Sophie Ellis-Bextor: ‘Kitchen Discos gave me something good when it was wonky in the news’

“I actually thought people were going to laugh at me, saying ‘what are you doing?’,” says the 42-year-old, explaining that the success of the glitterball karaoke events far exceeded anything she had dreamt of when she posted the first one in the depths of lockdown on March 27, 2020.

“On the first one my youngest was 13 months, crawling around the floor, I’d put on a sequined catsuit, we got the sound a bit wrong, they were all chaotic, but this one was extremely chaotic, I didn’t know if people would even respond to it and enjoy it. But what happened with the discos became such an integral part of what has been going on around here for the last two years, not least for what it did for me in an emotional way, really.

“It gave me something good when it was all wonky and wobbly in the news. For me personally in a really selfish way it was something I needed, to be honest.”

Aside from coping with the pandemic, Ellis-Bextor’s stepfather, John Leach, was gravelly ill with lung cancer. When he died in July 2020, Ellis-Bextor paid emotional tribute, describing him as “kind, good, funny, smart, subtle, solid and clear”. Today, she admits the Kitchen Discos were a “coping mechanism” during such distressing times.

“I already knew that some of the elements were things that always made me feel better, performing and dressing up and getting lost in a song have always been things I’ve loved, but I think it kind of went into caricature during the lockdowns just because of the nature of what was going on,” she says. “It was really quite scary and intense, especially raising a young family when I didn’t know how to explain things because we didn’t know what was going on either, when work would come back or how we were going to do gigs, whether it was ever going to be a thing again.

“There was a lot of talk to suggest that normal life as we knew it was gone forever and it was a lot to deal with. And yes, my stepdad was really ill and sadly he did die during 2020 as well, so there were lots of things going on, but I know that everybody’s got their version of what’s been going on for the last two years. We’ve all had something.”

Ellis-Bextor thinks the simple fun element was what connected with people. “Firstly I think it was a place where we were actively encouraging being a bit silly in contrast to the heaviness of the news,” she says. “I felt there was a lot of expectation of ‘oh, you’ve got a lockdown, why don’t you learn a new language or take up a new skill?’ I personally found it certainly didn’t aid creativity.

“I found I was a bit paralysed with my creative thoughts, I couldn’t think about creating something new, so for me having the distraction of the discos and learning lyrics to songs I didn’t know that well was really good. Then hopefully community, the fact that it was happening in real time and maybe other people recognised elements of what was going on and what was happening in their lives, particularly if they were living with young kids.

“I’m sure there were themes that were coming out of it, but also there’s a familiarity in the chaos of domesticity and we could all be together for a little while and collectively put everything down for a minute and stop worrying and be daft, just for half an hour and then back to whatever you’re thinking about.”

While the venues on her Kitchen Disco Tour – that include Sheffield City Hall and St George’s Hall in Bradford – might be considerably larger than her own kitchen, the singer hopes to recreate some of the celebratory aspect of the original shows.

“We’re going to bring a set that’s a bit like the kitchen, we’re going to do a mixture of my songs and old and new singles and cover versions of songs and change the set list a little bit every night, just have that spontaneity and a bit of a party atmosphere,” she says. “Just get everybody feeling good – that’s my intention, anyway.”

Prepping for a new set every night might involve a fair amount of work, but Ellis-Bextor sounds in her element. “That’s what I was doing during the lockdown, I was every week choosing a new cover, singing classic songs I’d always loved. Learning the lyrics gave me something to distract myself, so I’d be doing the laundry or the kids’ bath or whatever and then practising the words to Holiday by Dizzee Rascal or whatever it was that week. It was brilliant, it gave me something else to think about. I’ve got to try and wake all those brain cells up again and see how well I remember those songs and bring them with me.

“But I just want to have an element of something fun and playful because that’s basically what the discos had. They always had something unexpected in there. I’m not going to bring the kids onstage with me so I might as well do it with music instead of children.”

Among the many spin-offs from the Kitchen Discos is a regular show on BBC Radio 2. Becoming a fully fledged DJ seems to be something that Ellis-Bextor has relished. “Radio has always been my favourite medium, actually, from when I was a teenager and discovering new music,” she says. “Then when I came to be a singer, I’ve always enjoyed it, it’s my favourite way to go around and talk about what I’m up to just because I like how informal and relaxed and calm radio tends to be. Putting together a show has been glorious, I actually get to curate these little playlists of songs. It’s a bit of light relief, really. I think music is so good at that, it’s such an amazing tool for giving a place to put your emotions sometimes.”

