Sophie Ellis-Bextor swoops into the restaurant looking so Sophie Ellis-Bextor, so disco diva, that it almost makes me laugh. She is wearing a gold‑trimmed, blusher-pink, kaftan-style caped dress and has a wide smudge of neon-blue eyeshadow streaked across her eyelids. She could have freshly twirled off the dancefloor at Studio 54. It is a strong look for a late afternoon chat in a quiet hotel, but then I remember that she has been at a photoshoot all day, and assume she must still be wearing one of the outfits. “These are my own clothes,” she says, as if that should have been perfectly obvious.
To be fair, Ellis-Bextor is throwing a party later, so she has made an effort. She’s hosting a playback of her new album Perimenopop, which is also very disco, so much so that Chic’s Nile Rodgers is on one of the tracks. During the Covid lockdowns in 2020, the pop star hosted a weekly Kitchen Disco, broadcast live on Instagram from her family home, with her husband, the musician Richard Jones, and with occasional cameos from her five sons. People must think she’s pretty good at throwing a party. “Well, I am capable,” she says, drily. There will be a photo booth. Aptly, the bar already has a giant glitter ball hanging from the ceiling.
As a title, Perimenopop is both silly and defiant. It came from a joke in the studio between Ellis-Bextor and her friend Hannah Robinson, who co-writes some of her songs. “We’re a similar age,” she says, “and so we were jokingly saying: oh, it’s perimenopop. And we thought it was hilarious. It just didn’t leave my head.” It’s a showy, attention-grabbing name. “I think I’m in my sod-it era, really. What’s the point of tiptoeing around?”
She is 46 now. As she gets older, she is growing much more comfortable in her own skin. “Just shaking off a lot of the peripheral worries of stuff,” she says. She started planning her return to dance music in 2021, having been reminded by the lockdown Kitchen Discos just how much music and dancing can lift the spirits. “Music is often a cape that I will shroud myself in, to boost me up a bit,” she says. She wrote Perimenopop – wall-to-wall bangers, mostly about enjoying life – at home, in comfort, working in the daytime, eating dinner with her family at night. “I stretched myself out like a cat, letting the music lift me and letting it make me feel better.”
Perimenopop arrives at a time when perimenopause is slowly becoming part of the cultural landscape, from Bridget Christie’s underrated Channel 4 comedy The Change, to Miranda July’s literary juggernaut All Fours. “I do feel so grateful to all of the women who have made it more of a conversation,” she says. “I was working with someone the other day, just met her, and she was like, ‘Oh, I’m having a hot flush – perimenopause.’” Once, that was a conversation Ellis-Bextor thinks she might have had with her mum, but not with her friends. “Now, there’s much more transparency. Thank goodness. There’s just so much less mystery, and more help for people who need it.”
And what about her own experience of it? “It’s funny, because when I said to my mum about the album, she said: ‘You do realise in interviews that they’re going to ask you about it?’” She laughs. “I feel like I’m just on the cusp [of it], really. Maybe in the first room. I don’t know how many rooms there are! But it’s chats that my girlfriends and I have been having.”
Many of her friends are women she has known since they were at school together, and they are coming to the party tonight. In a lot of ways, Ellis-Bextor is overdue a celebration. She has been a household name since the turn of the century, when an early career as an indie singer collapsed and led her, inadvertently, to the housey pop of the song Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), which became an international hit. For years, alongside music, she has done the celebrity circuit, appearing on the likes of Strictly Come Dancing and The Masked Singer. She has a podcast, Spinning Plates, in which she interviews mothers who also work. When the BBC needed a New Year’s Eve host, as 2024 rolled into 2025, they got her to throw everyone a party. She has become the nation’s smart, fun big sister. But her music career has undergone a resurgence on a massive scale, too. It’s not that she ever stopped making records – Perimenopop is her eighth studio album – but in 2024 her other megahit, Murder on the Dancefloor, first released at the end of 2001, became one of the biggest pop songs in the world.
