She’s fond of reading cookery books too and has something of
She’s fond of reading cookery books, too, and has something of a pash on Nigel Slater “He’s my favourite. He appreciates that you’re going to get stuff stuck to the bottom of the pan.” She’s quite a foodie, actually She orders oysters for her breakfast here. There they sit, oozing and glistening and bulging in their shells “Want one?” she asks Not bloody likely, I say They’re much too biological for me “I love them,” she says She’s not a great cook herself, no “I once baked a cake without flour. It was horrible.”She started writing a novel herself not so long ago, and writes most of her own music and lyrics She started writing lyrics at 13, 14 They were “dire”, she says. An example? “The kamikaze part of me is dying to be with you,” she quotes Oh, I say. “I was trying to understand my mortality at the time,” she explains. Whatever, she’s got where she is entirely under her own steam, without the cynical engine of, say, a TV audition show backed up by a major marketing machine going at full throttle You have to admire her for that, surely Plus.. and here’s the best bit…
she loves daytime telly, too! And Watercolour Challenge, although not as much as Bargain Hunt. “I sometimes delay leaving the house for Bargain Hunt,” she says I try to put a word in for Watercolour Challenge. I say one of the things I most love about it is the host, Hannah Gordon, who you just know is wearing sensible shoes, even though they’re never in shot “And sensible slacks,” adds Sophie “Probably elasticised,” I add, trying to look disgusted. Sadly, though, Sophie isn’t with me when it comes to Pet Rescue because “I’m not really into animal things”.Now, back to Sophie’s story.
Was, I ask, Blue Peter a major thing when she was growing up? Not especially, she says. Although once she came home for lunch and found her mum and Nerys Hughes filming a cookery item in their kitchen She wasn’t intimidated, though Or star-struck “I just pushed her out the way saying: ‘Excuse me, Nerys. I’m trying to get to the tuna’.” Her father, Robin Bextor, is a TV producer who now works for Prince Edward’s television company. Robin and Janet split up when Sophie was just three, but quickly remarried other people, so now Sophie has lots of half-brothers and -sisters whom she adores She attended a fee-paying girls school in west London. Originally, she wanted to be an actress, but discovered she was crap at it “I kept corpsing.” She thought about singing instead She’d always been mad for pop, in quite a snobbish way.
“I was never into Stock Aitken Waterman stuff or Take That.” She was more Soft Cell and the Verve.At 17, while doing her A-levels, she became lead vocalist with an indie band, theaudience, who were critically successful but never commercially so. Still, Sophie had a good time trying to blag freebies from top designers. “I pretended to be my own manager, called myself Anna, and would phone them up saying: ‘Would you like to send some things for Sophie?’” Est?Lauder was the best Est?Lauder sent her a load of creams. “So I phoned them back, as Sophie, to thank them, and do you know what they said?” You sound like Anna? “No, they said that it’s the first time a singer has ever phoned personally to say thank you.”Sophie still uses Est?Lauder, “particularly the cleanser” Sophie has beautiful skin It’s like porcelain I wish I had skin like Sophie’s. I wish I, Deborah Ross, who has flatteringly mentioned Est?Lauder quite a lot in this article, could be sent a load of free Est?Lauder stuff Perhaps I’ll get my manager to ring them tomorrow. Spookily, she sounds quite a lot like me.Anyway, when theaudience folded, as it did, Sophie was left at something of a loose end. But then the cult Italian DJ Spiller put together a disco-ish, instrumental track that he sent to Sophie, asking if she’d do the vocals She played it and disliked it Then she played it again and again and it grew on her.