Ellie Goulding steps out of a museum gallery full of monster-slaying Greek statuary, where a string section awaits. Deprived of an audience, Goulding has opted for an elegantly filmed showcase at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her red dress is the sensually bright centre-piece of
blue-lit tableaus.
Goulding’s fourth album, Brightest Blue, is a similarly graceful mix of classical and hip-hop influences, which confidently leaves space for her trademark voice. Partitioned off to a separate disc are the sort of hit-chasing collaborations favoured on her previous, self-consciously “big” pop album, Delirium.
This represents a failsafe back-up for an artist who, having come from a Herefordshire council estate, knows that pop stardom is a job with its own requirements – and one that you can lose.
The simplicity of early hits such as Lights has been rediscovered, alongside creative and personal bullishness, after a decade when Goulding has admitted to feeling like an impostor, smarting at dismissals of her writing and musicianship. Lyrics pick over relationships’ power dynamics, while asserting her strength.
“I was old when I was younger,” she opens on Start, tensed and crouched as if ready to fight. Power, which asserts Goulding’s sexuality after a decade avoiding its exploitation, knowingly sets her apart from the values of previous pop icons: “I’m not a material girl/ Everything in your world just feels like plastic.”
The Fifty Shades of Grey tune Love Me Like You Do is theoretically giddier with sex, though she looks bored reciting its old verses, as drums crash around her. She’s more involved in the visceral romantic messiness of Bleach, and the “dark side” of Slow Grenade.
Arena shows’ usual costume-change interludes are replaced by ballet dancer Nafisah Baba snaking through the empty museum, arriving at its locked doors and looking out at South Kensington as if caged. And then Goulding reappears in the Victoria and Albert’s forecourt pool. Finally, the ambition of music and setting fuse.
Her 2013 No 1 Burn considers time rushing past, suggesting life, or maybe just stardom’s accelerated, alienated version, as a panic attack. She stands in the pool’s shallow end for “Flux”, a sliding-doors consideration of an unlived life with a selfish lover. Goulding gives her voice full rein on the home straight: rap-rhythmic, or impishly elasticating the word “cool”. Her red dress is shrugged on How Deep, as if she’s arrived safely home.
Goulding is still a cautious artist, with one eye on not falling from her peak. But as she sings under the V&A’s sombre lunar lights, we catch glimpses of how good she may yet be.