It's taken La Roux – now a solo vehicle for the lavishly fringed Elly Jackson – five long years to follow-up the self-titled debut album that spawned two global hits in the shape of In For The Kill and Bulletproof. In that time she's won two Grammys, worked with Kanye West, toured the world and acrimoniously parted ways with former collaborator Ben Langmaid. For the past two years, she's been making the follow-up,* Trouble In Paradise,* an album that somehow manages to sound effortless despite its long gestation. Fusing lithe funk guitars, smatterings of ’80s synths and a lyrical obsession with the problems caused by sex, it's one of the best albums of 2014 so far.
So we sat down with Jackson to discuss the topics of the day. And, true to style, she was brilliantly frank, unapologetically sweary and gleefully out of step with what seems to be happening in music right now...
Which narrative that's built up around this new album is the most irrelevant: how long you've been away or the split from Ben?
The most irrelevant one is, well, I want to say Ben because it's the truth, but it's difficult to say that without it looking like a dig. He did influence the album because he was there for portions of the beginning of the songwriting and some parts of that still remain, albeit minor parts, and yet they're still there. In terms of the way the album feels and the way it sounds and the artist I've become throughout it, it doesn't feel relevant. It's funny, after you've been asked the same questions so many times you can't remember the relevance of anything any more.
Do you understand why there need to be these narratives when a new album is coming out?
Yeah.
Do they interest you as a consumer of pop music?
It's difficult to say because I haven't consumed new music in a volume for a while, so I don't feel like a modern consumer. That's an area where I find it very hard to be kind of objective, in a way, because I try to put myself in the shoes of a consumer, but I can't.
Are you interested in the context albums are made in? You're a big David Bowie fan – do you go back and read about what he was doing when he made Low, for example?
No. I don't do that personally and I think that's why I find it strange when you get people hanging on your every word because I guess I've always just felt that it doesn't really matter if you're wrong or right about what a song means. You couldn't possibly ever know exactly what anyone means in a song, you'll always be miles off. For me it's half the fun of it – having those questions answered for me is everything that's wrong with now.
Over-sharing.
Exactly! It's totally over-sharing.
Obviously there are a few new narratives now, though, aren't there; apparently you hate Kanye West...
Yes (raises eyebrows). It was taken out of context. The journalist and I were having a brilliant chat, it was a really fun interview and we were having such a nice time talking about music and the record and the sexualness of music. He was saying he wanted to jizz on the window every time he listened to the record so when he wrote that [about her apparently not liking Kanye West] about me I thought, 'that's not fair, you should write what you said to me as well'. He went 'shall we talk about Kanye West? Nah!' and I went 'nah, because no one fucking likes him' but as a joke. But you can't get tone across in interviews and it was so in-between questions that I didn't see it as part of the interview. You learn from those things.
Do you think that's a trap you maybe fell into in interviews around the first album?
It's a trap I fall into all the time!
But you'd rather be like that than a media trained puppet, I assume?
Yeah I would. I don't like being misrepresented, but the problem is that if I read it from the prospective of how I said it then it's not misrepresented because I know myself. What's shocking is when other people read it and go 'oh that's really harsh' and I'm like 'I didn't mean it like that at all'.
The other one is that you're too old at 26 for Radio 1…
Yeah, I don't know where this has come from. I think someone's got the wrong end of the stick because that's not why I'm not being played on Radio 1. I know there was definitely talk about how I wasn't relevant as an artist, but not my age, which I think is proven by the fact that there's a lot of people in their 30s being played on the radio right now.
Do you see not being relevant to Radio 1 as a compliment in a certain way?
In a way. Considering I haven't made an album that sounds like the music that's being played right now. If I liked the way modern music sounded now then I would have made an album like that. I like to make my point with my music. I think my album says everything I want to say about music without me having to say it.
If you could control this interview right now, what would you want to talk about? What's on your mind today?
Really not very much.
When was the last time you went to the cinema?
