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G GODDESS
E L L IE RUL E S ‌the charts. The Twittersphere. Oh, and pretty much the world. meets the phenomenon that is Ellie Goulding P
Sylvia Patterson
Photographs by Micaela Rossato Fashion Director Natalie Hartley
G GODDESS he night before I meet Ellie Goulding, McBusted bassist Dougie Poynter confirmed their relationship on ITV2’s Fearne And McBusted documentary (after months of tabloid speculation). Ellie was filming Alan Carr’s Chatty Man at the time so doesn’t know, today, exactly how he phrased it. He said: “All’s good in that area...” “Romantic!” blurts Ellie, cackling in the back of a sleek black car scooshing through London. He also said: “It’s a no brainer, it’s just normal, it’s whatever anyone else is getting up to.” “Well it’s absolutely true!” she hoots. We also discovered he’s really into taxidermy, as are you. “Yes. We’re very similar.” Is he as sensitive as he seems? “Hahahahah! He’s... lovely.” When you’re together do you not drink, in an act of solidarity? (Dougie survived alcoholism and depression via rehab.) “Oh no! He doesn’t drink, but I drink.” Did you fancy him as a kid? “Ahahahahah!” roars Ellie, who was a gothy, face-pierced, 17-year-old Pearl Jam obsessive when McFly, toast of the tweenagers, erupted onto the scene a decade ago. “Nooooooo comment!” Two years ago this summer, Ellie Goulding and I spent many hours in New York for the very first interview of her Halcyon Days campaign, the second album which made her a multi-million-selling global phenomenon, and featured the deadly hooks of the inescapable Burn. This year, she’s so famous in America (she has headlined arenas and supported Katy Perry and Bruno Mars) that the returning Lily Allen was asked by a New York customs officer if she could be “the new Ellie Goulding” (which they both found “hilarious!”). Our interview today is, accidentally, the very last of her Halcyon Days campaign, and the only thing that’s changed about Ellie is her hesitance to blab (as she once fulsomely did) about her personal relationships. “Because the one thing that has changed is the tabloid and paparazzi attention on my private life,” she nods. “And it always seems to
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be negative attention. And negative attention about what you’re wearing. Men never get that!” Forty minutes earlier, the ever-moving Ellie is inside The Town Hall Hotel, east London, in a wood-panelled lobby area, her mobile phone laid beside an e-cigarette on a small, circular table. Sometimes, she smokes real cigarettes too, “and I’m not proud.” Nonetheless, she’s luminous with good health: flawless, creamy skin, winged eyeliner framing burnished brown eyes, glossy lips, newly shorn of her “annoying” hair extensions and wearing huge Alexander McQueen biker boots, J Brand leather trousers and a metallic-grey, wool-knit Acne jumper, “My favourite things that I wear.” If anything, she’s even more normal than she was two years ago: warm, enthusiastic and rational, possibly the least fame-damaged global artist of the contemporary era. She’s dimensions away, now, from the panic attacks that consumed her during her first rush of fame in 2010, the year she won the Critic’s Choice Brit Award, aged 23 – adrenaline-fuelled attacks which led to A&E and cognitive behavioural therapy. “There’s still psychological chaos,” she muses, sipping sparkling water. “But everything you do is about how you react to something. Everything. It’s how you respond. And I wasn’t aware of that before. But when you grasp how you can control things, and accept things, you can cope.” Today, she has learned to accept our pressurised showbiz era, and the media now permanently fixated on her boyfriends, since she split with US EDM titan Skrillex in late 2012 – the long distance, after six months, proving unworkably “cruel”. Since then she’s dated actor Jeremy Irvine, flirted with Ed Sheeran and reportedly snogged Niall from One Direction (when they were drunk). One week before she went public with Dougie, the Daily Mail published 40 online photographs of Ellie on a yacht in Miami, supposedly “frolicking” with a “tanned hunk” and seemingly “head over heels in love” while revealing “MAJOR side-boob”. Ellie sighs. She’d hired the yacht for the day as a thank you to her band and crew for their hard work on tour. “He’s a friend of a friend and we were actually this far away [throws arms wide]. It’s all about angles, this is how photographers do it,” she snorts. “It’s very wrong. Very naughty. Side-boob [witheringly]... why can’t you wear a swimsuit?! But I’ve come to accept there P Continued on page 172
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Dungarees 3.1 Phillip Lim; top Jacquemus
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“I want to be surrounded by powerful women, not men”
Dress Jacquemus; knickers Base Range 171
G GODDESS O will always be something to say. Luckily I’ve got to a point where nothing can obscure the fact I’m a successful artist. I’ve done well and people still really love my music. And I’m always about the music. My friends know that and the only downside is people reading things like that and assuming I’m something that I’m not. But that happens. And it will always happen.” llie, 27, now moves in comically rarified circles. This year she attended the London launch of David Beckham’s latest swimwear range, alongside Niall and her new friend Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad (“you just meet these people, on TV, radio, at concerts”), but she’s even closer to her new female friends, US superpowers Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. She met Taylor on The Jonathan Ross Show and guest-appeared on her 2013 tour in LA, the pair thundering through a transcendent Anything Could Happen, which is now a contemporary dream-pop classic. “We’re friends because they understand the predicaments,” she decides. “They see what is and isn’t real. I’m not anywhere near their level of fame, but if I say, ‘Oh God, Taylor, this happened,’ she’ll be like, ‘Girl, that’s nothing.’ Suck it up, kind of thing! I have strong female characters all around me, really cool women. My tour manager is a woman, my manager is a woman. I want to be surrounded by powerful women, not men.” Suddenly, she must relocate, off to a meeting with a potential side-project collaborator, currently a secret, “in case he doesn’t like me and it doesn’t happen! Someone you’ll know, in rock music.” We sprint to her waiting car, where freebies have just arrived: boxes of Nike trainers and Rodial beauty products. “Ooh, my favourite stuff for my face!” she swoons, wielding an enormous bottle of serum (Bee Venom 24 Carat Gold Super Essence, complete with matching moisturiser). “You have to get it,” she insists. “Swipe away everything on your shelf and just buy this, once a month. How much? I actually don’t know [rubs some into hand]. Feel that!” From rural Herefordshire, she’s an old-school working-class girl made good, a middle daughter of ’80s post-punks (who both sported mohicans), her mum an art school drop-out who worked in a supermarket, her dad in the undertaker business (also a musician). He P
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“There’s an innate part of me that is very strong. But I access my vulnerability to write my music”
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G GODDESS O left when Ellie was five, leaving her with an abandonment complex, “a void”. For years this was exacerbated by the intimidating presence of her “shitty” step-dad, who Ellie loathed. An intense, poetic, grunge-possessed teenager (who also loved Patti Smith and Björk), she educated herself via literature and music and developed a formidable work ethic. She wrote songs on acoustic guitar, and her ethereal vocal was discovered at an open-mic talent show by manager Jamie Lillywhite (son of venerable producer Steve Lillywhite and the late Kirsty MacColl). She was signed in 2009 and by 2011 was the Brit-winning wedding singer to Prince William and Kate Middleton. llie’s devotion to her fitness regime is as strong as her work ethic: her seven-mile runs are now interspersed with Bikram yoga, boot camp, boxing, the Insanity Workout and a vegetarian diet. All of which she credits for her notable new curves. Although the internet believes she’s had a boob job. “Hahahaha!” roars Ellie. “I’m petrified of anything like that. My friends will think that’s hilarious. I ran every day for seven months, maybe too obsessively, and when I stopped I became curvier. My boobs look bigger because my waist is smaller. People underestimate how you can shape your body. Since I stopped eating meat and fish, my body’s better than ever. I feel calmer, clean, although I drink and smoke. And – touch wood! – I never get ill on tour any more. And it’s always hectic, man.” Ellie has three million followers on Twitter and is “an Instagram fiend” who loves to “archive everything”. She trawls through recent posts on her phone: wearing a comedy moustache while making her debut album five years ago; playing guitar last week while downing shots of tequila; and a photo of Dougie wearing a pink jumper, peering into a box of Battenburg cake. “Aww,” she coos. She’s seeing him tonight, heading by train to Manchester, where McBusted are currently based: “Honestly, they’re the soundest
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Make-up: Andrew Gallimore at CLM Hair: Panos Papandrianos at CLM Nails: Rebecca Jade Wilson at Jed Root Fashion Assistant: Charlotte Lewis
people”. In three days she flies to Australia so she is, she notes with a twinkle, “making the most of it!” On return from Australia, her travels for Halcyon Days will finally stop (while she writes her third album) and the pair will be UK-based. Perhaps things will be less cruel this time? “Long distance isn’t easy at all,” she muses. “You have to work at it, like anything in life. But I’m very happy. I’m happy, man! I’m chilled. I’ve got this [e-cigarette], I’m getting on a train soon, I’ll listen to music. I’m happy.” Sometimes Ellie still feels “naive” to the showbiz circus. She was genuinely aghast when she and Dougie were recently papped at a basketball game in London and appeared, she cringes, “on the Kiss Cam, me being my usual naive self!” It’s testament to how much she hasn’t changed, that she can be naive, and isn’t calcified by self-consciousness and cynicism. It’s also testament to her positive attitude: committed, determined, able to overcome fears, perhaps born with a winner’s mentality. “There’s an innate part of me that is very strong,” she decides. “But there’ll always be that part of me that I go to to write songs, that weakness, that vulnerability. That’s what I access to write my music. In this industry, oh God, do you need a thick skin! But it’s that thinner skin that’s gotten me here. So you have to be sensible enough to know when to be strong and when to be weak. And when you accept that, you can succumb to it. Like, what’s that word in yoga when you stop resisting... [starts furiously Googling]... surrender!” There’ll be surrendering tonight, for sure... “Oh no, forget that word!” she guffaws, leaping from the car. “I’m really nervous,” she suddenly announces, the multi-million-recordselling pop star now applying confidenceboosting lipgloss (no mirror) before disappearing into a Prezzo restaurant towards her potential, famous new friend. Chances are the result, yet again, will be a world-class musical winner. G
“The only downside is people reading things and assuming I’m something I’m not”
Ellie’s album, Halycon Days, is out now 175