Wolf Alice interview: 'I often wonder why girls who do get into music tend to be just singers, or else play the piano'

Mercury-nominated band Wolf Alice's singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell talks about performing at Glastonbury and why she feels lonely as a girl in rock music

Wolf Alice (Jenn Five)

The first time Wolf Alice played Glastonbury, three years ago now, singer Ellie Rowsell was 21 years old. It was an auspicious occasion for the emergent London act, and she was scared witless.

“We were on the John Peel Stage, which was far bigger than I had imagined,” she says. “My knees were literally shaking, and I don’t think they stopped throughout the performance. That kind of ruined it for me, to be honest.”

They returned the following year, with more stable knees, and to a better reception. And this year they play again, appearing on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday with what should be a spring in their step: last year’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, was one of 2015’s highlights, by turns limpid and coruscating, an album that managed to take inspiration from the largely wan 90s shoegazing scene and make something captivating out of it. Rowsell herself was particularly compelling, at once the quintessential English rose on tracks like ‘Bros’, a sweet lament to female friendship, and then coming over like the bad-tempered offspring of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on the vituperative revenge anthem, ‘You’re a Germ’.

Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice

Having spent much of the past year both touring and writing material for their second album, Glastonbury seems the perfect place to air some new songs. Rowsell shakes her head vigourously at the very suggestion, and becomes palpably agitated. She bunches her straw-coloured hair up into her left fist and wraps it under her chin until it resembles a beard.

“No! The songs aren’t ready. And even if they are, sort of, they are still in their early stages.” Had they been part of the original shoegazing set, she concedes, she might have felt confident trying new songs out on a live audience that size, but 21st century technology has ruined such work-in-progress pursuits. “People will be filming; the performance will be up on YouTube. And if the songs don’t sound great, it’ll haunt me forever.”

Ellie Rowsell is in an interesting position right now, one common to any singer in a band in which the spotlight falls almost exclusively on the person upfront. Wolf Alice are a quartet – Joff Oddie on guitar, Theo Ellis on bass, Joel Amey on drums - but it is singer/guitarist Rowsell that receives the lion’s share of attention. Consequently, it is only she who turns up for our interview today in a deserted North London pub. She is willowy and waif-like, dressed in a pair of bright blue Levi’s and tiny white T-shirt, her eyes a luminous shade of brown Farrow & Ball would likely call honeycomb. She is sufficiently shy that eye contact is indulged in only when it cannot be avoided, and she spends most of the hour we are together working new grooves into the pub table with her thumbnail. Whenever she becomes particularly uncomfortable, she pulls at the gold necklace around her neck until it leaves red marks on her skin.

Two years ago, she was still holding down a day job in a denim repair shop, music something she played cautiously on the side. The band formed at the end of 2012, and quickly amassed a growing - and largely teenage - fanbase long before any record company was smart enough to sign them. Their album came out last summer, and entered the charts at number two. It was later nominated for a Mercury Prize. They didn’t win, but that’s okay, Rowsell insists. Like much else in her world right now, things like award nominations only make her feel awkward.

“Being well-known, or sort of well-known, is weird,” she says. “It makes you self-conscious. It also makes you watch everything you say in a public situation, especially in interviews, or between songs on stage. I like to think we’re pretty jokey people, self-deprecating – and we can be quite moronic, too – but we’ve had to learn to be careful in how we present ourselves, just in case. People are very quick to take offence at the slightest thing, aren’t they – and then blog about it.”

She was born and bred in north London, and attended the Camden School for Girls where, she says, “I felt guilty for not liking subjects like science.” Her parents - father a painter and decorator, mother an assistant nurse at a sexual health clinic – encouraged her to join after-school clubs in the hope that something might pique her interest. “I liked the music one,” she says. Then, at the age of 14, a friend introduced her to alternative rock. It was at this point she started to write her own songs, which tended towards the plaintive and acoustic, but by the time she discovered Nirvana and The Pixies, her songwriting had become distinctly more gutsy.

“I think I like writing more from a pissed off perspective,” she says. On ‘You’re a Germ’, she sings: “You ain’t going to heaven/ Cos I’m dragging you down to hell/ Where’s Mum and Dad so you can tell them/ You’re a dodgy fucker as well.”

She blushes when I mention this now, before conceding: “It’s more fun than singing love songs, I suppose.”

It is perhaps symptomatic of the world in which we live that Rowsell’s gender is so often the focus in interviews with her, that by being a woman in rock – even in 2016 – she remains something of an anomaly. But the fact is, she is. At Glastonbury this weekend, appearing alongside Adele and Ellie Goulding, her only true female peer will be PJ Harvey.

“I often wonder why girls who do get into music tend to be just singers, or else play the piano,” she says. “And if they do pull on a guitar, why is it more likely to be the bass? Why not lead?”

Recently, she was invited back to her old school to judge a Battle of the Bands competition. Judging by the frown on her face as she relates this, she wasn’t much impressed. “There was a lot of singing at the piano, the occasional ukelele. I wanted to go up to these girls and say: why don’t you pick up the guitar? Give it a try, you might enjoy it.”

And so why does she feel that girls gravitate more towards pop than rock? She shrugs. “I really don’t know. Not enough role models, perhaps? Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly comfortable in the company of men, but it would be good if there were more of us around.”

Wolf Alice play Glastonbury this Saturday on the Pyramid Stage at 3pm. My Love Is Cool is out now