Before meeting Ellie Bleach (not a stage name), I’ve read all the interviews that have been published, listened to all her debut EP, No Elegant Way To Sell Out, several times, and I’ve gone through her Instagram with the forensic determination I’d normally reserve for my exes. I’ve done my homework, but it didn’t prepare me for how emotional her impeccable performance would make me feel, or for how impossibly cool she would be. 

After three practically flawless takes of Doing Really Well Thanks, Precious Feeling, and Big Strong Man, Ellie and I sit down in the live room of the Act Cool Records studio, which still looks like the inside of a Vegas wedding chapel. She’s still wearing the white suit she bought from Mango with the intention of returning it after the recording. “I might keep it though,” she admits, “I always do that, I buy stuff for gigs wanting to bring it back to the shop afterwards, but then I like them too much.”

“I feel like we picked the fan favourites for this live session,” Ellie says. “I wanted to make the most of the opportunity of getting a big band sound, which I didn’t get to do with the other live sessions I’ve done.”

I ask her which of her songs she feels the closest to, and if they match with the audience’s most liked ones. “Doing Really Well Thanks is my most liked song in terms of streams, which apparently matters…” explains Ellie, with an ironic note in her voice that I would learn to be somewhat of a signature of hers. “It wouldn’t have been my favourite, if you asked me to pick. But the reaction we get at gigs when we play that track made me hear that song in a different way, and I really like it now. I think how people react to your work can influence your own perception of it”, she elaborates. 





I ask her to tell me a bit more about the songs she’s picked for the live session. “Precious Feelings to me symbolises a shift in my songwriting. I wrote it quite a while ago, but it was the first time I started writing from the perspective of a character and realised that it worked for me.” “I think there’s a moment, while you’re developing your sound, when it dawns on you what comes natural, and Precious Feeling came through in an intuitive way that I hadn’t experienced before,” she adds. 

Ellie’s EP is written from the perspective of a series of characters that share an aura of hope and disillusion, all somewhat struggling with the conundrum that is taking oneself seriously. “I think, when putting together the songs that I wanted to include in the EP, a theme emerged without me realising it”, Ellie explains. “A lot of the songs have to do with success and failure, a kind of wanting and striving for something. And a lot of them have to do with showbizness.”



In a somewhat autobiographical way, Ellie’s songs touch on the frustration of having no money and of feeling like an impostor, on the perils of calling oneself an artist, and the continuous questioning of what qualifies as being good enough. When I ask her what’s the hardest part of being a musician, she talks about moving to London, working several hospitality jobs that would allow her to leave to play a gig at a few hours notice, and the realisation that she should call herself a musician. “Any artist with a grain of self awareness will go through cyclical phases of seeing themselves as a fraud,” Ellie says. “But the hardest part of being a musician is definitely getting my piano to fit into an Uber. Don’t play an 88 key weighted piano, that’s my advice,” she laughs.  

When she’s performing, Ellie projects the confidence of someone in her element, who always knew she would end up on a stage one day. I ask her if there was a single event that made her decide that music was what she wanted to do. Because of the highly visual nature of her lyrics, which tend to paint a very specific, usually relatable, always patinated picture, I expected a very cinematic anecdote in response. Instead, she says “I wish I could think of a single event, but the truth is that I started playing in pubs at Uni, and towards the end I had a few fun gigs and thought maybe some people besides my friend would want to listen to my music. I thought, maybe music is what I am good at, and maybe I should give that a go”. 





The inspiration for Ellie’s lyrics are decided before she even sits down to write the first line. She’ll have the idea of writing a song from the perspective of a cruise ship singer, or about a Wall Street Yuppie, and work out the elements that she wants to be very specific and those she plans to leave to the listener’s imagination. “Deciding where to zoom in and where to zoom out is a fun aspect of songwriting that I don’t think you can explore as much in other forms of writing,” she explains. “The vague realm of pop songwriting has lots of rules - you need to give people the hook they want to take home with them - but I came to realise that there’s no need to get caught up on the idea that lyrics should be generic to be relatable. There are plenty of confessional songwriters that do a better job at getting to people’s heart”, she adds. 

