It’s been just a couple of days since the final bars of music have rung out at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, and for English blues/roots/Americana artist Elles Bailey it’s been a particularly wonderful experience as she made her debut performing on the Avalon stage alongside artists such as Newton Faulkner and New Model Army. When asked to paint a picture of the event it’s with a huge smile that she replies “I loved every single minute of it! I loved it as an attendee, I loved playing it!”. And it’s in the afterglow of Elles performance at this incredible festival that we now turn our attention to Beneath The Neon Glow, Elles’ brand new studio album. It’s no understatement that this record is perhaps as close to perfection as you can get. The songwriting is absolutely exquisite and it’s an album of the most wonderfully upbeat and heartfelt tracks, with perhaps the most passionate and emotive vocal performances that we’ve ever seen Elles deliver. It’s an enormous privilege to genuinely feel as though we are witnessing a game-changing moment in music. We catch up with Elles at her Bristol home to talk about how this masterpiece came together. As she busily puts some personal touches to the special edition, official bootleg versions of the album, we make ourselves comfortable and our conversation begins…

You have created an absolutely stunning album in Beneath The Neon Glow! The first track I’d like to talk about is the album’s opener, Enjoy The Ride. It’s a hugely uplifting track and the perfect track to kick off the record. Lyrically it made a massive impact on me because it kind of presented my life back to me, always focussed on the big challenges ahead of me. Overall, the song is the perfect reminder that sometimes it’s about being in the moment and taking the opportunity to look around and remind yourself of everything that’s wonderful that’s going on in the ‘here and now’. Where did inspiration for this track come from?

First of all, I love that you resonated with that because for me it’s a really specific song. It’s about my journey as an artist. A little backstory is very early on in my career I met Mark Ede who is Jo Harman’s manager and he’s a very outspoken. He can be quite controversial and he’s got lots of opinions. We met backstage at a gig and there was a piano and he was like “What do you do?” and I said “Oh, I’m a singer-songwriter” and he went “Play me a song”. So I sat down and played him a song and he was like “You’re quite good, aren’t you?” and I said (modestly) “I’m alright!”. He said “Do you know what? There is no destination in this musical journey, you’ve just got to enjoy the journey!”. When we were sitting down to write this song, it was the last song we wrote before the album and I’d actually been writing Leave The Light On that morning with Will Edmunds and we invited Ash Tucker in who came a bit later to write what would end up being Enjoy The Ride. I remember sitting there with my head in Leave The Light On but it still wasn’t finished. I really wanted to put it on the record but we still hadn’t got it right. I was thinking ‘How the hell am I gonna get my head out of Leave The Light On and we find something different to write about?’. So we were all sat and listening to some music and having a cup of tea and Ash turned around and said “Elles, people look up to you as an artist, you champion emerging acts. What would you say to them? What would be your piece of advice? If you could put a piece of advice in a song, what would it be?” and I was like “Enjoy the ride”. You’ve got to enjoy it because it’s fricking hard. It’s really hard work! If you’re not enjoying it, there’s no point doing it. So I made a cup of tea and went to the bathroom and then the lyrics ‘I’m pretty sure there’s not a pot of gold where the colours end, but I’ll blend up all the pigments and paint a picture’ came to me. And I thought that that was a pretty good answer! Essentially, we’re always told to chase the rainbow and to look for the pot of gold. I don’t think I’m ever going to be rich from making music but my life is rich from making music. What’s funny is that you talking about living in the moment, that song is actually inspired about the living in the moment, which I guess essentially I hadn’t really thought of. Of course Enjoy The Ride is a ‘live in the moment’ song and I’m glad that you have shown me something that I hadn’t actually realised myself! The other song that is about living in the moment is 1972. So when we sat down to write that song we recognised how we are so tied to our phones. We’re tied to looking down and tied to how we are going to present our lives on social media. We wanted to get back to a time where we didn’t have mobiles and where we didn’t have social media. Obviously, we could’ve said something like ‘living like it’s 2002’ but it’s not as cool as a ‘living like it’s 1972’! So we just decided to pull on people’s nostalgia heartstrings which having been to Glastonbury and seen the nostalgia sets and how people react to something that they find nostalgic, we wanted to pour all of that into a song, about living in the moment. Thinking of Glastonbury, the whole weekend I just tried to live in the moment and enjoy every second of it and then not relive it again if that makes sense? I wanted to enjoy it, be there, live in the moment and then not think ‘I wish I could go back and do that again’.

