Warwick’s Very Own: Ellie Dixon 

Ellie Dixon came to university a keen mathematics student, from the city of Cambridge and with a hobby that she didn’t think would become anything bigger: music. The Warwick third-year began performing at the age of thirteen after undertaking GCSE Music lessons which brought together her piano-playing and newfound vocal abilities, and which gave her the opportunity to perform at open mic nights and gigs following firm advice from her teachers (“it’s so easy to chicken out,” she says simply.)

Dixon is a breath of fresh air; explaining that this journey evolved quite naturally, this serves as a perfect map of her growing confidence over the years, and it is lovely to witness an increased ease of conversation as we continue to speak. She recounts that there was a need to start small and get bigger as time went on – for example, she only covered songs for a while and later broke through the songwriter barrier by writing her own lyrics.

But that wasn’t the only obstacle. “I’d point blank refuse to sing in front of my parents,” she tells me. “Singing is about committing; if you don’t have confidence in yourself, you just don’t sound good.” It was only after an intervention by her singing teacher that Dixon’s parents even discovered that their daughter was a talent – she says they were mildly surprised when they heard her rendition of Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ from a class recording. From then on, the formula for success was a simple one – “you need constant support and, unsurprisingly, validation from those around you when you’re not quite skilled but you are honing one in the hopes that you will be eventually”.

Music is a tricky business to get into and if you have a degree in maths it’s not going to hurt

And Dixon’s drive to succeed in this endeavour bore many fruits, much before university life and beyond her hometown of Cambridge. I ask her why, in light of this, she chose to pursue academia instead, apart from the obvious reason that “it just doesn’t pay”. She says her plan was always to go to university; her parents did, and lacking any sense of pride in her words, she mentions that there was never a point where she wasn’t excelling at school. “Music is a tricky business to get into and if you have a degree in maths it’s not going to hurt – I have thought about maths-and-music jobs. Production, tech and programming are all things I haven’t ruled out.”

While she didn’t intend for university to take a subordinate role, Warwick has become a place of realisations for Dixon, and for good reason too. It’s not a university known for its music scene, but it has nonetheless witnessed the birth of organisations like Koan Records, the first student-led record label in the UK. Dixon takes a moment to thank Koan Records for the help it has provided, from bringing musicians together to finding gigs and everything in between. Crucially, it has been a place where collaboration is encouraged and which “inspires creativity that could never be the result of working alone”.

Most finalists are on the hunt for a job after they graduate. But Dixon is headed home on a special type of gap year – “I always have something going on, A-Levels, a degree – I’ve never been able to fully commit. The plan is to go full time and see what happens.” I ask how music can make an income for someone like her, and she tells me one of the best ways is to record songs or covers and sell them on for commercial use, in films or television. “It’s a lot more lucrative than people streaming your Spotify songs – something like 0.06p per play!” After that, it’s the open mic nights (Leamington’s The Townhouse, Leaf Tea Rooms, Curiositea and even Coffee House Sessions in her first year) and gigs at places like Kasbah which provide an income. I wonder how Kasbah is as a place to gig, and Dixon immediately understands that I’m asking how it’s even possible. “I average playing Kasbah one or twice a term, in the side room where lots of bands and individual artists come to play. I did a VocSoc audition in my first year and then, when I got a slot, invited lots of friends along…it’s actually more relaxed than you would expect, so if you play a note wrong no one will notice because everyone’s shitfaced!”

“I write stupid lyrics all the time!”

It’s only towards the end of the conversation that I learn about the real stuff – the music itself. In keeping with her plan to take a musical year out after graduation, Dixon didn’t do an internship this summer like everyone else in her year did. Instead, she spent the entire summer gigging and in her spare producing an EP in her parents’ bedroom using Logic – and it’s the “most up-to-date representation of my music which I can point to and tell everyone, ‘this is me’.” I accept this and ask her to explain it in a little detail for me. “It’s such a labour of love. It’s mellow-pop as well as jazz (though not necessarily production-wise, this more mainstream) but using an electric guitar provided a whole new wave of inspiration. It’s pop with essence of Two Door Cinema Club – but I don’t want to throw their name around.”

And in answer to what forms the subject of her writing, she approaches the topic light-heartedly: “I write stupid lyrics all the time!” and then, of course, it boils down to love and heartbreak, mostly. That she doesn’t write literally but prefers things to be “metaphorical” ties in nicely with the style of those she names as her influences. Part of the list are Adele, Ben Howard and KT Tunstall, all of whom are important either for messages of female empowerment or for their ability to capture an image, feeling or location, and who together inspired her to be “vibe-oriented rather than necessarily content-oriented.” It’s then confusing (and yet makes perfect sense, if you listen to Growing Pains) that if there’s one song that Dixon says inspired the EP it’s something different to all of those. It’s Portugal Man’s ‘Feel It Still’, which is “punchy, and gets you dancing” in a way that Dixon intends for her music.

Just when you think you’re not quite able to relate to Dixon’s musical challenges (how can an artist truly whittle down an EP’s influences to just one, and at that, a classic?) she mentions something close to her heart, a song called ‘Freak’ to which you might connect so much that it may feel as if you’d have written it yourself. “I just wanted to write a song about how we should embrace being stupid and looking like idiots. It’s more oriented towards women, of course. I made a music video for it with funny faces in it…I don’t think the world is ready”.

That’s an introduction to Warwick’s Ellie Dixon – I hope you enjoyed getting to know her as much as I did, and below is the video for ‘Freak’ for your perusal.