With a lockdown baby, a new album and an upcoming tour, Ellie Goulding has much to celebrate

You’ve had a busy year, I remark to Ellie Goulding, 36, as she catches her breath after a five-hour photoshoot. ‘I’ve had a busy life,’ she says pointedly, cracking open a peach-flavoured Hard Seltzer, her comedown drink of choice.

But truly, one look at her schedule is enough to make me feel anxious. It looks like a cross between Billie Piper’s hugely stressful I Hate Suzie and the political drama Borgen.

She is the sort of pop star who counts her song streams in the billions at the same time as being a UN Goodwill Ambassador for climate issues who speaks about coral reef depletion at COP27, and travels to wartorn Kyiv as the guest of President Zelensky.

In between there are Royal Variety Performances, awards shows, chat-show appearances, recording sessions for her fifth album and rehearsals for the forthcoming tour.

Oh, and did I mention she has a toddler? How does she manage that one? ‘As best as I possibly can,’ she grimaces.

But really, it has been like this ever since Goulding was first catapulted to fame in 2010 at the age of 23. She was born and raised in Herefordshire, and her parents – Arthur, a funeral director, and housewife Tracey – separated when she was five (she has three siblings: brother Alex and sisters Isabel and Jordan). She attended the local high school then studied drama at the University of Kent, where she met her manager Jamie Lillywhite (son of Steve Lillywhite and Kirsty MacColl) and began writing music.

We’re sitting on chairs on a balcony outside the photo studio, looking over wintry London, seagulls and crows circling in the cold blue sky. She’s sporting a Stella McCartney puffer jacket and new brunette hairdo, having been blonde for most of her adult life. ‘I’ve never had so many compliments about anything,’ she says. ‘It’s great, I don’t get recognised as much.’

In the course of our conversation, Goulding proves reflective, intelligent and surprising (she wants to make an album of classical music, she hadn’t heard of Fleetwood Mac until she was 18 and she really does know a lot about ocean biodiversity).

She also talks about her at times crippling chronic anxiety – so bad, you have to say she’s done well to remain where she is. ‘I think I have, too,’ she laughs. ‘My new thing is that I have to acknowledge how well I’ve done.’

One thing she does well is pure pop music. It pours out of her new album, Higher Than Heaven, for which I think the technical term is absolute banger. Her last album, Brightest Blue, was more personal – all nature and relationships – but this one is her doing what she thinks she is best at: big, shiny pop songs.

Jumpsuit, Alberta Ferretti. ‘7’ necklace, Persée Paris. Lariat necklace, Kimaï. Rings: Elhanati, Matilde Jewellery

‘Pop will always be my joy. I love – love – coming out with a song and going: ‘F***! That’s good. People are going to be dancing to that.’ It’s hard not to be excited by that.’ When we talk she is about to go on tour for the first time in years and can’t wait. She’s just got to arrange the schedule so her son Arthur, who is two in April, can accompany her.

She’s been open in the past about the pregnancy not being planned – it ‘just sort of happened’ during lockdown, when she and husband Caspar (Jopling, an Old Etonian and former Sotheby’s art dealer, whom she wed in 2019) moved to Oxfordshire and life calmed down a bit. (When I ask about their quite different upbringings, she says; ‘I don’t think background matters when you love someone, does it?’)

Jopling, their Spanish nanny and Goulding’s own family can all help out with the childcare, she says – but that’s just the practical side of things. What she hadn’t factored in was how much she would want to be with Arthur. ‘Even being away from him today, I’d love to just hang out with him, watch him play, watch him eat – watch him do anything.’

Jacket and skirt, Christopher Kane. Sandals, Aquazzura. Earrings: Maria Tash, Roxanne First, Kirstie Le Marque. Rings: Persée Paris, Annoushka, Cece Jewellery

The arrival of a child, however welcome, is a huge upheaval. Goulding formerly managed her anxiety with exercise – long-distance runs, high-intensity interval training – but that hasn’t been possible, and so she’s had to readjust again. ‘Post-Arthur, I’ve been more focused on trying to get myself balanced again and my nervous system back to normal. I’ve become quite geeky about it.’ The mildly alcoholic, zero-sugar peach drink is one of a few little crutches (yoga, weights, magnesium, the herbal supplement ashwagandha) upon which she relies. ‘When you’ve got anxiety, you have to overcompensate with relaxing things a bit more,’ she says. ‘I’ve got so much adrenaline all the time.’

Goulding has never been reticent about sharing all this with her large social media following. ‘It’s such a lonely and terrifying experience that I hate the thought of young people going through it by themselves,’ she says. And she is open now about the fact that it doesn’t necessarily go away, even when your life is as rich as hers appears to be. She has long suffered from imposter syndrome and says she is still trying to figure it out. ‘It’s a daily thing I deal with,’ she says. ‘I guess having Arthur created so many new neural pathways. So, it’s clearly tapped into that anxiety again – and now I spend my days just trying to keep myself balanced.’

She is trying to focus on the many positives – and she has noticed plenty since she became a mother. She can play with Arthur for hours on end, which is something so many of us lose and, I’m sure, would love to have back. ‘I can share his joy in silly little things like taking off lids of jars and putting them back on. I’ve found ways of saying no without saying no. I think it’s made me a better person.’

She now at least has the distance to understand what was happening to her in the early days of fame, when she says she couldn’t travel to the studio without putting a pillow over her face, since everything she looked at could trigger a panic attack. ‘The problem was that I wasn’t dealing with it as it came to me,’ she says. ‘I was just kind of shaking it off and all this panic and anxiety was being filed.’ It’s an image she returns to: a panic attack is when the filing cabinet bursts open and everything pours out. ‘When you panic, you think you’re going to die. You feel like these are your last moments on earth. Your body is telling you that. Your brain is telling you that if you don’t leave this situation, you are going to die. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s just such a horrible feeling and for a while, it dictated my life.’