In an album of absolute gems, one of my favourite songs is the one you made reference to a moment ago, Leave The Light On. Lines such as ‘I need to fly but have a place to land’ and ‘I’m a rolling stone and you’re a heart of gold’ are so incredibly powerful. For me, it paints this wonderful picture of someone with big dreams and a big life but they also have someone amazing behind them, encouraging them to spread their wings and letting them know that they’re always here for them. How autobiographical is this track was there anybody in particular that you’re singing to?

I’m kind of crying at what you’re reading back! It’s really funny when you hear it coming back from other people. Yes, this song is exactly about me and my life! I couldn’t be more brutally honest and I think there is an element of where I feel a huge sense of guilt as well. I think that also maybe comes out in the song. I am someone who feels so bloody lucky that I’m with someone who supports me but also guilty that I can’t see a way of not doing what I do, if that makes sense. I’m so driven, I love it, and my family compete with my love of music and my love what I do which is a real guilty thing to carry. But you can’t separate it. When you do something like I do, it’s all encompassing and the people that are around me kind of have to get on board with that, and that’s a massive thing for someone to take on. The inspiration from that song came when I was up in London and I missed my train home and I’d been away a lot and I was feeling really guilty. I’d been to London for work but I decided to stay late and just have a drink with a friend of mine because I was like ‘I never go out, I never do anything that’s just a little bit for me’. So I went for a drink and I missed the train and I got home really, really late. I was expecting my husband to be like “Oh for fuck’s sake, Elles! You’ve been away so much and now you’re back really late”, but I got home and he’d just left the light on outside and as I walked up I felt this huge sense of like it was a real welcome. It really struck me. When I went out for a run the next day – and so much of this record has been entwined with me running because I’ve had to listen to all the mixes when I run. I’m a mum so obviously I don’t have a huge amount of time and it’s quite hard to listen to music and then be present in parenting. So my thing would be I go out running and that’s what I do when I write songs as well, and it just came to me like ‘I’m a rubber band, and a boomerang, I have to fly, I need a place to land, I’m a rocket ship, I’m a shooting star and I’m always moving forward’. And I am always moving forward… a little too fast for my husband! I don’t know how I can stop running. I know it’s selfish, I know it’s cruel. I see the burden that you have to carry like when I’m away. So it really is like me at my most honest about who I am and what I want to do and I love what I do, and then how amazingly lucky I am that I’ve got people at home that allow me to realise my dreams - and that is my favourite song on the record.

I think one of the qualities that makes Beneath The Neon Glow so hugely special is the heartfelt emotion. The very nature of your songwriting means that to write with emotion is simply part of your DNA. The song Walk Away from the Sunshine City EP is a personal favourite of mine and is a specific example where you are singing about something so intensely personal. But I think what’s really interesting about the new album, and specifically the latest single Ballad Of A Broken Dream, is that the song was more or less complete five years ago but you felt it was too personal to release. It’s a song about mental health and how musicians in particular can struggle. It’s such a beautiful song. What made now the right time for the world to hear this song and how did you manage to hold it together when recording it?

First of all, I wrote Walk Away and a Ballad Of A Broken Dream on the same day with Tamara Stewart. In 2019, we’d gone away to Spain and we wrote six songs and Ballad Of A Broken Dream and Walk Away were written on the same day. So I love the fact that you’ve paired those two! To start off with, I didn’t play anyone Ballad Of A Broken Dream. My dad played it to everyone and he was like ‘this song is so good!’. It’s always been my favourite lyric I think that I’ve ever written or been a part of writing. I felt for a long time that it didn’t feel like an Elles Bailey song so I spent years trying to rewrite the melody and make it a bit more soulful, a bit more bluesy and a bit more gospel, and nothing stuck. When we were picking the songs for Shining In The Half Light, I didn’t send Ballad Of A Broken Dream to Dan (Weller – producer), and then in some random kind of “Oh, by the way, I totally forgot about this song” I sent it to Dan and he was like “Hold the phone! Where has this song come from?” and I was like “I’ve been sat on it for years but I just figured I’d never record it”. He was adamant that we had to record the song and I just said “No we don’t! I don’t think I can do it!”. Then we invited Joe Wilkins who’s played guitar for me for 10 years to come in and pick the songs and do preproduction and arrangements, and he put it at the top of the list of songs that we should record. It was only when both Dan and Joe said that we had to record the song that I thought ‘Okay, I’ll do it’. We then get in the room with the band and they start playing it and we got to the end of the song and I was sobbing. Absolutely sobbing! To hear the song that had been sat on a voice note on my phone for five years to then suddenly be played by the band… it’s incredibly personal… and that’s when I thought it could be an Elles Bailey song. So it was the first song that we did in preproduction and it was the first one we recorded. Up until about a week before I signed off the album it was the opening track as well.