Last November Ellis-Bextor raised more than £1m from a 24-hour danceathon for Children in Need. While the skills she learned while competing in the 2013 series of Strictly Come Dancing might have come in handy, all her preparations could only take her so far when it came to such a test of stamina. “Really the pressure is all mental,” she says. “It’s endurance, you can’t dance it any faster. Doing better moves does not make the time go quicker either, so really it was just about pacing myself and trying to relax and be in the moment rather than thinking ‘oh golly, I’ve still got eight hours to go’ or whatever it may be.

“I’d never done anything like that before and I was really quite nervous about it but as soon as it started a weird kind of calm took over. I think you’d spent so much time worrying about it your brain is actually preparing you a little bit. The hardest bit was really the last hour and a half. I hit a bit of a wall and I only had 90 minutes left and that was by far the hardest bit because I think that was the bit I hadn’t really prepped for. I’d done so much work on the first 20 hours then it the last three or four that was the bit where I thought ‘home stretch’, but actually it was not, I’d still got ages to go.”

In July the singer and her husband, Richard Jones, who plays bass in the band The Feeling, are due to release a cookery book. Love. Food. Family: Recipes from the Kitchen Disco stems from an idea she had five years ago but it was rejected by publishers at the time. “Cooking is a really big part of our lives,” she says. “Richard is the son of a chef and I grew up helping my mum (Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis) in the kitchen and my stepmum. I’m just one of those people who gets very excited about what I’m going to eat next, whether it’s talking about food, thinking about food, making myself something, being cooked for, whatever it may be.

“Being able to put it all together, it’s not just what we cook, my mum’s got a recipe in there, and my brother and my sister and Richard’s dad. It’s a real family cookbook. We have to cook every day for a lot of people, there’s a minimum of seven of us around the table and I think my confidence in it has grown. I’m by no means a chef but I do like making things for people to eat and enjoying it myself too, thank you very much, so it’s nice to put that in there.”

It will be the second book that Ellis-Bextor has released within a year, following her autobiography, Spinning Plates: Music, Men, Motherhood and Me. In the frank tome, she revealed she had been raped by an older musician when she was 17 years old and told of another early relationship which became abusive.

Confronting such memories was “not actually that difficult because they weren’t new to me”, she says. “My early experiences that I wrote about happened 25 years ago. I actually felt quite empowered (to write about them), if I’m honest, because it was like being able to put the other side of the story to a conversation that had begun a long time ago and being able to put my side of things out there was almost like a pact with myself. I think that’s one of the hardest things, when you don’t feel like you’ve been listened to. Being able to actually articulate it in maybe a language I might not have had when I was only 17 was actually really empowering and a real privilege.

“I found the whole book a real privilege, actually, because who gets asked to write an autobiography? That’s already quite a nice position to be in, so I just enjoyed it. It was nice to think about lots of different things, to write about everything from great gigs to bad hairdos, first babies and first albums and everything, I really enjoyed it.”

She feels it was good to share all the aspects of her life, good and bad, with her family. “My mum read it and my dad, we’re quite open and quite communicative anyway and I wrote things the way I felt comfortable discussing them,” she says. “I think if it was something like ‘for the last three years I’ve felt like X’, that would be different but we’re coming from a point where the book begins with a happy ending, I’m where I want to be with the people I want in my life. I think it’s more for me looking back over all the strands and hopefully reassuring people that you can end up feeling really good about yourself even if you haven’t always been treated the way you wanted to be treated. That for me was the most important thing and actually my kids, my 12-year-old listened to it all on Audible and great, I don’t mind, we can talk about any of that stuff. I don’t really have secrets like that, and the littles ones wouldn’t really know anything about it anyway, but it’s OK, I’m not really squeamish about having more difficult conversations because my job is to raise five people to articulate those emotions anyway. It’s kind of my responsibility I feel like to pass the baton on.”

Sophie Ellis-Bextor plays at Sheffield City Hall on March 12 and St George’s Hall, Bradford on March 23. sophieellisbextor.net