If you are one of the 8.7 million people who follow the singer Ellie Goulding on Instagram, you’ll know that she is just back from a trip to northern Norway, sledging with huskies. It was, apparently, a last-minute break, taken with two friends.
‘I just wanted to get away for a few days, as it’s been a crazy year,’ she says. ‘We drove about five hours from Oslo up to the mountains, and once I got there I knew it was going to be good for me.’ We first met in August, before the release of the 29-year-old’s third album, Delirium, after a three-year hiatus.
It would turn out to be the calm before the storm. She was nervous about unleashing the album, with its big ‘pop’ sound (‘This is in some ways an experiment,’ she said at the time). Since then it has sold two million worldwide, she has been nominated for a Grammy for best pop solo performance and she has had a hectic schedule of single launches before Christmas.
It all proved too much. ‘I was in Miami [in December] and I was so tired that I couldn’t appreciate being there at all. I was exhausted,’ she tells me earlier this month when we speak again. ‘I found out about my Grammy nomination and I was just like, “Oh, great,” and I had to have a nap. When someone woke me up 10 minutes later I wanted to cry.’
Goulding also reportedly split from her boyfriend of two years, the pop star Dougie Poynter (she had excitedly talked to me in the summer about marriage and babies in the future; ‘I want to, I really do’). But although she tells me now, ‘It’s too boring’ to talk about her relationship status, they appear to be back together.
Two days ago she embarked on a world tour, which will see her performing most nights until the end of June. ‘It’s a lot of work, but I’m so grateful to be out there playing to the people who support me,’ she says. ‘The trip to Norway has really settled my mind and my body. I’m ready for this year now.’
Goulding has lived a Cinderella-style transformation. Having grown up in a council house in Lyonshall, Herefordshire, she found fame with a cover of Elton John’s Your Song in 2010 (the YouTube video has been viewed more than 56 million times).
She has sold more than 27 million singles worldwide, and has sung for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their wedding day and the Obamas. She is close friends with Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. But Goulding remains very aware of the life she left behind. She is surprisingly politically active for a pop star, using her Twitter feed to – among promotional tweets – attack council policies on homelessness.
Goulding was five when her father, Arthur, left the family. She initially saw him every other weekend, until finally losing touch with him when she was 19. Despite releasing the plaintive I Know You Care in 2012, a song that begged for a response from him, they are still not in contact.
Her mother, Tracey, was left to bring up Goulding, her older brother and two younger sisters alone, and when her mother did remarry, Goulding hated her new stepfather. ‘He wasn’t strict, he wasn’t drunk, he just wasn’t very intelligent,’ she has said in the past, adding that she thought her mother, who juggled bringing up her small children with working in a supermarket, stayed with him for 15 years because he helped raise the family.
As a little girl Goulding was acutely aware that her family were ‘poor’. She recalls worrying about whether they had enough money for the electricity meter; and they lived off handouts from her grandmother.
She remembers once when bailiffs came to take away the television. ‘I understood that I had a lot of friends who didn’t live in the same situation as me and I knew my only way out of this was through education,’ she says. ‘I worked really hard in school. Really hard. I don’t think I was intelligent but I feel like I worked so hard I kind of made myself.’
Part of ‘making herself’ included deliberately losing her Hereford twang, aged 12, by listening to the BBC newsreader Nicholas Witchell and copying his accent. ‘I regret that now,’ she says, ‘but it’s too late to go back.’
Knowing that her father played the guitar, Goulding took it up and taught herself aged 14 ‘to be like him’. She had clarinet lessons at school (‘I qualified for free lessons, which I’m really grateful for’) and sang and played in a local folk band. Her mother, who is a big music fan, gave her an education in 1990s pop music such as the Prodigy and the Future Sound of London, while her uncle introduced her to artists like Alison Krauss and Fleetwood Mac.
After excelling at school – she attended Lady Hawkins’ School in Kington and then Hereford Sixth Form College, both state schools – she was the first person in her family to go to university. While she was at Kent, studying theatre, she got a book deal for a collection of poems, but continued with her folk music. In a real-life X Factor moment she won a university talent contest singing cover songs, and a representative from a music management company, Jamie Lillywhite, happened to be in the audience.
