Singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor has opened up about parenting and the secret to her 20-year marriage with her musician husband
As a mother of five boys, Sophie Ellis-Bextor is happy she can talk openly to her sons about difficult issues like toxic masculinity. The Murder On The Dancefloor singer’s children are aged from six to 21 and, although she keeps an eye on their mobile phones, she says she does not try to demonise them.
She tells Good Housekeeping magazine: “I’ve always had a lot of faith in my boys. We’ve openly chatted about toxic masculinity for a long time. My eldest is very articulate about these things, so none of it was new to my house.” Toxic masculinity is a hot topic following the recent success of the hit Netflix show Adolescence starring Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper.
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Stephen plays father Eddie Miller, who watches armed police burst into his home to arrest his 13-year-old son Jamie (Owen) over a bullying incident. It has sparked conversations around misogyny among young boys online and the radicalisation of young men, with its creators discussing the topic in Parliament in April.
Sophie, 46, is mum to 21-year-old Sonny, Kit, 16, Ray, 13, Jesse, nine, and six-year-old Mickey and says she has honest conversations with them about the subject. She said: “Sometimes people have an idea of what boys are like, as if they’re a different species. As I far as I’m concerned, I’m raising five people who happen to be boys.
“I keep an eye on (their mobile phone screen time), because that’s parenting, but if you start demonising things, you shut down communication. Then you’re like those parents in the 1950s who made kids burn their rock ’n’ roll albums.”
Disco queen Sophie is married to musician Richard Jones, 46, and said her mum – former children’s TV presenter Janet Ellis – is partly to thank for their happy 20-year union: “When we got married, we’d already had our first baby. My mum said, ‘Make sure you always choose each other over anything else, even the kids.’ She was right.
Even though the kids might roll their eyes if they see us hugging or whatever, they are happy that we are happy. We have fun as a family, too. Last year, they came with us for a lot of the tour.”
Pop star Sophie burst on to the scene in 2000 with her number one hit Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), a collaboration with DJ Spiller She has sold millions of albums worldwide, and her other chart successes included the Cher cover Take Me Home and Murder On The Dancefloor – which has enjoyed a recent resurgence thanks to the movie Saltburn. Sophie said of the revival: “The whole thing was glorious.”
Sophie got the nation dancing throughout the Covid lockdown with her Instagram kitchen discos and recalled: “It felt so good to have that community.”
This year she is returning with new music. Her album Perimenopop is out on September 12 and Sophie says that it’s her way of showing the world there is no age limit on pop music.
She added: “There’s still this idea that only young people make pop music. As soon as I had the new album title, I felt like, ‘Now I can literally be myself.’ This album is about poking fun at this gloomy chapter and the narrative around it that women should be quietening down and becoming invisible. I don’t feel like that at all.”
Read the full interview with Sophie in the August issue of Good Housekeeping UK.
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