Born on 19 July: Ellie Rowsell, incendiary singer with Wolf Alice

She was born in 1992 in Archway, North London, and has presided over the destiny of the English quartet since their debut in 2013.

With grandparents from Dublin, she grew up in an environment steeped in Irish culture, even if this is hardly audible in her songs. As a teenager, even before learning to play guitar at the age of 14 thanks to the Garage Band software that would eventually become the basis of her first songs, it was words that first attracted her. She fills in countless pages, inventing whimsical stories and characters that become the framework for her first songs.

In 2010, she won a singer-songwriter competition at the Holloway Arts Festival. Unwilling to build a solo career, she founded the band Wolf Alice with guitarist Joff Oddie. The band's name Wolf Alice is a reference to a short story by Angela Carter, the novelist who died in 1992 and is known for her outspokenness and what is often described as “magical feminist realism”.

The quartet self-released several EPs before releasing their debut album, “My Love Is Cool”, in June 2015, followed by “Visions Of A Life” two years later, which won them a Mercury Prize. After ‘Blue Weekend’ (2021), they have just released ‘The Clearing’ (2025), the pretext for a tour which, after the United States, will arrive in Europe in the autumn.

Ellie Rowsell embodies a poetic style combined with a soprano voice that is sometimes gentle, sometimes explosive. She explores themes that are sometimes extremely personal, sometimes universal in scope: identity and femininity, of course, but also, for example, anger and vulnerability. In an interview with radio station Chorus FM, she explained her interest in what she calls ‘dark fairy tales’: ‘I appreciate their metaphorical side and the poetry on the edge of reality that they convey’, she says.

As a woman in the music industry, she hopes that it will finally be possible for women to enjoy as much success as men. While she sees a trend towards greater balance, she also calls for better female representation at festivals. Unfortunately, she has suffered from misogyny and harassment on several occasions. She had the courage to lodge a complaint against Marilyn Manson, who in 2021 had the nerve to film under her skirt with a Go Pro camera in the backstage area of a festival!

Upcoming concerts:

21 November: Den Atelier - Luxembourg (Grand Duchy)

23 November: AFAS Live - Amsterdam (Netherlands)

24 November: Forest-National - Brussels (Belgium)

25 November: Zénith - Paris (France)

And then across the UK

Photo: Ellie Rowsell with Wolf Alice on stage at the Hear Hear festival in Hasselt (Belgium) on 14 August 2022.