Ellie Goulding is a complicated thing in a seemingly simple package. On first hearing, she’s a bright and shiny 22 year old singer-songwriter, with her fingers on her guitar, her feet in a night-club and her head in the heavens. But very few singer-songwriters, young or old, can flip between dance-til-you-drop euphoria and wistful, journeying space-folk. Very few can do all that and leave us, the listeners, with enchantment, curious romance and, somehow, a sense of vastness, of travel, of space and time. It’s pop, Jim, but not as we know it.
 

Ellie’s songs are built around big proper tunes that lift you up and spin you round, yet there’s something off-centre about them, something sparkly, filmic, haunting, odd. She mixes heartfelt emotion with other-worldly atmospherics, spins cool electronica into dreamy warmth. We note that she hasn’t changed her name, that she doesn’t hide behind a stage persona. She is who she is. And in person, Ellie is direct. Honest to a fault.
 

Born Elena Jane Goulding in Hereford on December 30th 1986, brought up in Kington, a small village on the Wales-England border, she decided to change the way she spoke “because I felt different”: now her neutral tones mean she gets mistaken for a posh gel. In fact, her background was anything but cushy: brought up by her mum and step-dad in various council houses, she shared a small bedroom with her two sisters and spent most of her young life outside.