She’s sold 30 million records, ‘fights better than most blokes’ she knows and has pushed feminism back into the music industry. Sophie Heawood hangs out with the audacious and unstoppable Ellie Goulding.

The problem with being such a successful pop star that you can buy a beautiful house in central London, is that London has turned into a building site, so Ellie Goulding basks in the relaxing sound of jackhammers and bulldozers. As I discover, when we sit down for a chat in the snug room tucked to one side of her big open-plan kitchen, with piles of cushions, and classy grey and black framed artwork, only to be interrupted by the repetitive thuds of the office building behind us growing ever skyward. And if that ever lets up, then her two slinky Bengal cats come in to trample on some ornaments and walk across my dictaphone. “Aaaaargh,” she says, laughing but nearly despairing, as she scoops up the cats and takes them into the kitchen. Repeatedly.

Curled back up on the enormous sofa, in her stockinged feet and baggy clothes, with no make-up, damp hair and a cup of herbal tea, Goulding is clearly yearning for a small moment of calm. As anyone would be if they had spent the past few years selling 30 million records, gaining almost nine million Instagram followers, hanging out in Taylor Swift’s girl squad, winning two Brit Awards and getting nominated, this year, for a Grammy. This month, she’s nominated for two more Brits for Love Me Like You Do – which went stratospheric and became the fourth-biggest single of 2015 (Adele’s Hello is at number six). And she writes the majority of her own songs, making her the perfect example of British creativity, which Red is celebrating by shooting her with our favourite fashion stars: milliner Stephen Jones, designer Henry Holland, shoe god Rupert Sanderson and NEWGEN winner Ryan Lo.

Ellie Goulding is 29, grew up on a council estate on the Welsh borders, and was told by music teachers she couldn’t sing. She’s now a megastar who flies to LA and back twice a week. I sort of want to take her into my arms and rock her to sleep for a while, even though she doesn’t actually need anything of the sort, because the thing about Goulding is that she invented herself, quietly, out of steel, so she can handle all of this and more. She is at once the sweet blonde girl who sings live on the Strictly final, who performs with a troupe of puppeteers under her enormous skirt at the Royal Variety Show (“honestly, look it up on YouTube, it was the best thing ever!”) and a fighter who can pack a punch with men. Literally. Now she’s trying to turn the tables on the pop world and inject a little feminism into the music industry.

“I’m kind to everyone I meet,” she says at one point, “but the blokes I work with know that I don’t take any shit, ever. I can fight better than most of the blokes I know – boxing, real fighting – and I do things that are traditionally meant for a guy going into the gym.”

Somebody better warn the tabloids, who’ve spent the past few months snooping into her long-term relationship with fellow pop star Dougie Poynter from McFly. In her songwriting, she recently decided that women should be allowed to talk about their experience of one-night stands – so sick was she of songs like Chris Brown’s Loyal that talk down female sexuality.

“People who write songs and lyrics like ‘These hoes ain’t loyal’, which I detest – I fucking detest it,” she says, not actually naming Brown. “Don’t even get me started on that. All these songs about how I slept with this girl, didn’t call her, whatever – well that girl might be the most epic girl ever! And then a female artist will get loads of shit for writing a song about a guy.”

She means Taylor Swift, who surprises people by using her lovers as her muses, something men have done for the entirety of human culture since, ooh, about the Renaissance.

“If we go a little bit further than that,” says Goulding, hitting her stride now, “a girl can’t really sing a song about a one-night stand. Well, I wrote one – On My Mind. [Its lyrics are: Next thing that I know I’m in a hotel with you / You were talking deep like it was mad love to you / You wanted my heart but I just liked your tattoos / Poured it down, so I poured it down.]

“I was stoked to release it because it shows my vulnerability as a human. I was honest about it, I drank too much – and why not? That does need to change, what girls are ‘allowed’ to write about.”

All images Chris Craymer

Goulding taught herself to play the guitar when she was a kid, growing up obsessed with the pop music she heard on the radio, and her mum’s uncanny ability to know when something was going to be a hit. Her childhood was not always great – her dad left, never to return, only to be replaced by a thuggish stepdad who cared even less. There were four kids in their small house in Hereford, and Goulding says she has blacked a lot of her childhood from her memory. She focused intently on her schoolwork and music as a means of escape, managing to pay her own way through the University of Kent at Canterbury. She even invented her accent, listening to Radio 4 and trying to speak like a ‘BBC person’.

One weekend, she went home from uni with a new laptop she’d been writing music on – the bailiffs came and confiscated it when the family were out. (It’s quite something when you think of the other pop stars she’s up against – the public schoolboys like Mumford & Sons and Coldplay, and the other celebrities she sometimes knocks about with, like the high-society model Cara Delevingne.)

Before graduating from her drama degree, she signed a record deal with Polydor, and that was it. She was free. Except, of course, that she is now Britain’s hardest-working pop star, hasn’t had so much as a weekend off in months, and recently tweeted in response to a fan’s question about her insane schedule, performing at the O2 straight after landing at Heathrow from flying from LA to Miami to New York, “I don’t know how I’m alive truly.”

