This is part of my stage set from Glastonbury 2010,” says Elly Jackson, AKA La Roux, pointing at an 8ft gold- and silver-plated palm tree. “I got lights fitted in it so it’s a lamp, too,” she continues, her bright orange sweater clashing perfectly with the oversized ornament. But we are not standing in some vast storage space picking out old tour props; we are in her living room in south London, where the palm tree now takes pride of place behind her TV. Even her cat Calypso eyes it up strangely as she settles on the sofa between us. Jackson had to fight to get her bold centrepiece, haggling with the hire company who kept telling her no. “They said: ‘We don’t sell stuff,’ and I was like: ‘I get that, I’m not stupid, but I will give you anything for it.’”

Fighting to get what she wants has been the overarching theme of Jackson’s tumultuous career so far, and that tenacity forms the foundation of her new album, the supple, groove-led Supervision, the first on her own label. It is still unmistakably La Roux, kaleidoscopic musical references covering her favourite 80s pop from Let’s Dance to Faith, but it also feels looser, a reflection of an artist more comfortable in their own skin. While the album itself carries a sophisticated ease (its eight tracks clock in at a luxuriant 48 minutes), it was preceded by a nightmare of scrapped songs, panic attacks and life-changing decisions.

When she arrived with a bang in 2009, all burnt orange Mr Whippy quiff and ear-pricking falsetto, Jackson stood out in a sea of TV talent-show blandness. Her success was sudden and unexpected: second single In for the Kill’s metallic 80s electropop peaked at No 2 in the UK and was later remixed by Kanye West for its US release, while the follow-up Bulletproof landed her and La Roux’s silent second member Ben Langmaid their first UK No 1. The accompanying self-titled debut album topped 2m sales and won them a Grammy for best electronic/dance album. Just like La Roux’s music was a throwback to a different time, Jackson kept it similarly old school with the press, favouring sweary honesty over media-trained politeness. “I just wanted to get rid of all the crap you weren’t supposed to say in interviews,” the 31-year-old laughs, ruffling her loose, David-Bowie-circa-Low fringe.

Roux the day... Jackson with Ben Langmaid at the Grammy awards. Photograph: Steve Granitz/WireImage

As early as 2010, however, the wheels started to come off; shows were cancelled and crippling anxiety meant Jackson lost her voice suddenly. “I found success really, really hard,” she sighs. “It made me want to run for the hills. It wasn’t cool to be that popular.” The sessions for album two were torturous, costing her label hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundant studio time, and she and Langmaid eventually parted ways. However, the end product, 2014’s excellent, Chic-indebted Trouble in Paradise, gave Jackson her second UK Top 10 album.

Still, given that five-year wait between albums one and two, there were inevitable tensions with her major-label bosses. Jackson rattles off a list of issues: a lack of communication, a lack of respect, and a lack of a video for the album’s big single Uptight Downtown (“A massive fuck-up”). On New Year’s Day 2015, a letter from the head of Polydor landed on her doormat, unceremoniously announcing that she was to be dropped. “I opened it and was like: ‘Yippee, I’m fucking free!’” she smiles. “I knew how lucky I was to get out of that deal” – she still owed the label three more albums – “but everything was a mess. I had no infrastructure whatsoever and I knew I was going to have to start from scratch.”

Jackson found career advice in the unlikeliest of places. While filming a cameo in the Absolutely Fabulous movie, she got chatting to Joanna Lumley about how difficult Trouble in Paradise had been to make. “[Lumley] said: ‘In the future, a warning: if something’s a nightmare at the start just give up, because it will be a nightmare all the way to the end.’ I remember thinking: ‘I’m going to take note of that.’”

Reader, she did not heed those words. While her new record Supervision was eventually knocked out in four months towards the end of 2018, demoed downstairs in Jackson’s makeshift kitchen studio, and finished with producer Dan Carey (Kylie, Sia, Kate Tempest), it was preceded by an earlier attempt that was marred by destructive old habits. In contrast to her usual openness, Jackson won’t go into details about the early iteration of album three, refusing to name its main collaborator.

“I’ll never go into it in interviews but shit got dark,” she says, before adding that “the main problem was that my confidence wasn’t there at all, still. I felt like [that early album] was displaying the hardships more than the lessons. It all felt really, really wrong.”

