There's nothing wrong with belting out the word "burn!" 64 times in a four-minute dance track, as long you're clever with the wider audience it opens up.
"It's a tough one, because if you have that one song that catapults you, and takes you to a level where you can perform the songs that are really true to your heart, really vulnerable, really deep, whatever – if that one song gets you to a place where you can fulfil what you want to fulfil as an artist…" She leaves the thought unfinished, but I take her point. I wanted to release Burn, I loved it, even if it is a vague sentiment. "Probably the most poppy song I've released. Listen, Goulding tells me, it's a pop song. "Cos we got the fire," the line goes, "and we're burning one hell of a… something." I wonder what the lyricist inside her makes of Burn's big singalong line, a triumph of imprecise, end-of-the-day composition. (She had a book deal before the music took off.) She is the proud owner of a medal for songwriting. A smash! And yet.Īt one point, Goulding was almost a published poet. It's repetitive, relentless and was huge on British radio, selling half a million. In Goulding's version, the vocal is crowded with echoes and distortion. The apogee of this feeling came in the summer with the release of Burn (a track first written for the X Factor winner Leona Lewis). "I failed my music A-level because I just wanted to sing and play guitar," she says. It was a timely decision, with the xx and other dream-pop acts breaking through, and by the time her debut LP came out Goulding's mailed-out samplers had won her a critics' choice Brit award as well as the BBC's Sound of 2010 poll. "I sensed there was something that needed to be added to my songs." "I felt a pull towards electronic music," she says. A canny decision was made by Goulding and her managers, though, to combine her piping vocal with busy computer production. Polydor signed her in 2009 and she might easily have released a debut album of unadorned guitar ballads, the sort of stuff she'd been touring around London pubs and bars. What do you think? "All of them told me to go for it." She quit her degree by emailing tutors a link to her demos. Her voice could be manipulated and used as an instrument.Īt university, Goulding "got my guitar out, sang to people, and it was the first time anyone ever said, 'My God, you really should do something with that'". Goulding has come to regret it – "I feel silly because I'm not ashamed of the Hereford accent now and it's too late to get it back" – but it was at least a useful lesson. I felt like people just knew I was from a council house, and that I was poor, because of the way I spoke." She studied BBC newsreader Nicholas Witchell, of all people, trying to emulate his vowel sounds. Told them I couldn't afford to get down there and they took me without an interview." Meanwhile, Goulding, who had always spoken the same way as her three siblings, "in a Hereford accent, quite Bristolian", made herself sound posh. Raised on a Hereford council estate, not alone among her friends in having "a dad not present", Goulding was a bright kid who did well in English at school, failed music at A-level and then talked her way on to a drama course at the local university by sending tutors an impudent letter. "It was my mum," she says, "who taught me to smoke."įor Goulding, it's been a halting, windy journey to this point in her life. Having been through this bit of panto with pop stars before, I tell her not to worry, I won't mention it in the article so that her mum finds out. "Why does it smell of smoke? I haven't smoked in here." "It smells of smoke," Goulding notes suddenly. There's even – sweet! – a little medal, given to her by the BMI for songwriting. We settle on sofas in the living room, next to a Brit award that came early in her career as well as a big chrome Q (best solo artist at the Q awards) and a bigger chrome A (best musician at the Attitude awards) won this year. She is small, richly blonde and walks around the flat in a T-shirt and checked baggy slacks: her pyjamas. "I think we drank the bottle they sent when I sold out the Hammersmith Apollo," says the 26-year-old.
On a sideboard, not yet opened, is a magnum of Grand Siècle champagne, sent by her label when Goulding's summer single, Burn – throbbing, clubby, ubiquitous – went to No 1 for three weeks in July. There's a cluster of backstage passes in the bedroom, mementos from a big summer tour. Platinum discs for her 2010 debut album, the electronica-rippled Lights, and its 2012 follow-up, Halcyon, hang in the hallway. It's a two-bed-and-balcony flat in west London, decked out in testament to a pop career going well. A fter a quick scurry around to check that her bed is made ("Half made, will that do?"), the singer Ellie Goulding leads me on a tour of her home.