Ellie Dixon

Eleanor Charlotte Siobhan Dixon[1] was born in Foxton, Cambridgeshire.[2] Growing up, her father played piano and her mother played the tin whistle.[3] She started producing music when she was thirteen[4] after her father downloaded music production software on to the family's desktop, and took music GCSE, where her singing teacher encouraged her to perform at youth open mic nights; she also performed at her school's concert.[5] Originally a pianist,[4] she taught herself guitar after tiring of porting her keyboard to and from gigs.[5] After leaving school, she read mathematics at the University of Warwick, as she felt her performance anxiety would occlude a music career; during each summer, she would release an EP,[5] and these were "Looking Forward", "Jungle", and "Growing Pains".[6] After graduating, she gigged for about six months until the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom.[5] In November 2019, she released "Pressure", an ode to overcoming pressure,[7] and in March 2020, she released "Ugly", a song about empowerment and self-love,[8] which was accompanied by a music video.[6]

After the COVID-19 lockdown caused the United Kingdom's live event industry to shut down in 2020, Dixon began to upload content to her social media.[5] She used a March 2021 interview to state that she spent this period making money by producing other peoples' tracks and by teaching.[9] Her content during this time included deconstruction of harmonies, such as for "Dancing Queen" by ABBA, and original verses for other people's songs, such as "Toxic" by Britney Spears;[10] at the time, many artists were publishing instrumentals. One verse, written over an instrumental produced by Blue Lab Beats, became the second verse for "Space Out",[11] which she released in July 2020, self-produced,[12] and accompanied with a music video in which she wore an astronaut suit;[6] in a December 2021 interview, she stated that she first looked for realistic space suits, found they were expensive, and then looked for "deliberately silly ones instead", selecting one that was inflatable.[11]

In November 2020, she released "New Waves", a duet with Austin Prince.[13] In February 2021, she released "Sucker",[14] a song about a teenage crush[10] which was inspired by Harry Styles and accompanied by a music video in which she wore a heart suit,[15] and in May 2021, she then released "Green Grass", a description of an existential crisis,[16] for which a music video was released. Dixon then released Crikey! It's My Psyche, which featured "Green Grass",[6] "Space Out!",[11] "Sucker", and "CEO of Watching Television", a dig at workaholism which had been released with a video filmed in her flat.[10] Dixon's mother came up with the name while brainstorming ideas while both were dog walking.[10]

In March 2022, she ran in slow-motion through King's Cross, London wearing a space suit and signed a giant Decca Records contract using a giant crayon. A sharp uptick of abuse on TikTok prompted her to abscond to an Airbnb in the Cotswolds for a week[10] and be unable to look at her TikTok for two;[5] whilst at the Airbnb, she wrote her first single on Decca, "Swing!",[10] a belligerent baseball-based response to her attackers.[17] A further single, "Big Lizard Energy", was released in February 2023 alongside a music video and a dinosaur-inspired video game,[18] and was her attempt at responding to her habit of cognitive distortion by imagining herself as a 320-foot (98 m) dinosaur.[19]

On 25 February 2023, Dixon appeared on Patrick Kielty's BBC Radio 5 Live show,[20] broadcast just before a Scottish League Cup fixture between Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C. While there, she performed "Jota on the Wing", a football chant written to the tune of O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei", and about Jota,[21] the then-Celtic F.C. winger.[22] The song went viral on social media, prompting Celtic's social media account to use it to soundtrack a clip of Jota holding the trophy.[23] She later performed the song at Celtic F.C. in front of 60,000 fans during a subsequent Celtic-Rangers fixture on 8 April.[24]

In May 2023, she released "Dopamine", a song she had written shortly after reading an article about brains being desensitised to the chemical of the same name through excess consumption of social media, having debuted the track at a BBC Radio 1 session[25] with Jo Whiley on 19 April.[26] On 21 July, she released the single "Bounce", which she wrote around the same time as "Swing!" and also about the abuse she was suffering at the time, and the EP In Case of Emergency,[27] which had been delayed from 16 June,[25] and which included "Swing!", "Big Lizard Energy", "Dopamine", and "Bounce".[28]

• Looking Forward (2016)
• Jungle (2017)
• Growing Pains (2018)
• Crikey! It's My Psyche (2022)
• In Case of Emergency (2023)