When we come to the much dreaded question about which artists she considers her inspiration, Ellie explains that there is probably a reason for all the eyerolls I get when I ask musicians about their references. “I think it’s because if you answer by citing someone legendary, it sounds like you’re comparing yourself to them,” she says. “For me there are the untouchables - Leonard Cohen and Fiona Apple are maybe my two favourite songwriters of all time. And then there are the people that inspire me on my day to day, my peers that give me feedback and motivate me to continue to make music. My flatmate, Platonica Erotica, is one of them.” 

Perhaps one of my favourite moments of my conversation with Ellie is when I ask her to give a piece of advice to anyone wishing to pursue a career in music. “If I knew the secret I’d be playing somewhere in Japan right now,” she says, candidly. “At the end of the day music is stupid. You’re never going to be canonised in the way the great artists of the past have. Today, it’s about having to do some very cringey things, and you’ll find yourself recording a TikTok video, wondering why Bob Dylan never had to do this.” Dealing with the pressure of anyone being able to pass judgment on how good your art is is another difficult part of being a musician. “If I met someone in the smoking area and they asked me what I do and I said I worked in marketing, that would be pretty much the end of the conversation. But when I say I’m a musician, anyone can pull out their phone and check how good I am at my job,” Ellie says. “Vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean confessing our heartbreak - taking yourself seriously, or being silly, is also making yourself vulnerable. That shit can be embarassing,” she says, laughing. I ask her what’s the cure. “Make some work that you don’t plan to show anyone. Make something that’s just for you. It’s a good reminder that you can also be your own audience. We are so used to broadcast everything we do, and sometimes it’s good to keep some stuff for ourselves.”



On the topic of having to share our entire lives, we get into the TikTok territory, and Ellie doesn’t think we should throw away the baby with the bath water. “I know things have changed, but I’m not a boomer who thinks music is dead and the internet killed it. I’m inspired by stuff that I see online, and while it’s true that there’s a lot of crap, there are also many interesting things out there.”

There isn’t, I think, a better way to describe the melancholic undertones of No Elegant Way to Sell Out than to compare them to the charming, unsettling stillness of English seaside towns. So, knowing that she’s from Southend, I ask Ellie whether she feels that the place where she grew up still leaves a mark in her work. “Definitely. A lot, if not all of my songs, I imagine to be set in suburbia, or a place where there’s not much going on. When you live in a seaside town, you see people come for the day and then go home, whereas you stay there. It’s a breeding ground for suburban weirdness to occur.”

“Idleness is a great source of inspiration”, she continues. “I love living in London, but I’m grateful not to have grown up in a big city. I had nothing to do, and that forced me to nurture my interests and learn to keep myself entertained without much external stimulation”.  We continue talking about the patina of broken expectations that are English seaside towns. “They’re purpose-built for fun, but here it rains 80% of the time. So you get the theme parks, and the arcade games. I love how people from London get misty-eyed when I say I’m from Southend - they know it’s a place that hasn’t changed since the 80s, but it reminds them of when they used to go there as children. I love that.”

To conclude what felt less like an interview and more like a chat with a friend over a glass of wine, I ask Ellie to talk a bit about what it means to be a woman in the music industry, and if there is something she wishes she had known sooner. “I can’t say that I get a lot of pressure externally. I think we’ve come very far at an industry level, even in the past five years,” she tells me. Candidly, she continues: “But I do feel that, as a woman, there are higher standards that you have to live up to. To put it bluntly, I don’t think I would have had the same opportunities I had if I dressed like shit. While a scruffy man can be an undiscovered genius, for women there is an expectation that we’ll have a much more polished image, an emphasis on aesthetics, having a look, or a vibe”.  I tell her I agree, and that it seems like women in the underground music scene, but also in the music scene as a whole, need to just be better at everything in order to be taken seriously. Ellie looks at me and, with a smile, she says “But luckily, we are better at everything”.