Tranquil reinvention
ELLIE Goulding has grown up the hard way, in public. Starting off, the Brit-winning singer was an archetypal ingenue — softly spoken, prim, a bit skittish. In other words, an unlikely pop star.
This remained so, even after her debut album, Lights, went to number one in the UK in 2010, and she was asked to sing at the wedding reception of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. Goulding looked like a deer stunned in the headlights. But clearly things have changed. On a crisp Cork morning, it is a very different Goulding who sweeps into town for a 12-hour visit in which she will play two Arthur’s Day gigs in one night.
Goulding’s hair hangs in trendy braids; her fashion sense has been upgraded from Marks & Spencer mumsy to catwalk goth. She no longer reminds you of a singing dormouse.
Musically, too, Goulding is shaking things up. On her new album, Halycon, she throws off the shackles in spectacular fashion. There are edgy beats, loud, buzzing guitars, and songs that jump up and down, demanding the listener’s attention. Sometimes, it is true, Goulding sings in that familiar, breathy coo. At other moments, she shrieks and yells, as though trying to jolt the listener out of their comfort zone.
What’s happened? At one level, it’s perfectly simple. She is older and wiser. “You have to be confident in this job, because you are placed in so many strange and demanding situations,” she says. “It is something you come to terms with. You learn.”
Her personal circumstances have altered considerably. In 2010, she was in a sensible relationship with a London television executive. They split 18 months ago and now she is dating the LA dance producer, Skrillex.
It has been suggested that hanging out with an edgy, electro star has influenced her writing. Goulding snorts at this. “He’s my boyfriend,” she says. “That whole theory is so silly. He’s not a … what’s the word? A muse. People have looked into that waaay too much. I mean … come on.” To Goulding’s mild distress, she and Skrillex (aka 24-year-old Sonny Moore) have, over recent months, entered the ranks of celebrity coupledom.
The UK tabloids have taken to chronicling every up and down in their relationship.
It is only a mild exaggeration to say they’ve become alternative pop’s answer to Posh and Becks, or Peter André and Jordan. People who know nothing about music recognise their names. “Celebrity couple … oh, don’t say that,” she says. “We’ve never tried to get attention. We don’t like to be photographed together, or anything like that. It’s not something either of us initiated.
“People have, for some reason, taken a big interest. It is one of those things that you shrug off and carry on. My focus is my album and performing, and becoming a great artist.”
Goulding is equally perplexed by the media obsession with her new hairstyle. The widely-held belief is that she lifted the look from her boyfriend. She laughs heartily at the suggestion. “That’s so funny,” she says. “People assume that you have to present yourself in a certain way to do a certain job. I’ve never been one of those artists who sees things like that. I just do what I want to do. Everyone is so fascinated by weird things like that. It is strange, because they focus on the wrong stuff sometimes.”
Goulding is a picture of self-assurance today. But she admits to having had to work hard at her confidence. In Jan 2010, as she was riding that first swell of hype, she suffered a protracted, public breakdown, a series of increasingly severe panic attacks culminating in a visit to an A&E ward.
Goulding had long struggled with self-belief, a result, she says, of a troubled childhood in Hereford. She was raised by a single mum on a council estate (her parents divorced when she was five).
Goulding was seized with terror all over again when asked to serenade Will and Kate at their nuptials. The hush-hush invite was dispatched several weeks before the ceremony. Goulding assumed she was a decoy, that Beyonce, or someone of her ilk, would be the real wedding singer. But, no, Kate was a huge fan and, to Goulding’s enduring disbelief, she found herself entertaining the world’s most famous couple.
“I’ve had to become confident,” she says. “If I wasn’t confident at this point, I’d worry quite a lot. I mean, there are times I still get shy and have stage fright. However, you have to have confidence to do this job. Because there are so many things you simply have to do, even if you don’t want to. You have to discuss things you don’t want to discuss. You need to develop a thick skin and get on with it. And that’s what I do.”
As if her life wasn’t busy enough, she’s just struck it big in America, a hurdle at which most British artists stumble.
A full two years after Lights came out, this summer the album suddenly caught fire in the US, re-entering the charts at number one. Back in the UK recording Halycon, Goulding found her US success surreal.
“I never was one of those artists hung up on breaking America,” she says. “I had a lovely fan-base, was playing really good shows. Maybe I was just blasé — I didn’t have this idea of, ‘oh, I have to crack America or everything is over’.
“And then, Lights took off and it went to another level. It was weird. Because my music was very visible there and I was in London working on my record, I kept having to take breaks to go back.
“They were saying ‘you’re everywhere, but we can’t see you — you need to get out here’. So that was a strange experience.”
* Halycon is released Friday.
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