Photo courtesy of Daily Mail
La Roux, front woman's Elly Jackson's stage name and persona, looks about as friendly and inviting as a couch made of cactus in most photos. Her eyes are usually disinterested slits of icy cool and her posture says she is not that into you. But La Roux, Elly says in an interview with the Daily Mail, is just an exaggerated character she's created and not indicative of who she is in her downtime. In other words, La Roux is not who shows up at the family house for Christmas or the old friend who shows up for a spot of tea in the afternoon. But that's not to say that the bitchy, distant veneer that comes across is an accident. Elly likes her pop stars aggrandized and inaccessible. Source: Daily Mail
She defines her style as ‘androgynous moody bitch’, and then falls about laughing in a very un-moody, un-bitchy way. But there is a point to the look.
‘We try to make the style as inaccessible as possible. That’s the thing that has always attracted me to the artists I admire – you see something and think, “Where do you find that?” No one really does that any more. Everything in the mainstream is so accessible – with certain girl bands it’s like Urban Outfitters, H&M, Topshop… Are they really trying? It’s that culture of people wanting to know where they can buy their pop star things. We’re saying, “Well, you can’t!’”
She laughs. ‘That’s the whole point of being a pop star, isn’t it?’
Elsewhere in the interview, Elly talks about how mind boggling it is that she only came up with the La Roux character and sound a year and half ago, and performed her first stage show as La Roux in February of this year. In that time, she has scored two hit singles in the UK, "Bulletproof" and "In for the Kill," and become the darling of hipsters and celebrities, like Kanye West and Chris Brown, alike.
La Roux's success is trying to break through Stateside and it's going slowly. But La Roux's "Bulletproof" was recently featured in an episode of "Ugly Betty" and the singer will be embarking on a North American tour next year. If you haven't heard La Roux's latest single, the finger-snapping, new age "I'm Not Your Toy," listen to it here.