It had made a splashy appearance in the Emerald Fennell film Saltburn, soundtracking the now infamous scene in which Barry Keoghan’s character dances through a country house, nude as the day he was born. Ellis-Bextor saw Saltburn – and that scene – for the first time at a private screening in London, at 10am, with a lot of her family in tow: “My oldest boy, my mum, my brother, his then very new girlfriend, my husband.” A friend had warned her that it was “quite extreme. I’m like, come on,” she laughs. “But, yeah, it was!”
Ellis-Bextor and Jones were flown to LA to DJ at the premiere, and afterwards a couple of her friends told her that she was on the verge of becoming a thing. “One of those things where the song goes everywhere. And I was like: I really don’t think so. Let’s not lose our heads.” But by the end of 2024 it had been everywhere, becoming the biggest song of the year by a British female artist, 20 years after it first came out.
It’s hardly like you’re at retirement age, I say, but, still, was the song’s belated success surprising, given that pop is so often characterised as a young person’s game? She politely rebuffs me. “Part of what I loved about disco was that a lot of the vocalists were telling stories and singing songs from a point of experience. OK, they could be cautionary tales, they could be stories that were the other side of heartache, but they weren’t all anchored in youth culture.” Then there’s social media. Her oldest son is 21 and tells her that on TikTok nobody cares about the age of the person singing the song, or how old the song is, “if it means something true”.
In the heat of the Murder on the Dancefloor revival, last year was “quite a giddy time of my life”, but Ellis‑Bextor has been a professional musician since she was 16. “This year will be 30 years since my first gig,” she points out. “So the years are there, and I’m really into that. I like experience.” A few years ago, when she wrote her autobiography, also called Spinning Plates, she said that she was happier at 42 than she had ever been before. How is it now, at 46? “Same, same. That’s nice!” she laughs. “I’m very content with what I have in my life. It’s exciting when you have the twists in the road and new experiences. But I am also very aware of how good I have it.”
The main impression I got from the book, and one not dimmed by meeting her in person, is that Ellis-Bextor is one of life’s great optimists. “I am very optimistic,” she nods. “I am my mother’s daughter.” Her mother, Janet Ellis, was a Blue Peter presenter who turned to writing novels in her 60s. Ellis-Bextor had a short-lived sideline in selling Blue Peter badges to her classmates when she was at primary school. “Shh! Not so loud!” she jokes. “I haven’t got any with me, I’m afraid.”
She reconsiders the optimism question. “[I’m] a pragmatic optimist,” she says. “I’m happy to acknowledge and explore things that upset me or that hurt, but I’m quite good at framing things in a way that can make me feel good about stuff, ultimately.” Her music career, now spanning four decades, involves quite a lot of pragmatic optimism. I don’t want to say that she has been lucky – “There’s definitely been a lot of luck,” she interrupts, cheerfully – but there is a sense that a lot of things happened to her as if by chance. “Oh, 100%. Serendipity. But I suppose the trick is to be able to get the most out of these opportunities when they come your way.”
As a teenager growing up in west London, Ellis‑Bextor thought she wanted to act, but music was her real love. She bought the NME and Melody Maker every week, and was obsessed with Britpop. At 16, she started going to an indie night in London called Popscene, “living for the weekend”, as she puts it, in her Rimmel Black Cherries lipstick, a 1995 staple. One night, she met a journalist from Melody Maker who passed her a note with a phone number on it and told her that his mate was looking for a singer. She recorded a tape of herself singing Oasis covers and handed it over the next night.
That band was called Theaudience. For a brief moment, they were music press darlings. It must have given her whiplash to go from reading Melody Maker to being on the cover of it. “It was terrifying,” Ellis‑Bextor says now. “It was a baptism of fire, and I was a closet square, really. I felt like: oh my God, I’m not cool. I can’t keep up. I don’t fit in. And, of course, it turned out everybody was feeling a bit like that.” Theaudience had a moment, did OK, but they were signed to a major label, and OK wasn’t enough. They were dropped after their debut album, and the music press turned on them. “It is hard to avoid the suspicion that she is part of some sly television exposé on how to get ahead in the music industry,” read one of the more vicious gig reviews from that time.