Ages ago. I went to see 12 Years A Slave and got really angry and nearly walked out. I'd just read the book and I cried several times reading it. I read it in the Caribbean as well and I was staying on a sugar plantation so it was really poignant. I just thought it was the most fascinating story I'd ever read and sometimes I can be unengaged if I don't feel there's some element of truth and a sense of a fake narrative to a fake life. With this you didn't have any of that because you know it was his life.
But you didn't enjoy the film's representation of it?
Not at all. I thought all the parts that suited a film the most and were the most cinematic were left out. Obviously, you never know what scrutiny a film like that is under and I do understand how difficult it is to get a film made the way you want it made nowadays, but it was so frustrating.
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Do you find that with music as well? Did you have a lot of people from the label asking where the album was and interfering?
They didn't really. I'd say the disappointing thing about the music industry is when the system stops working, which is more when your record's out. You kind of get all this pressure when you're making the record and then you release it and it's kind of like you're building towards this thing and suddenly they're going to jump into action. That's the hard thing with making music as opposed to the film industry. With film, once the film comes out that's when they make sure they get their money back, no matter what happens. I feel like there's a lot of 'oh well, that didn't really sell in the first two days, so...'.
What's your favourite song on the album?
That's a really hard question. Not to sound arrogant, but I like them all.
Was there one you thought wasn't going to make it?
Yeah The Feeling, which is why it sounds like it isn't supposed to be on there. It's supposed to make you feel like 'why is that on there?' It's weird, we did wonder if it was the song only Ian [Sherwin, co-producer] and I would understand and clearly it is. This album is very personal, I just like to hide it but that track is actually the most revealing, honest, vulnerable song about the most personal part of my life. If you know exactly what it's about it will make you burst into tears, but I'm not going to tell people what it's about so it will always be the one that doesn't really work. It meant a lot to me. So much of what I like to do is create a fantasy land and that's not just a fantasy land, that was how I felt at 4am in the morning. I knew that if it didn't go on this album it wouldn't go on the next one. Plus part of me was slightly scared of releasing an eight-track album, but I don't know why because so many albums I love are eight-track albums. For some reason, today, it's unacceptable to release an album that's less than 22 tracks.
When people say 'oh you must be a perfectionist', does that annoy you? Almost as if wanting something to be just right is a negative thing.
There's a couple of different schools of thought. I find that people who just want to have hits aren't really that bothered by the stuff that maybe we would spend time agonising over. I think a lot of people think that people who listen to music are really stupid as well, so as long as you write a hook you're fine. The thing people seem to forget about music – again because so many people make it for business reasons – is that they forget that it's not perfectionism it's just about getting as close to what I can hear in my head as possible. If my taste is saying 'this isn't good enough' or 'that reference isn't right' or 'it doesn't make me feel anything', why would you stop working on it? I can hear laziness in a lot of records and a genuine sense of 'I don't give a fuck'.
You've said before that you can hear panic in the songs being made at the moment, which can sometimes be a good thing but also sounds a bit desperate, too.
Yeah exactly. There is so much stuff that I could talk about, but it's always so difficult not to sound like you're making loads of negative points. I am extremely opinionated, obviously, but you know what, and I've not said this before but it's really important, I think it's important to always feel like that person you were when you were 18 and you were buying records and you were out of the music industry. The minute you accept that you're part of it, suddenly your opinion isn't really allowed any more and it's hard to actually have one because you fucking know everyone. And you've met everyone. So trying to be objective and say 'I don't really like that' is impossible, but you need to be objective in everything you do so you can take stock of what's going on in that world and work out what you want to do yourself. It's also a choice not to have friends in high places or that are in bands. I've seen it happen loads of times – you can't have an objective chat with a musician about another musician because if you say 'oh I'm not really into that' and they say 'oh my god what are you talking about, they're such a nice person'. And I'm like 'ahhh'. That's totally irrelevant. So basically I've wanted to work in music my whole life and now I do I can't have an opinion on anything? Can't we live in a realistic society where obviously every single band is trying to compete with another band. There's no such thing as a great band who hasn't sat in a room and thought 'fucking hate that band, I want to be 10 times better than them'. Without that competitive element WHAT. IS. THE. POINT? Of course I don't love everything. Obviously. People are like [puts on snooty accent] 'oh yeah I love her, I love him, I want to work with everyone' and I listen to their album and I'm like 'well that's crap'.