You’ve mentioned Dan Weller there and it wonderful that you’ve chosen to work with him again for Beneath The Neon Glow. He did such an incredible job of course with Shining In The Half Light so it’s no surprise that you’ve chosen to work with him again. You give me a little bit of a hint when talking about recording that particular song but what is it about Dan that creates such amazing results?

I think I’ve probably experienced it more so on this album than the last album. Making the last album was super special. It was really fun! I was pregnant and it was a weird time to be making an album during a pandemic, but it was really enjoyable though! I think the record came out really well and I really enjoyed the process. We created a really special album and I wanted to go back and do it again. I wanted to go back with the same people, to the same place and I specifically knew that I did not want to make the same album again. What I really noticed is Dan gets so into the songs – he lives and breathes them. He’s in every note and he’s offering advice on every little part. Obviously, I work with an amazing band and they’re incredibly talented, and it was very much a collaborative process because they’re all bringing in their own talents and their influences - we play live and that in itself is very organic. But Dan is sat there listening to everything, reporting on drum patterns and stuff like that. I really found with Dan that he’s just so present and in the songs. He’s also a delightfully lovely upbeat human that is always positive and having him in the studio is a really, really important asset. The studio can be really hard, stressful and tiring, and my gosh we worked late! Turn Off The News we recorded at 1am! I’m a fricking mother of a two year old - why am I recording at one in the morning?! I can’t think of anything worse (laughs!) but it was great!

What’s also really interesting is after being an independent artist for so long you decided to sign with a record label, Cooking Vinyl, for the release of Beneath The Neon Glow. It was really interesting to read about how for the release of Shining In The Half Light, the demand for the album was so high that you had enormous problems getting the record on the shelves of record stores – and I’m guessing that there was a risk that it could have impacted your chart position. High demand is of course a great problem to have, but it must have been difficult for you to balance ‘business and artist’. Tell me about how you made the decision to sign with a record label and also, are you confident it’s going to solve the problems you had as an independent artist?

It’s a very interesting question! Well, first of all I was offered a deal on Shining which I turned down. I decided to release it myself and I’m really glad that I did. I learnt so much. As an independent artist I did Wildfire which I released through Pledge (PledgeMusic) which went very, very well. I then released Road I Call Home, also through Pledge which went terribly and I lost all my money. Thank God for the Arts Council because I had an Arts Council grant which basically saved my butt during that time. They were all small releases in the grand scheme of things and then Shining came out, did really well, and then suddenly I was releasing at a level of an artist that signed artists are, so I learnt so much. I love business and I get really excited by it but – and I always harp back to this one moment - the Charts tweeted that I was number 11 in the mid week charts. HMV had tweeted that they’d run out of copies of Shining In The Half Light. My distributors were on the phone to me saying “we need 2000 units in Dartford tomorrow”. I’ve got my tour manager saying “Well, you’re going to Liverpool tomorrow” and I’m about to walk on stage in Bristol. I was like (happy but slightly delirious) “Okay! This is a problem to have – probably a good problem to have!” But it’s also not a message you want to translate when you’re about to walk on stage: ‘Go and buy the album but maybe don’t buy from HMV right now because they don’t have any copies!’ (Laughs!) So it was then that I thought I probably needed to start working with a label. I had wanted to work with a record label on Shining but I just decided I wasn’t ready. After Shining came out was when I thought I was ready to start working with someone. So we just started talking to labels and I think this is quite an exciting thing: I had two offers on the table from two different labels and before they had heard anything – they hadn’t heard any demos and they hadn’t heard any recordings. I was signed blind. I gave Cooking Vinyl the album a month after they signed me. They’d not heard anything before they signed me. So it felt great to have that trust from the label and their message of ‘We believe that what you’re going to do is going to be good for us’. It was a big deal to sign and I almost thought ‘can I do it again myself?’ because I knew I could do it. I’d made my mistakes on Shining and I’d know how to rectify those mistakes this time around. But I tell you what, I’m absolutely loving not having to do any of the heavy lifting! I can actually be an artist again which is great. The problem is I’ve relaxed so much that all of the shitty business stuff that I still have to do as an artist hasn’t been done yet! (Laughs!) I’m like ‘Come one, Elles! You’ve got to do your accounts! You’re so late on your accounts!’ (Laughs!). I’ve taken on management as well so I’ve got management and I’ve got a label. I’ve basically got the whole team around me now and it is utter bliss! And I can say it’s bliss because I’ve been there and I’ve done it and I’ve done the hard work and it feels really good to have got to this point. It’s great to have more time – time to be a parent and I’m really enjoying that aspect of it. I get to be an artist, I get to be a parent and I don’t have to be a label manager of a current album. I obviously still have my back catalogue so I’m still having to manage all of that, the stock and all that kind of stuff but it is manageable.