“It’s hard, because you’re reading all the stuff about you that you’re worried is how people think about you, so …” She laughs. “As a teenage girl, it’s not ideal.” But, of course, she has found the positives. “The good news is: it definitely built up a kind of resilience!”
When Theaudience got dropped, she thought it was all over. “I was like, oh my God, I’ve already had the highest high already, and I’m not even 20. Now, for the rest of my life, I’m going to be this tragic person who’ll say: ‘I had a record deal once when I was 18.’” Why did she feel she could plough on, when others might have walked away? “I just didn’t have anything else I felt I could do,” she shrugs. Then serendipity intervened once again. She recorded a speculative vocal for a dance track that turned into Spiller’s Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), even though she kept saying that she didn’t like dance music. “I was just a proper indie kid!” she protests. Obviously, she loves it now. “I remember thinking: Melody Maker and NME won’t even know I’ve done this, and then they won’t be bruising me, because it’s a whole different world.”
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Groovejet was a massive international hit, at the exact moment she had stopped trying to be credible. “And then once I stopped trying, it was like, oh, I’m up and running.” She still works with a lot of the people she met at that time. “I’ve always been quite good at recognising good folk. But I think also, because I’d had the failure with the band, I was probably just a little bit less of a brat than I might have been.”
She met her husband when they were both 22. Jones was auditioning for her band (he would go on to form the Feeling), and when he joined her on the road they became firm friends. Both were in other relationships at the time, but after a while their mutual attraction was obvious. They celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in June. They had only been seeing each other for a few weeks when Ellis-Bextor discovered she was pregnant. Her first solo album had just come out and she had become a target for the tabloids. That whole time was “freaky”, she says, because when she was in Theaudience nobody ever really knew who she was. Then all of a sudden, after Groovejet, she would be recognised in the street. “And that was simultaneous with phone hacking, so I just thought that being known, in that era, meant that you didn’t have any ownership over information. It just was so normal to me.”
Before she had told her friends that she was pregnant, her press officer called her to ask if it was true, and to let her know that the papers were running the story the next day. At the time, she brushed off the tabloid intrusion. “I just thought that was what happened. But now I’m like, God, that is outrageous.” For a moment, she looks almost appalled. Their relationship was so new that they hadn’t yet said I love you. They didn’t move in with each other until two weeks before Sonny was born. But still, she finds a silver lining. “It’s OK. I was just starting out with Richard. I was falling in love with him. So there’s lots of reasons to be cheerful, but I do look back and think it’s pretty outrageous, really.”
She only learned that she had been a victim of phone hacking many years later, when the police got in touch to let her know. For a long time, she let it lie. “I thought, I don’t want to dredge up any negativity. I’m happy. I’ve got my young family. I don’t need to dwell on something.” But eventually she pursued, and received, a settlement from the Mirror Group. “I did actually want to be a tiny little thorn in their side, even if only for a split second. I was happy being a little, tiny, teeny pest, even if that’s all I’ve got.” She doesn’t remember the details, she adds, because she was having a baby at the time. “Who’s now 13, so it’s quite a while ago.”
She pauses. “I think it was that baby?” I laugh. “Sorry. I was definitely having a baby, and I’m pretty sure it was him.” After all, she has had five of them. She starts to giggle. “Sometimes I’ve got baby pictures and I don’t know which one it is! I don’t remember whose first word was what.” Her youngest is six; her eldest 21. I ask if that means she’s really good at it now, a well-oiled machine. “I don’t know about that, because they’re all individuals. They’ve all got a slightly different relationship with me. I don’t think it’s like, ‘Now I present you with Mother 5.0.’”
