"I was incubated, put in a coma for seventeen days. I had to relearn how to walk and talk – and my voice was completely different." Elles Bailey talks fame, vanity, mental health and the childhood trauma behind her smoke’n’honey battle cry

Elles Bailey studio portrait — (Image credit: Rob Blackham)

What you see is what you get with Elles Bailey. No filter. No subject off limits. No stage-managed Zoom backdrop. And, as the Bristolian singer-songwriter points out with a cackle, no personal stylist to primp her for today’s video call.

“This is how I look ninety per cent of the time. The idea that I’d have to actually put some make-up on and do my hair just sounds horrendous. I would be that person in Hello! where it’s like: ‘Oh, Elles Bailey, snapped again, looking like a bag lady.’”

Bailey’s industrial-strength likeability is just one of the reasons she’s been killing it lately. At the heart of her long-game success – seven albums since 2017, with 2024’s Beneath The Neon Glow making UK No.12 – is her dynamic spin on roots music, making blues, soul, rock, country and Americana sound young and vital, not dusty and dead.

Militantly independent for the best part of a decade, Bailey is now working with label Cooking Vinyl and promoted by Madonna’s PR agency; it’s feasible that eighth album Can’t Take My Story Away could turn her into the kind of singer that Britain reads about over its cornflakes.

“Fame is not something I aspire to,” she insists. “When I look at someone like Taylor Swift, I think: ‘Every moment of their life is documented.’ That feels to me like a trauma. I love Bonnie Raitt, Imelda May, Beth Hart – who have incredible catalogues, but if they were walking down the street you might not recognise them.”

Elles Bailey - Better Days (Official Video) - YouTube

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Bailey’s voice, though, is unmistakable, like dry leaves crackling on a bonfire. “On this album I was trying to find my inner Mavis Staples, my inner Janis Joplin.” She laughs at her impudence. “You’ve got to aim high, haven’t you?”

That vocal, she points out, is the silver lining of almost dying in childhood.

“Just before my third birthday, I got viral and bacterial pneumonia,” she explains. “I was incubated, put in a coma for seventeen days. I had to relearn how to walk and talk – and my voice was completely different. Back then the tubes could damage your vocal cords. But I wouldn’t change it.”

Not long after, Bailey remembers her dad playing roots music around the house. “But then you’re eight years old and you want to be Baby Spice. It wasn’t until my early twenties, when I was doing my sports psychology dissertation, that Etta James’s Something’s Got A Hold On Me came on the radio and just stopped me in my tracks. That took me straight back in – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, that whole Chess Records scene. I was reconnecting with The Band, but also discovering this new Americana, like Jason Isbell and The Civil Wars.”

She served an apprenticeship in indie-rock bands (“You know, that toilet-tour circuit – play on a three-band bill, get paid a pound for everyone you bring in”). But 2017’s Nashville-recorded Wildfire teased out her sound and put her name on the marquee, with everyone suddenly namechecking ‘the girl in the fedora’.

Bailey smiles. “The hat thing… I used to get excited on stage and pull my neck. So I started wearing a hat cos it meant I didn’t toss my head around as much. I’m wearing it less now. If you see me wearing a hat on stage it means I haven’t washed my hair for four days.”

Elles Bailey publicity photo — (Image credit: Rob Blackham)

Since then, if you’ve read only the headlines you’d be forgiven for thinking Bailey has been cruising, from winning Artist Of The Year at the UK Blues Awards so many times she’s no longer eligible, to defying the loneliness that often awaits itinerant musicians, with her happy marriage and motherhood.

Can’t Take My Story Away, produced by Temperance Movement guitarist Luke Potashnick, celebrates the high times on the summery Growing Roots (“It takes an amazing human on the other side of a marriage to accept this is your life”) and a flower power-sounding cover of Catfish’s Better Days. “I hope to god that better days are going to come our way,” she mutters, quoting the chorus, “because it does feel like the world is fucked. But we have to be the change.”

Dig deeper, though, and you’ll find lyrics that must have hurt Bailey to put down. “Starling is about losing a friend,” she says of the closing track’s sad sweep of strings. “She took her own life when I was in my twenties. It took a long time to write about that.

“And then,” she continues, “Tightrope is about my battle with mental health, in particular with intrusive thoughts. That came on really strong in 2017, and I had no idea what it was. For years, in secret, I just felt really shameful. When I had a baby, I prepared myself, like: ‘This is going to get really bad.’ And it did. But the midwives found me help, and it was so liberating to find someone to talk to about it.”

Elles Bailey - Growing Roots (Official Video) - YouTube

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Thankfully, alongside those songs in the tracklist is the gliding Dandelion, whose sentiment can be summed up as ‘life is a bin fire, but we’ll tough it out somehow’.

“That goes back to the pandemic, when I’d take my hour-a-day walk and see dandelions everywhere. I Googled them, and it said they can grow in the harshest conditions, and I was like: ‘That’s quite reflective of what we’re going through.’ I guess it was still in that moment where I was like: ‘We’re all gonna come out of this as better humans, and it’ll be a better world.’ I was blissfully naive. But it’s hope that gets us through, isn’t it?”

Bailey has grave concerns for the next generation of grass-roots musicians (“The industry feels really broken right now. For the upcoming artists that are three, four, five years behind me, it’s just getting harder”). But with a dynamite new album, tour dates in early 2026, her story is turning into a real page turner.

“Being able to travel around the country and pull in big audiences…” She smiles, still a little disbelieving. “That’s what I’ve dreamed of my whole life.”

Can’t Take My Story Away is out on now via Cooking Vinyl and Outlaw Music.

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.

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