It’s great to hear how it’s giving you a balance against all the things that you have going on in your life. And I also understand why you asked yourself the question whether you should release this latest record as an independent artist because you must have felt an enormous sense of pride around everything that you have achieved as an independent artist?

Yes, definitely! I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved and even though I’m not doing the heavy lifting now I’m still very much right at the centre of every decision that’s being made. I signed a deal but I signed a licensing deal. It’s Outlaw Music, which is my label, under exclusive license to Cooking Vinyl. So it’s a partnership and I’m really enjoying it. My label manager Tom is fabulous! I even have somebody helps my social media now and it’s utter bliss!

Well let’s pick up on how, as you mention, you are keen to be at the centre of things because one thing I do want to pick up on is the connection that you have with your fans around Beneath The Neon Glow. The way you share Elles Bailey news is like you are reaching out to friends. You have some incredible bundles available for the new album including signed vinyl, numbered Polaroid photos, cassettes, T-shirts and importantly also the ability for fans to build their own bundles. Not only that, but in August you’re going to be doing nine in-store shows where fans will get the opportunity to meet you and say hello. It seems to me that you’re putting the fans at the very centre of the release of Beneath The Neon Glow. To what extent is that a fair thing to say?

It’s 100% a fair thing to say! I’ve been so supported by a very, very loyal fanbase. I’ve been an artist that has gone out and I’ve met face-to-face with fans right from the beginning of my career. I’m an artist that has built my career playing live and that’s a really physical thing to do. You see people, you get to know them and I genuinely feel like all these people of my friends! I find it weird calling people fans. I might have someone helping with me with my social media now but I’m still writing everything – everything comes from me and that’s really important. I always want to make sure that it’s my voice coming through online as much as it is when I’m there on stage. I really watched the power of the fan during the pandemic and how fans supported artist like myself financially. People were so generous. So whenever I do anything, my fans are always at the core of it. I’ve made mistakes and there are times I’ve actually felt that I shouldn’t have done certain things because it may not have been the right thing to do for my fans, so I’m consistently learning all the time. But yes, everything I do is for my fans enjoyment basically. We’re doing a bootleg addition of the new album which has five extra tracks and they’re really exclusive. They’re all handmade and surrounded by gems. I’ve made 100 and I’ve got 200 more to go and it’s taken me three days already to make 100 CDs! But these will be really exclusive bootleg edition, and we’ve done it because at the beginning of my career, when I first started out, I used to make my own CDs and we just thought, because we had recently recorded some acoustic tracks, and they had come out so beautifully, that we would try and make them part of this release some how. So I’ve hand made them …. And I’ve just heard that I’ve got to make another two hundred … so there’s a good few hundred for me to make now on top of the ones I’ve done… that’s a lot of gems ! But yeah - it’s is done in the hope that my fans can try and get something a little extra special.

The rest of the year sees you touring extensively throughout the UK in September, October, November and December. How much you looking forward to getting out there and playing the new songs live?

Like, more than anything! We had three years to get really good at Shining In The Half Light. We recorded it in 2020 but we didn’t have it until 2023. Obviously, we played festivals and we played a few headline shows here and there, but by the time we got around to touring it we were pretty good at the songs! I must admit that I felt this incredible fear about going out and touring Beneath The Neon Glow, again because Shining had such a great reception, it had done so well and was a real fan favourite. These songs, when I was writing them, I really wanted to stretch my voice melodically. I wanted to push myself as an artist and as a singer - and then I basically lost my voice for three months and I couldn’t sing the songs. I was just thinking ‘Oh my gosh! I’ve got this massive tour coming up!’. I just worked really hard trying to get my voice back and we’ve actually booked some rehearsals in which are the first we’ve had in five years. I think we last rehearsed in 2019 or something like that. So we’ve done these rehearsals and it is so much fun playing these songs live, you know? And I feel like my voice is ready to go out and play these songs. Songs like If This Is Love and 1972 are such fun to sing. I think there’s lyrically a lot of colour in the album. There is a lot of light and there’s a lot of darkness so there’s a lot of feeling, but I feel like all the way through the record there’s quite a lot of uplifting melodies and that really comes through when we’re playing it live!