People are often fascinated by the fact that she has five boys. During her fourth and fifth pregnancies, strangers would tell her that she must be wishing for a girl. “Sometimes you’d get some bore sat next to you at one of those dinners, where you don’t know them, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, how terrible, you have sons.’ I just think people have got quite narrow ideas sometimes.” She is careful to point out that she doesn’t actually consider this to be a big issue. “This is small fry, really. It’s more an occasional lack of imagination than an everyday problem.” Somehow, in her lightness, she manages to sound even more scathing.
But, in the current climate, there has been an increasing interest in what it’s like to raise boys. “It’s definitely become more of a topic recently,” she says, but she shuts it down before it can get going. “It’s a bit clickbaity, isn’t it? It only makes me feel sad, because my children are five really interesting, lovely people, and I don’t really like the idea of their imagined characters being skewed into something for that.”
One of the things she has learned from doing her podcast, in which she has long conversations with other mothers, is how to talk about her job with her children. “I don’t diminish it any more. I used to be very apologetic about work. I’d make it tiny.” She puts on a quiet, squeaky voice: “I’ve got to go and do this thing, I wish I didn’t have to, I’ll be as quick as I can, I’d rather be here.” That just isn’t the truth. She loves what she does, and after the lockdowns, especially, she realised how much she needs to perform to feel like herself. Now, when she goes somewhere, she talks about it differently. “I say to the kids, ‘This matters to me. I like what I do. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon. But I’ve worked really hard to get these opportunities’ – that kind of thing. So I think I frame it better.”
In 2013, Ellis-Bextor appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, getting through to the final week. In her book, she was candid about the strain that it put on her relationship with Jones. He gave her permission to write about the fact that he sought counselling when she was on the show, to help him cope with anxiety it triggered about their relationship. “I thought that was really brave of him,” she says. “But, look, it wasn’t like he thought I was going to run off.” It was more than 10 years ago, she points out, a little wearily. “But he felt like it wasn’t involving him. And then, because he was seeing us experiencing things separately, it shook something. He was worried about it.” Every time they went out, she said, people would joke about the so-called curse of Strictly, in which the celebrities and their dance partners supposedly fall for each other. “And I think it just started to wear him down a little bit.”
Jones worked through it and was supportive of her time on the show, but Ellis-Bextor was an early critic of some aspects of Strictly, writing about how she felt the contestants were not always well supported psychologically. Is it fair to say that she wasn’t surprised when allegations of unacceptable behaviour emerged in 2024? “I only know what I witnessed on my year,” she says. “I made some really good friends out of it, and I loved doing the dancing, but I think they should have been checking in, because I was seeing real relationships changing and people breaking up.” The programme should have taken that more seriously, she thinks.
She calls it “an extraordinary, heady chapter. I think maybe some of the things I spoke about in the book aren’t seen as exotic any more, because more people have contributed to [talking about] the things I experienced.” She wrote that, at times, doing the show was “too intimate, too intense”, and that contestants were, back then at least, separated from family and friends. She practically pinpointed what the show needed to change, long before they agreed to change it, I suggest. “And they’ve done it. All good: chapter closed!” she says, sunnily.
Ellis-Bextor has work to do. She is about to swoop off again, to get ready for her Perimenopop party, and before the guests arrive she has to record some clips for Instagram, twirling around in the pink dress, lip‑syncing to her new single. She mentions a conversation that she had recently, with a man who is 20 years older than her, who suggested she take all of August off, as she’s had such a busy year. She asked him how he had felt in his 40s, and he told her that he had felt driven. “And I said: that’s where I’m at. I think that’s not always expected. In some ways, I think I’m better at being in my 40s than in my 20s.” I wonder what the difference is. “I think you’ve curated your life a little bit more. You’re not trying things out for the first time, but doing the things that you know work for you.”
What’s next, then, I say: Menopop? She laughs. “Oh my God. Imagine! I’m already getting so many people contacting me, saying: I run this menopause help thing …” But she gets serious for a minute. “What’s next? I don’t know. But I don’t think you should do what I do, if you like knowing what happens next.” This, from the woman whose 20-year-old song has just been a huge global hit again. “Yeah,” she says, smiling. “That doesn’t work.”