SameSame.com.au ~ Inside Out Australia

La Roux: In The Red

Feature, By bec4239, 25th June, 2009

When I asked a handful of friends if they had any burning questions for twenty-one-year-old Elly Jackson, front woman of electro-pop outfit La Roux, responses ranged from the smutty “Does the carpet match the drapes?” to the troublesome, “Favourite character from The Bill?” before peaking with, “Ask her what La Roux stands for, just to see her reaction.” The ridiculousness of the latter says a great deal about just how much this striking pale-faced redhead has infiltrated our collective consciousness as she climbs the British charts to pop stardom at breakneck speed.

It’s been a sudden rise from growing up as an awkward ginger kid.

“Yeah I got picked on, but it was all really lame, like ‘Carrot Top’ and stuff, except ‘Fanta Pants’ was quite a good one I thought,” says Jackson. Now she’s a mainstay on all the ‘Hot Tips for 2009’ lists, she’s yet to fully come to terms with where her distinctive voice and Tilda Swinton-esque look are taking her.

“I was out on the weekend at a mate’s show just round the corner from my house, and I got recognised,” she marvels. “When I’m out with friends I kind of just forget, and I haven’t been clubbing for ages, so when I finally went out it made me really subconscious because these strangers actually knew who I was.”

Sudden success, it seems, tends to become conversational arsenic. “You have to force yourself not to talk about it,” Jackson admits, her delivery so endearingly sincere that it almost completely masks the inherent irony. “It doesn’t matter if I’m on tour or on a break, I get maybe one day off every few weeks, but everybody’s so excited for you, with the chart positions and the single success and the album, that I haven’t really spoken to anyone about anything else for ages. I’ve started to forget what real conversation was like. I go to parties and I want to have a normal conversation but I can’t. It’s driving me fucking mad.”

It’s all a far cry from her days as wayward artist dabbling in acoustic folk music at her parents’ house in Brixton. “I didn’t have a job,” she says. “So I was just bumming around not really doing much.”

But everything changed when she was introduced to producer, Ben Langmaid, with whom she would quickly form a tight bond and a clever synth-fueled quasi-pop duo dubbed La Roux, a name inspired by her much-discussed coif. “We were just hanging out, making music. We didn’t have any time limits, so we’d often have days where we’d spend the whole day chatting and not getting any music done. We’d end up being each other’s therapists because we’d talk about so much stuff together, but then we’d end up finding something to write about. We wrote all the songs we have now, except maybe two or three that were written since getting signed.”

Securing a record deal with UK giant, Polydor Records, late last year when you’re a relatively new act is no mean feat, but it did help that Jackson and Langmaid had already surrounded themselves with the right kind of company, sharing a management team with the enigmatic Klaxons and having a single, Quicksand. released by French tastemakers, Kitsuné Maison.

When discussing their upcoming debut album Jackson is keen to promote its diversity.

“It’s really hard to describe it, but when I talk about the music I always have to say that it’s pop to avoid complication, but it’s not just pop. It’s influenced by the 80s but with a modern twist, and I think it’s also really important to mention that it’s not all dance music. There are other emotions on there, other feelings. There are a couple of ballads, and some mid-tempo tracks too. It’s important to me that there is variety on there.”