“I Give It My All!” CLASH Meets Nieve Ella
As the leaves turn orange and the evenings grow darker, the arrival of a new season is something all-too familiar to indie-rock artist Nieve Ella, who has spent 2024 entering a new season of her own. Having released her first EP, ‘Young & Naive’ just last year, the West Midlands musician has since grown a cult following of loyal fans, seen the end of a long-term relationship which influenced much of her earlier songwriting and now awaits the release of her third EP ‘Watch it Ache and Bleed’, which, coincidentally, is to parallel a long-awaited move from Ella’s small hometown to the capital. ‘I’m so excited honestly, it’s about fucking damn time,’ Ella laughs from her Mum’s house in Shropshire having just arrived home from a six-week tour supporting Norweigan singer-songwriter, girl in red, “I’ve just started to wash all the clothes from tour so I’m literally surrounded by mess right now.”
Whilst many artists see the supporting slot on tour as something to dread, Ella – filled with excitement and optimism – relished the challenge, “It feels like a competition where I’m like ‘okay Nieve this is probably what it would feel like if I was on X Factor or something like that’ because you’re winning the crowd over every night. For some people they just see it as warming the crowd up, for me I’m like no I am wanting these fans to be at my own show one day so I give it my all…”
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Performing with flair and style, Ella brings a certain sincerity to every performance and despite recalling her love for live performing, admits it wasn’t something she always felt so confident in, “I used to have to take calming tablets because I was so nervous but now it’s just become a routine in my head. Especially when you’re on a tour which is 20+ shows, every night you’re doing the same thing.” She credits much of her growth to the unconditional support from her band, “We’ll play the ‘cha cha slide’ twenty times before we go on stage and we just love it – it’s just fun.”
The band, who Ella describes as ‘family’, formed organically after meeting through TikTok or at Sam Fender gigs, “I met Fin – my guitarist and we also write all my songs together – I met him four years ago on TikTok on my ForYou page. I put it on my Snapchat private story being like ‘this boy is going to be in my life forever I just know it’ and me romanticising everything I was like ‘boy who plays the guitar? yes – gimme!’ A year later I met my drummer at a Sam Fender gig and I stayed at his uni house because I fancied his friend and I stayed on his sofa. And then I met Fran (bassist) a year later when I moved to Brighton and I sub-letted her room and it all worked out and everyone just merged together instantly. It’s one of those moments where you know it’s meant to be.”
Whilst Ella’s earlier work largely concerns growing pains and first loves, her latest release crashes onto the scene, spinning no-holds-barred tales of a young woman full of ambition and unapologetic joy. Ella argues the evolution in her sound comes from a more recent shift into becoming a music obsessive, “I feel like when I started music I knew hardly anything about music. I literally knew nothing. All I knew was the things that I’d see online, I didn’t really go to gigs, I didn’t really have musician friends – it was just me, in my room, with a guitar and making a world out of it. Whereas now all of my friends are musicians, I’m in the studio all the time, I’m constantly writing all the time, I’ve just become more educated on music. My music taste has just changed and that’s why I think my music has changed with it because I’m just growing with it, I’m just learning as anybody else would.”
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Concerning the new EP, Ella describes how the work – purely accidentally – tracked the process of a recent break-up, “what I find really interesting about this EP is that when I started writing it, without knowing I was writing it, it was the start of the breakdown of this relationship that I was in and then when I finished the EP, that was literally the week I had this break-up.” The relationship Ella describes here, influenced much of her earlier songwriting which, Ella admits, she doesn’t particularly connect with anymore, “I don’t listen to my own songs but if someone were to play those [earlier] songs in front of me like ‘Blue Shirt Boy’ or ‘Glass Houses’, I’d be like ‘who the hell is that?’ I don’t feel connected to it anymore, I don’t mind it, it’s just not me. […] The meaning of the songs are just so cringey but I was 18, I can’t hate them, it’s just growth.”
With die-hard fans who can often be found adorned in merchandise, waiting along festival barriers for hours until her allotted slot, Ella describes a genuine love for connecting with her fanbase, “I’ve always been a social media girly. I’ve always loved TikTok and being active on social media so I feel like I’m just one of them.” She describes how the numbers side of the music isn’t what motivates her, but her fans, who run countless fan-accounts and bedazzle clothes with her name, which offer her a sense of success, “I don’t define myself at all by the numbers, I never have, I don’t really care, I just want to see people’s reactions and how they connect to it.”
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One moment from this summer, which saw her fanbase rally in support, came from a social media storm when Ella took to the stage at TRNSMT festival wearing a black bra over a white t-shirt. Across social media, misogynistic keyboard warriors flocked to the comment section of various videos and posts, outraged at her clothing choice. “You can go through the comments on my Instagram and there’s a couple hundred comments but the BBC Scotland Facebook – the comments! There were nearly a thousand.” Ella recalls, “I went onto their profiles and just thought ‘you’re a dickhead. You’re a father of two beautiful women and you’re saying this about a young girl. I’m sorry for you – I feel sorry for you’.”
“It was so interesting to see women do the exact same thing to me – older women who clearly just think there’s one way to be and that’s sad. It is sad. What made me feel so much better was there were women the same age as these other women and men, commenting back like ‘did you ever see what was going on in the nineties or the early two-thousands? Gwen Stefani, Britney – these are icons who were already doing this beforehand. Why is it such a problem twenty-years later.’ I loved seeing these people who clearly have their heads screwed on – there are good people!” Ella rolls her eyes and smiles, “It literally was the silliest thing.”
“If you really think deeply into the music industry and bands and artists – it’s silly as HELL.” Ella remarks, “The things that I write about in my songs – when I started I was writing about Harry Styles, random stuff, people I’d spoken to once. It’s so silly – it’s so silly and I’m so aware of that.”
Ella shrugs from her childhood bedroom, uncharacteristically wise and down-to-earth for a musician experiencing success at such a young age, “I’m just growing and I love it. As much as I really enjoy this life, I just really like being in my room by myself and scrolling on TikTok, watching Netflix. I clearly just enjoy being a normal person.”
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‘Watch It Ache And Bleed’ EP is out now.
Words: Grace Dodd
Photography: Mollie McKay
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