Things came to a head at the end of 2017 during a holiday in Greece with her then partner of 10 years. “I was walking to the beach and I kind of just collapsed out of nowhere,” she says, slowly turning her body to the side, her head resting on her fist like a Rodin sculpture. “I was holding on to the floor trying to breathe and I said: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this unhappy.’ I felt like I needed to walk away from everything in that moment, which then made me have another panic attack.” She sits bolt upright and loudly admonishes herself, rattling through a list of questions she couldn’t find the answers to. “It was like: ‘How much longer do you fucking need? What is wrong with you? All you have to do is make fucking music, it’s not that complicated. Why are you so stressed? Where’s your confidence gone? Where did your voice go? And why is this still happening now, when you’re on holiday?’” That last one makes her laugh, as does the memory of telling her mum, Trudie Goodwin, AKA The Bill’s Sergeant June Ackland, she was scrapping a near-completed album. “She was like: ‘I’m going to have a heart attack and die because of you,’” she says, her south London accent growing more pronounced. “Imagine being me! But I knew I had to stop doing things that made me unhappy.”

Once the decision was made, everything changed. “I think that whole process made me see other things more clearly,” she says. She ended her relationship. “I was a mess. I felt unfair about the person I was being, like it wasn’t right to be with anyone else at that point.” She channels this clarity into the aptly titled Supervision, be it playfully poking fun at ideas around control on the disco-tinged lead single International Woman of Leisure or directly digging into the split on Automatic Driver’s loping funk. Not that Jackson consciously planned it that way, with the song’s prescient lyrics, including “sometimes I feel like we’re just pretending”, eked out of garbled melodies she had left on the demo.

While Jackson is hardly a closed book, she has been keen to keep her personal life out of interviews, typically employing the less-is-more edict previously adopted by her heroes Prince and David Bowie. “In the past, I’ve been really nervous about speaking about my sexuality because there currently isn’t a word for how I feel,” she explains steadily. “Androgyny 90% covers it, I’d say, but I’ve felt weird about using the term ‘gay’. It’s not that I’m straight, because I’m not, it’s just that that particular word doesn’t feel accurate for me.” She remembers telling her parents she was in love with her best friend, which came as a relief to her mum, apparently still in character from The Bill. “She was like: ‘Oh, that’s why you hang out so much! We thought you were doing a lot of drugs in your room.’” For a time, she says, she thought she might be bisexual. “But then I thought: ‘Well I can sleep with [men], that’s not an issue, but that’s not the same as falling in love with them.’” She says part of her distrust of labels stems from frustration at hearing people define bisexuality as being about having sex with “anything that lives and breathes”.

A Worthy performance... Jackson at Glastonbury in 2010. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty

Besides, sex is not hugely important to her. “Maybe it’s because I make music instead of having sex,” she shrugs. “I like playing with the feeling and sounds of being sexy and maybe that’s my outlet. And I’m not asexual, either, before anyone starts,” she adds. “If men had any patience in bed they could possibly be of use, but they don’t.” She lets out a palm tree-rattling cackle, before becoming serious again just as quickly. “I just found there was a lot of pushiness around labelling myself. Over time, I’ve understood myself a lot better and now I can be happier with my sexuality. At the moment I don’t feel like I even have a sexuality because I’m not aiming it at anything or anyone. Male, female or otherwise.”

Jackson is acutely aware that, as in 2009, she is still a glorious anomaly. Her recent appearance on Jools’ Annual Hootenanny was a case in point. Sandwiched between the likes of Tom Walker and Stereophonics, Jackson – resplendent in shiny pink bomber jacket and what looked like MC Hammer’s old trousers – seemed like an extravagantly dressed alien. “It’s quite a shock to people now,” she says of standing out. “All the more reason for me to do it.” She laments the end of the era when pop stars could be both otherworldly entertainers and perfectionist musicians. “Now, you’re either PJ Harvey or you’re Dua Lipa,” she says. “As we get further down that line, I find having my own lane in pop music harder and harder.”

But that is a worry for another time; for now Jackson is just happy her strongest relationship remains intact. “I realised music was about enjoyment,” she smiles. “It’s not meant to be about having a hit, or making money, or keeping your label happy, or any of that dirty bollocks. It’s about making me happy. That’s why I do it.”

Supervision is out on 7 February