Ellie Goulding: the wedding singer

Elena Jane Goulding was born in December 1986 and grew up with her mother, brother and two sisters in the village of Lyonshall, near Hereford, on the border of England and Wales - 'literally the middle of nowhere'. Her father, a punk musician who played in a number of bands, none successful, left when Ellie was five; she hasn't seen him for years. 'I wonder what he's like, what sort of person he is now; I don't really know.' The family were poor: 'Growing up it was about survival; about whether there was enough money to put in the electricity meter or pay the rent.' She shared a bedroom with her sisters, one older, one younger, to whom she was not close growing up, but missed when she left home for university. 'I had my own room and I didn't like it because I didn't have anyone around me.' Her mother, a super-market worker (now a pharmacist, Ellie tells me proudly, 'a really cool job'), was an art-school dropout who passed on a love of music, from indie- rock to house; but Ellie detested her mum's new partner, a lorry driver.

Ellie was an oddball, a black sheep, a neurotic kid with an overactive imagination. 'I would read about meteorites and then spend weeks worrying that one would hit the Earth.' She was talented, too, and showed sufficient promise on the clarinet at the age of nine that her school helped her family to pay for one; she progressed to the guitar at 15. As a child she also began affecting the rounded vowels and crossed 't's of received pronunciation, in contrast to her siblings' broad Herefordshire accents. 'I watched a lot of films and television and I realised there was this whole other accent, like the one news presenters have, so I copied that. That's why it appears I speak quite well, but I'm not meant to.'

Years later, Ellie would relive this personal transformation with the therapist she saw in the wake of her panic attacks. She had the classic symptoms: chest pains and tingling in her left arm; 'I thought I was having a heart attack.' She was also unable to keep food down, had a rapid heartbeat and increasingly morbid thoughts. It lasted, on and off, for six days and she became convinced she would die. An ex-boyfriend took her to hospital, where she found herself breathing into a paper bag to try to regulate her breath and regain control. Soon after, she went into therapy.

'People instantly dismiss therapy as something for mental people - ha-ha, that's a [Ricky] Gervaisism, isn't it? "That's mental!" - but I truly believe in it, I believe in untangling things. My therapist explained that when I started teaching myself to speak differently, I was giving myself the pressure of being this other person and succeeding. But there's another girl who was meant to go down the bad route - dead-end jobs, taking drugs, being gobby, not giving a f***. And that's my dark side, I suppose, and I have to accept it will never fully leave me.'

It was her close friend (who she doesn't want to name) who ultimately prevented Ellie from going down the bad route. Or, rather, it was what happened to him. They had been 'thick as thieves' at school. Like Ellie, he was a bright kid from a struggling family, but somewhere between education and adulthood, he got caught up in the rave scene and started taking a lot of acid. 'For people growing up in the countryside with not much to do, it's so easy to fall into the trap of taking drugs and going to raves. You feel as if you've nothing to lose - but you have. The acid changed his brain; it was like he couldn't take the weight of the world. He just started spiralling, overthinking everything.' He ended up in an institution. 'I think he's still there now. I hope he's OK, I haven't spoken to him in a while'

Ellie briefly flirted with the rave scene, too. Her experiences inform the lyrics of her hit 'Starry-Eyed' - 'So we burst into colours, colours and carousels/Fall head first like paper planes in a playground game.' But what happened to her friend was a wake-up call; she went to study drama at the University of Kent, where she performed at student gigs, then moved to London to pursue a record deal. She never looked back.

She seems over her troubles now, though she still has a thin skin. 'I take criticism so seriously, to the point that I end up agreeing with them. I think it was Graham Norton who questioned on live TV whether I was the right choice to do the royal wedding - and I sort of believed him.' Did that affect your per-formance? 'Oh no, I'm very different on stage. I think confidence comes from having done it quite a lot and knowing what to expect. And there's another attitude that takes over and I think, "F*** it, I deserve to do well." '

On the morning of her second Dublin show, I meet Ellie at 10am at her hotel's gym. Schedule permitting, she trains for two hours every day. Her blonde hair is scraped back in a ponytail and she wears shorts, vest, trainers and no make-up. What follows is a punishing session that begins on the running machine, progresses to endless stomach crunches, medicine-ball lifts, squats, lunges, dumbbell curls, spinning capoeira kicks, the full splits and ends, surreally, with me wicketkeeping while Ellie does a headstand.

'I feel awful if I don't train,' she says. 'Just really depressed. I guess there's something behind it psychologically that I don't fully understand. I have to exercise as much as I can.' Later, over a chicken salad and mineral water, we return to the theme of running, her favourite discipline. Ellie loves it so much she even meets fans for 5km runs. She feels less 'embarrassed' when there is something to focus on. 'People say I'm a geek, that it's not very rock'n'roll,' she says. 'But they don't get it. To me, running is about survival. Literally wanting to survive. So much can go wrong in life. I could lose everything, but I'd still have my strength. And it's a lot of strength. I pride myself on that.'

Not that running always elevates her mood. 'It can make my darkness worse. The clearer my head is, the more I can see how f***ed up things are: messed-up relationships, things in my past, my broken family'

Ellie doesn't remain in the doldrums for long, though - life right now is too sweet. Besides, her manager, Jamie Lillywhite, keeps her on the right track: 'Whenever I'm being negative, he picks me straight back up and makes me realise that things aren't bad at all.' Another knock-on effect of her performance at the royal wedding is her increased profile in the States. 'They were fascinated by the wedding,' she says.

So she is off to America again soon. Then, after a royally deserved rest, she will begin work on the notoriously tricky second album. 'I've a feeling it will be less electronic and it is going to be darker,' she grins. 'A lot darker.' ES