Sophie Ellis Bextor’s kitchen disco chaos with her five sons inspires new chapter in her pop life
A family tradition of playing their fave songs and dancing around the kitchen proved just the tonic for Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s fans and her dance music career.
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Kids run riot in the kitchen as mum, glittering in sequins, belts out a note-perfect version of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights under a mirror ball.
Just your average day in the London home of Sophie Ellis-Bextor and her five sons during the pandemic lockdown.
The kitchen disco chaos, broadcast via IGTV, was orchestrated by the dance pop queen and her musician husband Richard Jones as a fun activity for their family to blow off quarantine steam.
“Our discos weren’t even really about me being a singer and performer, it was more about what our family do when we need to feel better,” she says.
“Whenever we want to alleviate tension in our house or change the narrative or give everybody a perk, we put on songs we like, it’s what we’ve always done. It’s not the same as when I do my gigs.”
The weekly Kitchen Disco sessions would become appointment viewing among her fans and an organic career booster for the Murder On The Dancefloor pop star.
Ellis-Bextor has just released her greatest hits collection Songs From The Kitchen Disco, announced a UK tour for May next year and unveiled her cover of the Alcatraz hit Crying At The Discotheque.
“It’s funny what has emerged from this year. It’s in very different shape to what I thought I would be doing; it’s been nice to run headlong into it all rather than pretend it’s not happening,” she says.
Ellis-Bextor is pop culture royalty in the UK, soaring to the top of the charts as a dance pop artist after the demise of her 90s indie band Theaudience.
After a year off to figure out her next move, she was asked by Italian DJ Spiller to add lyrics and vocals to his instrumental track called Groovejet.
That piece of music became the global hit Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) which hit No. 1 in Australia in 2000. It also beat Victoria Beckham and her first post Spice Girls effort Out Of Your Mind to the top of the UK charts and was reportedly the first ever song played on an iPod during beta testing of the music player in 2001.
Over the decade post the Spiller hit, she enjoyed solo success with a run of pop and club hits including Take Me Home, Murder on the Dancefloor, Get Over You, Move This Mountain, Music Gets The Best of Me and Catch You.
Collaborations with DJ superstars including Giving Up On Love with Armin van Buuren and Heartbreak (Make Me a Dancer) with Freemasons kept her popular in the clubs.
As Kylie Minogue enjoys another chart boost courtesy of her sensational Disco record and Dua Lipa rides the next mirrorball wave to the top of the charts, Ellis-Bextor is enjoying dance music getting its due from the critics after decades of dismissing it as a serious musical form.
“I’ve long been someone who has adored disco music. If anyone is a bit cynical about disco, then I challenge them to have a go at playing it; you can only do that stuff if you’re really good,” she says.
“The musicianship on those 70s records is incredible and the magic of their songs, like the ones by Chic, is all locked in their rhythm section.
“Try to imagine what it would have been like to be standing at the back of the studio when they were laying those tracks down, it must have been electrifying to be doing it for the very first time.”
Before the UK was plunged back into a hard four-week lockdown, Ellis-Bextor snuck in her first live gig at the famous G.A.Y. club.
The dancing queen and the club go way back and it was an emotional homecoming for the singer.
“It’s somewhere that has become an emotional linchpin really because I’ve had some defining gigs there over the years,” she says.
“After I had my first baby (in 2004), I had my first gig back after a couple of years at G.A.Y. and it was like something in me shifted and it gave me the confidence to be a bit more uninhibited on stage,” she says.
“And I remember being quite nervous before I walked out and the crowd was so warm and supportive, I thought ‘I don’t have anything to fear here, I’m amongst friends’. It was really powerful.”
Any ego bump she may have enjoyed courtesy of her adoring crowd at the club or online fandom is quickly countered by her children, who remain decidedly unimpressed by her stardom. She shares the reality of parenting a large brood on her podcast Spinning Plates.
Her 11-year-old son Kit recently delivered an expert troll to his mum having spotted a poster advertising a Steps concert next year with Ellis-Bextor as support act on his way to school.
After he sent a photo of the poster with laughing emojis, she offered to put him on the guest list. His immediate, abrupt response: “No”.
“That Kit is very dry,” she says. “He’s given me my favourite quote from one of the kids when I said ‘Will you look after me when I’m old?’ and he said ‘Yes … but only for a day or two.’
“Kids are egocentric and rightly so. They have a passing interest in what I’m up to but only passing.”
Songs From The Kitchen Disco is out now.
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