“The band and I are all dead,” she confirms, half joking. “I had to pay for everyone to have IV vitamin drips. Can you believe it? Backstage at Alan Carr and we’re all sat there on drips. The last month has been really testing, on everything. On my sanity, really. The music industry isn’t like other industries – there are no rules about working hours. A working day will start with a 4am flight and finish at 3am the next day. Sometimes I don’t have time to eat. I go, ‘are we gonna get lunch?’ And everyone around me is like…” she does a sharp intake of breath that signifies ‘No’.

Of course, I point out, she’s had the hits now, she’s seen the world, made the money, bought the property – she could just stop. Last time I met her, a couple of years ago, she lived in a two-bedroom flat: now she has this beautiful house with a sophisticated, contemporary, yet slightly Moroccan vibe, an architecturally bonkers roof terrace and a huge entrance hall covered in gold discs and other awards. She nods. She knows this. “But I think even when you’ve made the money, people still want to be doing the thing they love. I know in my heart that if I stopped doing this I would probably get depressed and it would defeat the object. I’d end up very free – but very miserable.

Goulding does love the glitzy side of her job, although she will only describe herself as “vaguely pretty”. She also doesn’t really think that she can sing amazingly, or dance, particularly, though she has dance lessons “to loosen up” and is, famously, a fitness freak. Though she wants to put the record straight on that. “I can’t even tell you what I’ve eaten this week because you’ll secretly judge me.” A list of marshmallows, Nando’s, crisps and selection boxes follows. “It was awesome, and I was like, don’t regret it! Don’t regret it! Then I lay there going,” she mutters, groaning, “yes I do.” As for juicing, she does it, but that doesn’t mean she likes it. “I don’t understand people who actually love the taste of cucumber and liquified kale. I bought one that was five quid! And I was going, ‘this better turn me into an actual warrior or something.’”

She sees how people might not realise how much else is going on. “I would understand if someone saw me on the front of a magazine, looking glamorous, hair extensions in, lots of make-up, and think that was what I was all about. Because I love wearing make-up. And I do like that side of being a pop star. I’ve never denied liking that side of it. I just have to remind people that is secondary to what I do, which is write music. I write it all myself and there have only been a couple of exceptions.”

One of which was the Fifty Shades song, Love Me Like You Do, which had already been written by a team of writers, who asked her to record it. So many chart artists spend their entire lives singing other people’s material, but not Goulding. “When you record something you didn’t write, at first you’re like, ‘aaargh, I’d never say that!’ It feels really weird for me to sing somebody else’s words. And I’m not a huge fan of the Fifty Shades franchise or whatever, but I thought, ‘it’s just a film, I’ll just do it.’ Then I heard the song back and thought, ‘oh shit, this is going to be a big thing.’ Now, when I perform it, it couldn’t feel more like my own song. You’ve got to breathe life into it.”

Suddenly, after scooping up the cats again, Goulding remembers something. “I had a dream that someone came up to me in a restaurant, saying ‘How are things with you and Dougie?’ And I said, ‘How are things with you and your wife?’ And he said ‘It’s none of your business’, and I said, ‘Well, it’s none of yours,’” she says, quite surprised at the recollection.

At the end of last year, tabloids claimed Goulding and Poynter had split up, but they have since been photographed together. It sounds complicated and, unsurprisingly, she doesn’t want to go on the record about it today, admitting at least that things have been tough but she’s in this for the long haul. She says she’s a good judge of character who can gauge people’s intentions towards her.

“When I met Dougie, he had no game. He was just like, ‘You’re really cool, let’s go out.’ It was me that pursued him, very unexpectedly. Before him, I was having a single period and hating all men, saying never again, after a series of things that happened to me. I thought I was going to be single for a long while. But then I met him and was like, ‘uh-oh, game over.’ He was just so nice. So, you know, you don’t throw something like that away so easily.”

Family and close friends are clearly very important to her. A year ago, her best friend from college, who is also her full-time assistant, organised a surprise party for her 28th birthday. “It was in this posh restaurant where rich old men take much younger women, and they were going to chuck Dougie out for not wearing a blazer – he had to borrow one that someone had left behind from Marks & Spencer. I was like, ‘this place is terrible, I’m going to complain.’ I felt like we were two punks amongst all these people eating properly. Then Dougie said, ‘Well there’s a good bar downstairs,’ and I was going, ‘You don’t drink, why would you want to go to a bar?’”

Then she got downstairs, realised everyone was there, even her mum, and had a freakout. “Rather than lapping up the attention, I hid in the toilets, having some kind of panic attack, for an hour. My brother came and said, ‘Oh don’t be a twat,’ and got me out in the end.”

But that’s Ellie Goulding: a shy Instagram sensation, an introverted pop star, a bundle of contradictions. But it’s her vulnerabilities, and her ability to wear them on her sleeve, that makes us love her. With that, she picks up the cats again, shudders at another ‘crash bang wallop’ from next door and heads off to do a bit of shopping at Waitrose.

Ellie Goulding’s album, Delirium, is out now

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