‘Success is harder for me to navigate than failure’

Pop was a bit of a dirty word,” Sophie Ellis-Bextor remembers, of her first flush of real fame. “Every pop video seemed to be filled with blonde, tanned models, who had a group of other models who were their friends, or cute, smiling guys. And I just thought... no, I’m gonna be this absolute cow.”

Across many of her early releases in the Noughties — like the beachfront chill-pop smash “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”, or the chugging stalker bop “Catch You” — Ellis-Bextor embodied a sullen, blue-chip glamazon with cheekbones visible from space. Her videos saw her stalk and pose and terrorise. One moment she was a mannequin run amok, the next she was speeding maniacally down a Venice canal, like Don’t Look Now but chic. And while she didn’t explicitly murder her rivals on the dancefloor, she at least made them trip, fall and throw up in the bathroom.

“Playing the baddie was like a protective layer for me,” she says. “I thought, OK, if I present myself in this way and my career is over within five years, I can go away knowing that I didn’t really reveal anything about myself. It would have been so hard to deal with if I showed everything straight away and got rejected. But if I was lucky enough to have a long career, I knew I could then reveal more as the years went on.”

During the pandemic, Ellis-Bextor began inviting her Instagram followers into her home via her Kitchen Disco videos, livestreamed performances that reshaped her image into something a little warmer, a little more maternal. But nicey-nicey isn’t really Ellis-Bextor’s forte, either. We meet at a coffee stall cum garden centre in Chiswick, the aluminum furniture still damp from the September rain. Ellis-Bextor, looking immaculate in a floral blouse and autumnal jacket, is funny and accommodating — hot drinks are on tap, as are apologies every time a dollop of moisture lands on my notepad — yet there’s also a brisk assertiveness to her; a laser-focused pop star cool more Neil Tennant than Kylie. She speaks like someone who’s been at this a while, knows every trick in the book, and won’t suffer fools.

“If you’re not having fun writing a song, just put your pen down and leave the room,” she says, with force. “I’ve been to songwriting camps with all of these writers trying to crack the code of a perfect pop song and make a hit record, and it never works. I find it confusing and cynical and sad, and I’ve got no time for it.” I’d rather have had two weeks with a successful ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ than three months of success with a version of the track that I didn’t understand. I’m its mum! The best Sophie Ellis-Bextor tracks have always had a bit of poison in them — cameos by thrashing guitars or fire-alarm noises, or a crack in her vocals that screams real devastation. Is it any surprise that it was the 2023 film Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s flashing neon sign of cartoon sociopathy, that sent “Murder on the Dancefloor” surging back up the charts 22 years after she initially released it? And now, after three detours into spooky balladry and magical-realist art-pop — spanning her 2014, 2016 and 2023 albums Wanderlust, Familia and Hana - she has returned to the disco space with Perimenopop, a record that burns with kitsch and camp and icy menace.

The title stemmed from an early conversation about the record with the songwriter Hannah Robinson, who’s worked with Ellis-Bextor on various tracks over the years, including the glittering “Me and My Imagination”. Ellis-Bextor wanted to talk about her age — she turned 46 in April — and celebrate the fact that she’s been working in music for as long as she has. “Hannah just joked, ‘Oh, so it’s like perimenopop’, and we thought it was hilarious.” There were other album titles mooted along the way. For a while it was going to be called The Invisible Line, which she imagined as reflecting the connection between all the different chapters in her life. “But it was a bit dry, and I felt like I’d have to explain it constantly.” She started googling different slang words for “middle-aged woman”. “There was ‘biddy’, ‘spinster’, ‘Sheila’,” she recalls, while admitting that part of her would have loved to have called the record Sheila. But eventually, she realised it had to be called Perimenopop.

“The fact I’m in my mid-forties is so inherent to what this album is,” she says. “I just thought ‘sod it — let’s literally put it front and centre.’ And I quite like the fact that it’s not a very sexy or ‘pop’ thing to do, and that it’s given me complete permission to be exactly who I am right now.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “The only drawback to it is that I genuinely keep being asked about my menopause journey.” She cackles. “Like I’m not looking to get medical here...” Ellis-Bextor is quick to explain that she’d been preparing a return to dance-pop long before Saltburn. “From the outside looking in, I know it looks like... ‘OK! Disco-pop train, where’s the next stop?’ But I was actually already making this record. I’m not very good at reacting to external factors. I can only do what my heart wants.” She gets antsy when she sticks in one lane for too long, which is why she evolved out of dance-pop in the first place.