There, she recorded her debut album Lights – comprising electro-pop songs about leaving home – working with the producer Starsmith. Before it was even released, she was tipped as the BBC’s Sound of 2010 in January and won the Critics’ Choice award at the Brits in February (then later best female solo artist at the Brits in 2014).
Lights showcased her impressive vocals, mixed with acoustic and synthesized instruments. It went on to reach number one in the charts, after it was released in February 2010, selling 850,000 copies. ‘I didn’t know when I was writing it that it would be something people would even hear, so to sell that many was overwhelming,’ she says.
But it was not until her sweet, soulful rendition of Your Song for the John Lewis Christmas commercial in 2010 that ‘people suddenly started saying, “Who is this person?’’ ’ Goulding tells me.
Then Prince William and Catherine Middleton saw her at a festival in Wales, and asked her to perform for them on their wedding day in 2011, where she reportedly sang Your Song for their first dance. Her second album, Halcyon, an electro-folk record about her break-up with the Radio 1 DJ Greg James, was released in October 2012.
It debuted at number two in the UK charts, but when she re-released the album in August 2013 as Halcyon Days it spent three weeks at number one. ‘It took a bit of work to get it there,’ she says. ‘It was a slow burn.’ It took a while to crack America too: Lights started to gain traction there in 2011, the year after it was released.
‘I sometimes feel I write music for the future,’ she says now. ‘It doesn’t always take off when I first release it.’ But as her fame started to grow, Goulding struggled to deal with it. The panic attacks she had suffered from since becoming a singer began to get more severe. One left her in A&E. ‘I was having these huge heart palpitations and it was really scary,’ she says.
She had started running when she was 18 to help her cope with anxiety – but exercise was only making it worse. ‘Because my heart rate was up my brain thought I was having another panic attack. It sounds dramatic but I ended up wearing a heart-rate monitor so that I could reassure myself.’
By 2013, she says, both the crippling self-doubt and the panic attacks were under control, (‘I’m fine now, I’ve got a good support network’). In addition she radically changed her diet after a friend made her watch the 2005 documentary Earthlings about animal suffering at factory farms and in laboratories.
She first became vegetarian, then vegan, and says it was a life-changing decision. ‘I like the lifestyle; I feel good about it. And when I look back at photographs of myself, I see that it’s really had an effect on my body.’
Now she’s a slender but strong-looking size 8. She works out six times a week, often running for one hour to the notoriously tough Barry’s Bootcamp class in Euston, London, and says she likes boxing and doing weights to stay strong.
‘I’ve always been a tomboy; I’ve never wanted to rely on anyone else to protect me, perhaps because I didn’t have a dad growing up.’ She regularly poses in her Instagram pictures with her biceps flexed, showing off her muscles. ‘I’m not a naturally skinny person, but I hope that I inspire other women to get strong. It makes you feel powerful.’
Her image has had an overhaul, from folk singer to pop princess. Gone are the floaty dresses and the hippy undercut with green tinged ends. Now she takes to the stage wearing crop tops and hot pants, her hair platinum-blonde.
‘It wasn’t necessarily intentional – it just happened,’ she says of her changing fashion sense. ‘The happier I felt about myself, the more confident I became in fashion choices and in my make-up and hair. I was quite insecure when I was first thrust into the spotlight, but after a while you stop giving a crap about what other people think.’
Along with her physical metamorphosis, her music has had a makeover. The new album has been created by the LA mega producers Max Martin and Greg Kurstin, who between them have worked with stars including Beyoncé, Taylor, Kylie and Britney.
Delirium is, as Goulding describes it, ‘a big pop album, almost like a rave’. The next single to be released is Army, a rousing call to arms about her best friend and personal assistant, Hannah Lowe.
‘It’s a realistic take on a friendship,’ Goulding says. ‘People see my life on Instagram and it looks perfect, but of course it’s not. And your best friend sees that. We all know that a friendship is about ups and downs, but friends like her, who have been there for me through more than one relationship, are important. I know she will be there for me forever.’
Army will be released on February 5
Source: The Telegraph