbers started to surge, everything was in place with UMG and Polydor. Everyone involved deserves great credit as we were saying, ‘Please let’s not miss this opportunity.’ And as we know, they got it completely right.”
The track now has more than 760 million streams on Spotify, far and away the singer’s biggest song on the platform.
“Everything connected,” MacKillop continues. “At one point daily streaming exceeded four million and the song became a global hit everywhere, including the USA. Our job was to work with UMG catalogue, international, Polydor and Casablanca, coordinating key radio and TV moments including Sophie’s BAFTA performance and her US TV debut on Jimmy Fallon. Conversations with Decca had also started and it was clear there was an appetite from them for a Sophie pop album. More importantly, she was ready to make it.”
“It’s quite hard, even now, to articulate what it’s like to be at the epicentre of something like that; it’s quite surreal,” Ellis-Bextor reflects. “When you first release a song, you’re there talking about it, promoting, singing, going on radio, whatever. But to have something go viral in that way means that you’re not doing anything. It’s just happening all by itself. It was all taking off over Christmas, and we were just at home in our pyjamas, or having a family over, or cooking with the leftover turkey. And meanwhile, there’s the song, just twirling its way around the globe.”
Those twirls eventually led to 13 billion global streams across all platforms, a chart revival and a slot on the perennially popular US TV staple Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
“The biggest shift was what happened in America, because I’d never been there before for work, never even done a radio interview there until last year,” says Ellis-Bextor. “But how surprising, how glorious is that? It’s so fun that something so unexpected can happen.”
The excitement of the viral hit fed into the album (“momentum is a happy bedfellow to creativity”), sparking extra fire into her conversations with Decca.
“I was really happy to continue because it was for all the right reasons,” she explains. “Sam Mumford [senior A&R manager, Decca] really understood what kind of album I was making. And in general they seem like a really lovely team.”
“As a label we have supported some of the world’s greatest and most unique voices,” says Laura Monks. “Sophie has always had such an iconic sound, when you hear any of her songs you know it’s her immediately. She is inimitable and that’s what we love.”
For Ellis-Bextor, the label having a female co-president was “a really appealing aspect” although she stresses that the overall team is the most important thing.
From Monks’ perspective, Perimenopop is part of a changing industry playbook.
“There’s certainly been an evolution and better understanding of how to work with female artists of all ages and there needs to be more,” she says. “As with all artists, it’s so hard to create longevity in a career, but Sophie’s tenacity and sheer passion for what she does just shine through.”
That tenacity has become a totem of the Perimenopop campaign.
“There are some incredibly creative moments including the music video for the first single Freedom Of The Night, which is a very clever throwback to the Murder On The Dancefloor video, filmed with the same director, Sophie Muller,” says Monks.
“In addition to new-audience building, the teams are working tirelessly to identify opportunities where we can meet Sophie’s existing core fans,” adds Derek MacKillop. “This has resulted in, for example, an activation on QVC’s digital and TV channels on the day of release.”
The team are working with Radio 2, where Freedom Of The Night has already been playlisted, and what MacKillop describes as “an ongoing digital campaign aimed at converting a newer, online audience into streamers and purchasers”.
Unsurprisingly, sync will also be playing a part.
“Our ongoing partnerships in the branding space, including syncs with singles Freedom Of The Night and Taste being used on two major campaigns across socials, TV, OOH and VOD, have created exciting new showcases for all that this album has to offer,” explains MacKillop.
For Sophie Ellis-Bextor, what the album offers is a blast of ageless joy. The idea that fun and glamour and dressing up and romance – the axis on which pop turns – are there to be accessed for anyone who needs them.
“I learned a cool thing the other day,” she says before we part ways. “In Greek – the language ‘perimeno’ derives from – ‘perimeno’ means ‘I’m expecting’. So in Greek, my album title is ‘I’m expecting pop’. So that’s what I’m doing… I’m expecting pop!”
