Friday Fancy… Ellie Goulding

by Florentine

She’s the winner of this year’s Brit Awards Critics’ Choice prize for the act most likely to break through in 2010, she’s toured the UK supporting Little Boots as well as featuring on the prolific ‘Later… With Jools Holland’ show and… she just so happens to have the best bush I’ve seen in yonks (probably since the last time I used the word ‘yonks’ in fact, which was a considerable number of years ago).  Her name is Ellie Goulding, and if you haven’t heard of her by now, then you can bet your first-born child (adoptive or otherwise) that by the time twenty-ten is through, she’ll be all over your respective sound systems like a melted shell-suit.

Don’t believe me?

Well, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the full and complete Brit Award winners’ back-catalogue, previous recipients of the sparkly new Critics’ Choice award include Florence and the Machine (2009) and Adele (2008), who have done pretty nicely ever since I’d say.  Ellie, born and raised on the Welsh border in a delightful little place called Hereford that I used to go running in lots, first came to my attention a good few months ago as I completed my regular trawl of ‘new & interesting artists I can buy tickets to see on a whim because I’m massively bored’.  I trawled, I found, Ellie conquered.

Here’s the video that immediately made me press the ‘buy now’ tab on Ticketmaster.  For info’z, it’s her debut single Under the Sheets, produced by upcoming electro-pop buzz name Starsmith.  There’s lots of gold glitter and that.

Can I just say at this point, how much I enjoy a girl in a hoodie.  Or just a hood of some description, whatever.  There, my menacing-looking-person-in-an-outfit-associated-with-petty-crime leaning is out.  Anyway, while Ellie’s sound has largely taken a swift U-turn down electro-synth lane since she started hanging out with folk like Frankmusik (who’s remixed for artists including Pet Shop Boys, Lady Gaga, Alphabeat and Amy Winehouse), her roots actually lie in folky acoustic.

“I was just doing an essay or something and I heard this music playing in my friend’s room, and it was Frankmusik. I was like, ‘This sounds so different’,” she told NME.

“We ended up doing a couple of songs, and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I wanna do’. As soon as I heard [Frankmusik collaboration] ‘Wish I Stayed’, I was like, ‘That’s it’. He made me realise just because I play guitar I didn’t have to be a folk singer.”

(source: www.digitalspy.co.uk)

True ‘dat Ellie, but your roots still rock pretty hard and don’t you forget it.  See below for a back-to-basics acoustic version of the first song she wrote, inspired by her move from rural Wales (kind of) to the big bad streets of London.  For anyone who’s interested, you can see the more official version (produced by Frankmusik himself) by following this beauteous, emboldened link.  For the record, it’s good.  So good it makes me want to weep tears of rad.

If you’re not yet convinced that anyone at Team Brits knows what the eff they’re talking about, I’ve got one more Goulding big-gun hidden up my sleeve that might just win you over.  Now, I’m just going to put it out there that my taste in music is frequently ridiculed… largely because my definition of cool differs to the entire population of Shoreditch and surrounding areas (in that, I don’t have one) and only slightly less largely because of my predictable penchant for wordsmiths with guitars.  Super-talented ones though, jeeze.  Anyway, before I lose all remaining shreds of credibility by writing words like ‘jeeze’, behold Ellie’s next single Starry-Eyed (due for release in February), again produced with a little help from Starsmith.  I imagine this will go down better with folk who like ‘music to cut shapes to’.  I like to move as little as humanly possible personally, so the slower/melancholy stuff usually works out pretty well for me.

The above tracks (with the exception of Starry-Eyed) are available to download from iTunes in a neat little bundle package with some extras, at little cost to self.  For those who, like me, think Ms Goulding is the best thing to assault your senses since Flo and her (quite frankly breathtaking) Machine, you can buy tickets for her various upcoming gigs here and rest safe yet impatiently in the knowledge that her debut album is due for release in March/April.  My ipod is already trembling at the prospect.  In a good way.  God bless you Ellie Goulding; you’ve single-handedly made 2010 worth listening to.

Got you in the mood for music?  Check out some other music-y feasts cherry-picked from the TMC archives:

Soundbyte: Nneka

Music Video Monday… The Big Pink – Dominoes

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Black Forest and Death by Chocolate do cake talk at Fever Ray