While Sara Cox was covering 135 miles in five days, one of the special musical guests on Children in Need was completing her own marathon. Performing fiery pop banger Hell Yeah, Ella Eyre was unveiling a track from her first album in 10 years.
It’s the pointedly titled Everything, in Time, a record the Londoner, 31, thought she’d never make, not least when she had to undergo major vocal surgery during the pandemic. She crafted the album in the teeth of major label calamities, finally struggling free of what she characterises as decade-long “[music] industry creative straightjackets”.
It’s a 15-strong set of songs that’s a triumphant two-fingers to the executives who told the double Mobo-winner who scooped a Brit award when she was just 19 that she “couldn’t write songs”.
When we meet in a Finsbury Park café, Eyre says she felt the stakes were higher now that, after two major label deals, she’s signed with indie Play It Again Sam (PIAS). “The pressure is on as an independent artist, on an independent budget. When you don’t have a major label footing all the bills that you weren’t aware of, everything becomes very real. Not only do I want it to go well, but I need it to go well, because we’re having to work 10 times harder to get to that point.”
Looking back, being with Virgin EMI, which released her 2015 debut album Feline, or Island, with whom she parted ways in 2021 after they agreed to disagree on the strength of her new songs, had its benefits. “Honestly, the luxury of having your cars booked for you!” exclaims this animated artist swaddled in a woolly balaclava and drinking a black Americano. “I’ve been driving myself to my music videos at four in the morning. But the grind makes it more real. I feel more in tune and engaged with what I’m doing than ever. I am making it happen. It’s not everybody else around me telling me what to do.”
Signing her first deal at 16, Eyre — born in west London and educated at the Brit School in Croydon — had instant lift-off when “the first song I put my voice on went to No 1 and I won a Brit Award”. That same year, 2014, she was runner-up in the BBC Sound of… poll and the Brits Critics’ Choice award, losing both to Sam Smith.
“I remember people… not comparing me to Sam Smith, but it was difficult because we were always level pegging. Someone told me that there was a bet as to who, out of me and Sam, was going to make more money out of touring. That’s not a pressure I ever put on myself. But that is something that I’ve been aware of for over 10 years, and how much Sam ran away with that lead.”
“In hindsight,” she continues, “Sam was so clear in their mind what they were as an artist. I hadn’t been able to do that work yet. I was so young, so excited and desperate to please and be successful.”
She was tapped for her powerhouse vocal skills by Naughty Boy and Tinie Tempah, had three Top 20 singles from Feline. But later, when she’d signed to Island, the results of a 2019 songwriting trip to Jamaica didn’t meet their expectations.
“I thought the songs were for my [second] album. But they didn’t see me as the artist that was making this music. At that point, I had done quite a lot with Sigala. My hit rate on radio was great. What I failed to recognise when I signed to Island is that we were on very different missions. They were like: ‘Why don’t you make more dance music? Becky Hill’s doing it.’ And I’m like: ‘Becky Hill is amazing, because Becky Hill does what she loves doing.’
“So I don’t think it was about me not being a good writer,” she continues. “I wasn’t being supported as a young female in the industry.”
Eyre was also suffering in her personal life. Her dad died in 2017. “I started seeing a therapist a year or two after that, because a female manager — who had also lost her dad — recognised some behaviours in me.” Consequently, she’s been taking sessions every Monday “since God knows how long now. I feel so grateful for the tools that I’ve learned to cope with my emotional irrationality. Particularly with the peaks and troughs of life, but also the music industry and being in the public eye. I definitely have hang-ups about my body and my hair and other things that all have to do with childhood trauma. It’s forced me to have some very good conversations with myself.”
It all led to a moment of clarity. Possessed of a powerfully soulful voice and compared in her early days to Amy Winehouse, rather than make music that would have her “gallivanting around dance festivals”, Eyre wanted to lean into writing the classy soul-pop that spoke naturally to her. That meant finding “a space which is allowing me to grow… And luckily, I was able to get out quite unceremoniously. Thank God for Raye! I think she put the fear of God in all the major labels by going on her Twitter rant. That meant that my label were terrified of me doing the same.”
Raye’s very vocal social media complaints (“I’m done being a polite pop star”) about her label refusing to release her debut album set off a firestorm within the industry. Celeste also recently took public issue about the lack of support for her album. Eyre knows exactly where they’re coming from. “We have a voice, because we have these platforms that we can use. Fair play to Raye for having the balls to do that.” Eyre’s own voice, though, was also literally muted. As she was licking her wounds after exiting the Island deal, she was also recovering from lockdown-era surgery.
“I’ve always had a naturally husky voice. It wasn’t until I was in the music industry and my record label could afford to shove a camera down my throat that we realised that I had scar tissue. That’s something that I’ve had for a very long time, potentially since birth. My mum always recalls a woman in the supermarket when I was a baby saying: ‘Oh, does she smoke 20 a day already?’ So doing 300 shows in my first year as an artist, I was basically running on a broken leg.”
Cue, eventually, an operation to “chop a bit out” from her vocal cords, which led to a difficult recovery period. Recuperating at home, Eyre couldn’t speak, laugh or even cry, because “crying can really affect that recovery. And it’s really hard not to do that when it feels like my life is falling apart, my career is in tatters.”
After a month of absolute silence, her speech therapist asked her to say: “Hi, how are you?” To Eyre’s horror, “nothing came out. It was truly terrifying.” There followed months of “laborious and incremental” vocal exercises. “It meant everything to get it right. I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to do again what I love doing.”
It was actually all part of the process of Eyre reclaiming control. She signed with PIAS in 2023 with the album finished, but then, “I had a heavy break-up — I’d been with my partner for seven years — and I was about to turn 30. It felt like an earthquake. Then a new world had started to grow… I felt like I almost was born again. I had to go back to the studio to write a few more songs. I was like: I’ve had this breakthrough, and I need to write about that. So [title track] Everything, in Time was the last song that I wrote for the album.”
Nonetheless, she admits that she has worried “all the time” that she’d lost too much momentum. “Especially because, lI ove my mum to death, but she likes to tell me every week: ‘Oh, Ella, why are you not doing this? They’re gonna forget!’” But Eyre ultimately kept the faith that “at some point I was going to have my moment”.
What message, then, does she think Everything, in Time sends to her previous labels?
“You caught me on a good day,” she begins with a smile. “This industry can be quite catty. I would like to think that the people who were a part of me before see the album and go: ‘Yeah, she deserves that. We didn’t quite know how to do that — but we get it.’ I hope that they don’t see my name come up on the Top 10 Shazam charts and go: ‘F***ing bitch!’ I hope they go: ‘Fair enough. Good for her.’”
everything, in Time is out on November 21. Ella Eyre performs a candlelit show at Great Hall, St Bart’s Hospital on December 6
