Ellie Jackson has never been particularly good at doing things simply because the music industry expects her to.
When La Roux burst onto the scene with In for the Kill and Bulletproof, her unmistakable voice, gravity-defying hairstyle and brilliantly constructed electronic pop made her one of the most distinctive artists of the late 2000s.
The success was enormous. The pressure to maintain it was considerable.
But rather than releasing records to a convenient commercial timetable, Jackson has followed her own instincts, sometimes disappearing for years between albums.
Speaking to Stephen 'Steps' Lowe on RTL Today Radio, she's remarkably candid about why.
“I'm quite rogue,” she admits. “I'm the kind of person that will land on a bunch of success, and then not have the same panic that other people have about keeping the momentum going.”
It's an attitude that has given her considerable creative freedom. It has also made the business of being La Roux rather more complicated than it might appear from the outside.
Jackson's latest album, Old Flames, arrives after a six-year gap. Previous records had appeared at roughly five-year intervals, prompting the obvious question: what happened to the extra year?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Her previous album, Supervision, was released just three weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down the live music industry.
The usual album cycle disappeared almost overnight. There was no proper opportunity to tour, promote the record or enjoy the culmination of years of work.
And that wasn't the first time circumstances had derailed her plans.
Jackson reveals that she had previously abandoned an entire album because of legal problems involving somebody she was working with. Trouble in Paradise, meanwhile, had been affected by the breakdown of her relationship with a record label.
After investing so much effort into projects that couldn't receive the attention she'd hoped for, she was exhausted.
Then came the breakdown of a personal relationship and the feeling that an entire chapter of her life was falling apart.
“I realised I had to rebuild from scratch again,” she explains.
For once, the absence of pressure was something of a relief.
She stopped worrying about maintaining momentum and allowed herself the time to work out what she actually wanted to make.
Not that the eventual recording process was entirely straightforward.
The album had to be mixed three times.
Jackson readily admits to being a perfectionist, although she insists she genuinely tried to loosen her grip on the new record.
After years of taking responsibility for so much of the creative process, she wanted to delegate some of the technical work to other people.
She hired highly respected mixing engineers, waited months for results and discovered that the finished mixes still weren't quite what she wanted.
Eventually, she and her own engineer produced an alternative mix and arranged a blind listening test against one completed by an internationally renowned engineer.
The results were unanimous.
Everybody preferred theirs.
“I was like, I'm not going mad,” she laughs.
The experience reinforced something she'd long suspected: she might not be a professional mix engineer, but she knows exactly how she wants La Roux to sound.
It's a distinction that matters to her.
Jackson is deeply involved in the composition, production and arrangement of her music. She isn't simply the voice at the front of somebody else's project.
And that brings its own frustrations.
Despite her reputation and the success of her records, Jackson says she's rarely approached by other artists or producers looking to collaborate.
“I've never had a single person ask to work with me,” she says.
It's a surprising admission from somebody whose music has influenced an entire generation of electronic pop.
Jackson isn't entirely sure why it happens.
She wonders whether her independence makes people assume she's uninterested, whether her musical approach is too particular, or whether the industry simply doesn't recognise her as a producer in the same way it might recognise a male counterpart.
She's particularly frustrated that people who have worked briefly alongside her can subsequently receive production opportunities that have never been offered to her.
“A guy says 'I produce' and suddenly he gets ten calls,” she observes.
But she's careful not to turn her own experience into a sweeping condemnation of the industry.
She acknowledges that attitudes have changed considerably since La Roux's debut, and that women are now prominent across many areas of songwriting.
She also recognises that pop music has historically been associated with performers singing material created by other people.
Perhaps, she suggests, the problem is partly that audiences and industry professionals don't necessarily expect a pop star to be responsible for the music they're performing.
Whatever the explanation, Jackson would like to see that perception change.
And interestingly, she's now more open to collaboration than ever.
Having spent years generating countless musical ideas herself, she admits that making every creative decision can become exhausting.
She's already exploring the possibility of working with other writers and producers from the earliest stages of her next record.
For the first time in her career, the prospect of making another album almost immediately sounds appealing.
“I've got a new energy, which feels great.”
The new record also marks a significant change in Jackson's approach to songwriting.
She doesn't believe Old Flames is necessarily more honest than her previous work. The debut album, she points out, was remarkably direct about difficult emotions.
What changed over time was the way she expressed them.
On Trouble in Paradise and Supervision, her lyrics became increasingly elaborate, layered with metaphors and deliberately ambiguous imagery.
She enjoyed the complexity, but eventually realised she might have made the songs unnecessarily difficult to understand.
“I was hiding in my music, a lot more than I cared to realise at the time,” she admits.
Her manager had suggested several years earlier that her writing was becoming less direct.
Initially, she disagreed. Eventually, she recognised the point.