You mentioned in a previous interview that during the tour for your first album you'd learnt what kind of performer you wanted to be. What do you mean?
I started to realise the way I wanted to perform didn't work with the music I was making at that time. I needed slightly new movements, not as in dance moves, but I needed new things, for music to move in a different type of way and make me feel differently on stage. I don't really know what to do with myself during Bulletproof now.
I'm a massive fan of your dance moves by the way. I like how awkward they seem, like your body is moving but your face doesn't really change.
Someone said it's like Michael Flatley Lord Of The Dance in the bottom half and something completely different at the top. Smiling and dancing is naff, isn't it. It's all a bit S Club 7. I hate it when people ask me to smile in photographs. That never goes down well.
Do you think that adds to this reputation you have as being a tad awkward.
Yeah, but I don't understand it because… argh, it's so sexist! Fuck! It's so jarring. All of my icons are male but if I opened a magazine and one of my male icons was smiling I would just punch him now [laughs]. But that makes me seem aggressive. Argh. People think that if you're not smiling then you must be a c**t, or you must be really miserable.
You're happy, right?
I'm so happy. I do what I do and what I do is creative and it's not the person I am 24 hours a day, it's not who I am when I roll out of bed. I think people need to understand there's a separation between the person I am and the person on stage.
There are a lot of sex references on the album. Are you obsessed?
I'm not, no. What I really wanted – and this is the most important part of the record – was for the musical parts to be about sex. The grooves and the melodies and the basslines.
So it's music to have sex to?
No it's not that. People always talk too literally about sex. I think that's what I find frustrating and the album's actually made people talk very literally about sex again. Put it this way, you could be asexual or never want to have sex or had sex and didn't like it, you listen to a piece of music does that mean you can't say it's unbelievably sexual? It's not about wanting to have sex to it, or to make you want to jizz on a window [laughs]. It's about the fact that it should make you feel musically sexual, but it shouldn't then transpire to the next level. It's not about being turned on.
Sexotheque is a different look at sex and how about it can be a destructive thing.
Yeah. If anything the record's about the downfalls of sex. Sex gets in the way of so many things. I've never had a particularly high libido, I've never slept around and I never will, but when you're that kind of person you look at people who do sleep around and they seem to get so much enjoyment out of it. So you try to understand it and try to put yourself in their position. You just learn after a while that you're born the way you're born and this album was about me trying to understand why other people are so driven by sex. When I said I felt sexual throughout the record I didn't mean I wanted to do something about it. It's more about sexual energy.
A lot of your interviews get quite serious, which is great because you have opinions on things, but maybe we should end with some of light-hearted questions.
Great.
What's your favourite colour?
I don't think I have one.
Oh for goodness sakes! Do you use emojis?
Sometimes. The ones that don't relate to the text messages at all. I've used the palm tree one to talk about the album on Twitter.
What's your favourite TV show?
(Very quietly) The Great British Bake Off.
Wow. Would you ever be on a celebrity one?
NO! I only like it because it's like Countdown in that it reminds me of an England that doesn't exist. It's the most comforting thing.
Would you rather wear a dress or a cap?
A cap. That's a hard one because I'd look shit in both.
What do you make of Crocs?
Awful. They're horrible.
When did you last watch Neighbours?
Is it still on?
Oh. What's in your fridge?
Loads of sliced meats. Also my cat has got cat food but I don't think she's ever eaten it because every time I get sliced meats out of the fridge she miaows so I have to give some to her.
Do you talk to him/her?
Yeah constantly. Me and Calypso are tight.
Do you ever worry that you might die alone surrounded by cats?
No, never.
I sometimes feel like I might be one of those people.
That attract cats? Maybe they know that soon you'll be alone?
Probably.
Trouble in Paradise is out now. Download it here.** **
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Follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelCragg
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.