'Success is harder for me to navigate than failure'

"Pop was a bit of a dirty word," Sophie EllisBextor remembers, of her first flush of real fame.

- Adam White, The Independent

Sophie Ellis Bextor

"Every pop video seemed to be filled with blonde, tanned models, who had a group of other models who were their friends, or cute, smiling guys. And I just thought ... no, I'm gonna be this absolute cow." Across many of her early releases in the Noughties - like the beachfront chill-pop smash "Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)", or the chugging stalker bop "Catch You" -Ellis-Bextor embodied a sullen, blue-chip glamazon with cheekbones visible from space. Her videos saw her stalk and pose and terrorise. One moment she was a mannequin run amok, the next she was speeding maniacally down a Venice canal, like Don't Look Now but chic. And while she didn't explicitly murder her rivals on the dancefloor, she at least made them trip, fall and throw up in the bathroom.

"Playing the baddie was like a protective layer for me," she says. "I thought, OK, if I present myself in this way and my career is over within five years, I can go away knowing that I didn't really reveal anything about myself. It would have been so hard to deal with if I showed everything straight away and got rejected. But if I was lucky enough to have a long career, I knew I could then reveal more as the years went on."