Jackson explains that she has always been drawn primarily to the musical elements of a recording. When listening to other artists, she often pays more attention to the instrumentation, arrangement and production than the lyrics.
Sometimes, she jokes, she'd happily turn the vocals off altogether.
That instinct had begun influencing her own work.
The words were important, but they weren't always receiving the same attention as the music surrounding them.
With Old Flames, she wanted to rediscover the emotional immediacy of her earliest songs.
“I wanted to relearn how to become direct again.”
It's not about abandoning sophistication. It's about making sure the listener can find their way into the song without needing to solve a crossword first.
Jackson is equally forthright about the modern music industry's obsession with social media.
She believes the definition of success has shifted away from artistic achievement and towards something much easier to measure: visibility.
“Just because you're the most visible person in the world, doesn't mean you're the most talented person in the world.”
She accepts that she's unlikely to become particularly good at TikTok, but refuses to see that as evidence of diminished musical ability.
What troubles her is the feeling that producing good music is no longer necessarily the most important ingredient in building a successful music career.
For an artist who has devoted so much time to the details of songwriting and production, that's a difficult proposition to accept.
But she's not particularly interested in chasing an algorithm.
What she wants is much simpler.
She wants people to feel something.
Jackson is concerned that contemporary pop music has become increasingly preoccupied with image, statements and carefully managed public identities.
She misses the kind of record that could make somebody dance while simultaneously breaking their heart.
“I miss pop music that I could move to and that was a three-and-a-half-minute magical wonder, also making me feel something.”
That mixture of joy and melancholy has always been central to La Roux's appeal.
Bulletproof might sound like an enormous declaration of confidence, but beneath its bright electronic production lies something considerably more vulnerable.
It's the contrast Jackson loves: music that makes you move while quietly revealing emotions that aren't always easy to articulate.
She hopes listeners discovering La Roux for the first time will experience that same connection.
Not necessarily because they understand every lyric, but because the music creates a feeling they recognise.
Perhaps even one they didn't realise they had.
For Jackson, that's the entire point.
There may also be another creative direction on the horizon.
Jackson reveals that she's interested in composing for film and television, and has already begun exploring opportunities in that world.
Songwriting remains a passion, particularly the challenge of telling a complete story within the limited space of a pop song.
But she would welcome another outlet for her compositional ideas.
Film scoring could offer the opportunity to develop music without every piece needing to fit the familiar structure of a single.
It's an intriguing possibility for somebody whose records have always placed so much emphasis on atmosphere, arrangement and emotional detail.
And while she has experienced frustrations with the way her production abilities are recognised, she's determined to pursue the work that interests her.
For all her reservations about the industry, Jackson is particularly proud of how she's developed as a live performer.
When she was younger, the studio felt like her natural environment.
She loved writing and recording, but wasn't always certain how comfortable she'd become on stage.
Now, after a lengthy absence from major touring, she's found herself performing in arenas holding around 20,000 people.
And she believes she's doing it better than ever.
“I'm really proud of myself this year for getting on stages, you know, in arenas, like 20,000-person arenas, after a ten-year hiatus, and being able to do that actually better than I ever did it before.”
It's a satisfying achievement for somebody whose career has involved so many interruptions.
And it has introduced audiences to a side of La Roux they may not have encountered before.
Jackson says people regularly approach her after shows to explain that they'd previously known only Bulletproof, but had connected with her other material after seeing it performed live.
She's pleased by that, even if her own preference as a listener is rather different.
Jackson admits that she often prefers hearing a recording exactly as she remembers it, through headphones, rather than experiencing the variations of a live performance.
But she understands that for many people, seeing an artist in person creates an emotional connection that a recording cannot.
And that connection is ultimately what she's looking for.
Despite the long gaps between albums, Jackson sounds unusually enthusiastic about what comes next.
She's already thinking about new collaborators, future recordings and the possibility of developing music for the screen.
There's also the prospect of more live performances, with Luxembourg potentially among the places La Roux could visit as touring plans expand.
Nothing is confirmed, but Jackson says the band hopes to reach more European cities over the coming year.
It's a welcome change in mood from an artist who admits to having felt exhausted by the demands of making and promoting records.
For years, success seemed to bring another complicated set of expectations.
Now, she's beginning to separate the things she loves about music from the machinery surrounding it.
She doesn't need to be constantly visible. She doesn't need to release records according to somebody else's timetable. And she certainly doesn't need to surrender control of the sound she's spent so long developing.
What she does want is to make music that means something.
And perhaps the most encouraging thing about Old Flames isn't simply that La Roux is back.
It's that Ellie Jackson already wants to make the next record.
Listen to both parts of Stephen 'Steps' Lowe's conversation with La Roux on RTL Today Radio and RTL Play.
Old Flames is out now via Vertigo Records.