Top and skirt, Zimmermann. Earrings, Maria Tash, Roxanne First, Kirstie Le Marque. Rings, Persée Paris, Annoushka

She is a thoughtful critic of social media, and the way so many of us feel the need to keep feeding the algorithm with fresh content about ourselves. ‘You’re putting yourself out there because that’s the currency of today. It’s like ‘More, more, more! Put up a TikTok. We want another one!’

But surely, I suggest, she has at least reached a stage in her career where she doesn’t have to do that if she doesn’t want to? Beyoncé and Adele keep their private lives well hidden. I’m sure that leaving behind her 14 million Instagram followers would come at a cost – but she presumably has the money and connections to carry on making the music she wants to make? But this is not how she sees it. ‘You’re putting yourself out there because it’s part of your job, and if you are not present in people’s minds then you go away – and another artist takes your place. That’s the conveyor belt it is now.’ Besides, she doesn’t want to quit. ‘Because, you know, I’m quite good on the old TikTok! And I’ve been doing it long enough to know when I have to set a boundary.’

Speaking of which, I can’t help wondering what prompted her to address the infamous Ed Sheeran-Niall Horan controversy the other day? In case this one passed you by, it has long been speculated that Sheeran and Goulding dated in the early 2010s (though Goulding has always denied this) and that Sheeran wrote his ill-tempered 2014 hit, ‘Don’t’, in response to Goulding cheating on him with Horan, then a member of the boy band One Direction. ‘I never saw him as a threat/’Til you disappeared with him to have sex’ is one couplet.

Goulding has long declined to comment on the matter – but did recently respond to a fan’s TikTok comment on the episode with an emphatic: ‘False!!!!’ How come?

‘I think I was really drunk when I wrote that, yeah,’ she says sheepishly. And then she sits up. ‘It’s fascinating how many people are interested in that. It happened nine years ago.’ She and Sheeran never dated, she stresses. And she defends his right to use whatever he wants as inspiration for his songs. But clearly, this is a raw nerve. ‘You know, completely honestly, it caused me a huge amount of… stress is not the word. It caused me a lot of trauma, actually.’

This is clearly not somewhere that Goulding wanted to go, but here we are. ‘How old were we, 23? I envy the fact that my friends just spent their 20s having flings and one-night stands and what every 20-something goes through in private. But every single thing I did was written about. I was made to feel like a terrible person and I really struggled with that because I know I’m not.’

It was this type of scrutiny that prompted the five-year hiatus between her third album, Delirium (2015) and Brightest Blue (2020), which she now suggests damaged her career. ‘I can laugh about it now but it changed things for me,’ she says. ‘I became kind of reclusive. I didn’t want to perform. That’s why I wrote that comment, because every day I get comments about this stupid teenage situation. It was nothing and it was private – and it caused me such a huge amount of grief and I resent it.’

Has she discussed it with Ed Sheeran? ‘Of course! It is in the past and we’re friends. We’re adults. Sorry, I’m not… I’m shivering because I’m cold,’ she says.

She is heartened that record labels are now taking more responsibility for the mental health of young musicians. ‘It is not a normal job to be photographed every day, to be on television, to be doing photoshoots with 1,000 people watching you while they tell you to do weird poses. It’s not normal to be scrutinised for your lyrics. I watch politicians and wonder how they manage to hack it.’

Many politicians don’t, I say, citing the recent resignation of New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. ‘That’s the thing,’ she agrees. ‘People don’t want to be politicians any more and I don’t blame them. Politicians are being physically assaulted and a couple have died doing their job – it’s scary.’

I recall that she has seen the pressures on politicians and ex-politicians first-hand, as part of her UN ambassadorial duties, which have brought about friendships with the likes of former Richmond Park MP Zac Goldsmith. ‘There are great environmentalists out there and they don’t want to go anywhere near politics. Kids are seeing this and feeling hopeless about it all.’

She feels that both of these problems – the climate crisis and the mental health crisis – are more connected than most people assume. ‘Being back in nature is the most valuable thing you could do.’ She regularly goes for walks in the countryside, leaving her phone behind – much as she did as a schoolgirl growing up on the Welsh borders. But it’s not so easy to escape. She recently went whale-watching in Norway and describes observing from the boat as the enormous mammals surfaced as a near-religious experience. Then she turned around and realised, as in a dystopian sci-fi film, that everyone else on the boat was looking at the whales through their phones. ‘I think it’s this new addiction to being seen – to your value being based on what you’ve been doing and who you’ve been with. I think if the demand for that went down, people wouldn’t be on their phones so much.’

But I return to my point: she could remove herself from all that, go for walks in the countryside with Arthur, record that classical album she wants to make, campaign for biodiversity – and let all of that melt away. ‘No,’ she insists. ‘It’s my job and I absolutely love it. It’s what I always wanted to do. I don’t want to take myself away from it.’

I can’t help noticing that for someone who suffers from chronic anxiety, she certainly seems to put herself into a lot of anxiety-inducing situations – that visit to Kyiv being a case in point.

‘Everything scares me,’ she laughs. ‘That’s unfortunately what it’s like having an anxiety disorder, which apparently I have. At the same time, I can put myself on a train to Ukraine and I can put myself in scary situations. I’m trying to be afraid of less. That’s no way to live life. And the joys outweigh the bad things. I get to play live in London for the first time in a couple of years and I’m really excited about it. It is anxiety inducing but I wouldn’t change it.’

And really, why should she?

Ellie’s latest album Higher Than Heaven will be released by Polydor on 24 March