La Roux says she has found the fame sparked by Bulletproof to be something she has really wrestled with.
The track shot straight to No. 1 when it arrived in 2009, yet Elly Jackson — the 38-year-old performer behind La Roux — confessed she felt as if she were pretending while singing it because the song doesn’t mirror who she truly is.
Speaking with Sunday Times Style, she explained: “It’s the song that doesn’t mirror me at all. I’ve wrestled with that a lot.”
“I know it sounds petty to fuss over, given how much attention it brought, but there it is.
“I mean, you could say, ‘Been there, done that, messed around.’ And I’d ask, what was I really experiencing? I fell for my best friend. I was insecure, unsure about my sexuality, never really travelled, never done much at all. Singing it made me feel like a fraud. I wasn’t bulletproof. I’m only perhaps starting to feel even remotely bulletproof now.”
The creator of In For the Kill — who initially formed La Roux with Ben Langmaid before his departure in 2012 — also vents frustration about the sheer number of remixes, many of which feel “cheesy” or push Bulletproof into an EDM mould, a genre she regards as her least favourite.
“It becomes insanely cheesy. It veers into EDM territory. No offence, but I can’t stand EDM. It’s probably one of my least favourite genres, if not the very bottom,” she said. “There are so many blasted remixes that have done well that people now think I’m an EDM artist. I want nothing to do with it! In fact, I’d love this interview to be the moment I say, ‘If you’re an EDM DJ, please don’t bother contacting me again.’”
After reshaping her image and her sound, La Roux now feels more at ease with herself than ever.
“I feel freer than I ever have, as if I’m starting over from a brighter, happier place.”
When asked about the boy-band-inspired choreography for her forthcoming single Night Vision, she recalled her partner’s quip: “My girlfriend teased me, ‘Okay, it’s like High School Musical!’”
“I’m truly connecting with an earlier version of myself. No matter how much I explored androgyny in the past, I hadn’t done this yet. Some people call it a mask; others say it’s a bit trans, a bit masc, a bit Sapphic, or whatever. I don’t care about those terms. Right now, it feels more like me.”
