Sophie Ellis-Bextor thinks losing her record deal when she was 20 stopped her becoming “completely horrible”.
The ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ singer found fame as a teenager in theaudience and despite the fact the group had split by the time she was barely out of her teens, part of her is thankful as she thinks it made her a better person.
She told Big Issue magazine: “The things that were super important to me in my late teens – my mand and my boyfriend – I lost both of them early.
“My band had split up and I was dropped by the label by the time I was 20.
“It had gone very fast in one direction and then very fast in the other.
“I credit that as being one of the things that probably stopped me from being a completely horrible person.
“I think if I’d had success after success, I’d be gross today.”
Sophie found the subsequent period “quite humiliating” as she didn’t know what to do with her life and feared her best days were over.
She said: “It was awful when the band split up. I felt very low.
“I felt like I’d had the best bit of my career behind me already and I didn’t have a Plan B.
“I felt like I’d screwed up quite a lot, really, because I’d found the thing I loved and it hadn’t worked.
“All my girlfriends were off at uni. I felt too old to be then going to university, two years behind them.
“So I felt like I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t feel like I had any other employable qualities.
“All I really wanted to do was get back into singing.
“I think in a lot of ways, that was quite good for me. But it was quite a blow really. It felt quite humiliating.”
Sophie’s fortunes changed in 2000 when she was asked to sing on Spiller’s song ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love) and it became a huge hit – but she almost turned down the collaboration and felt “a bit offended” to have even been asked.
She said: “When the band were dropped, my publishers sent me an instrumental of ‘Groovejet’, which was commercial dance music.
“Well, I’d just come from the indie scene. I didn’t listen to any dance music.
“So when I first got sent it, I was actually a bit offended. It’s just not my bag. Don’t you know me at all?!
“But then there was something about the track that I really liked and I thought maybe this is what I need – to go into another world away from the world I’ve been in. Nobody in the indie world will event know I did it and I can have a new adventure to kind of shake things up.”