You know what’s easier than following around your fave pop stars, day in, day out, to see what they’re up to right that minute? Asking them. This month, we nab Ellie Bleach.
9.30AM → My waking up is often from a series of vivid dreams. Last night’s instalment involved an aunt scolding me for being rude in a vaguely formal social setting, colouring the first thirty minutes of my waking day with a sense of unidentifiable guilt and shame until I could categorise the painful memory as a mere hallucination. I have dreamt nightly ever since I can remember, but since I started taking a certain medication in 2020, they’ve been exhaustingly action-packed. Bedfellows past and present have found me both laughing and crying in my sleep. I used to make an effort to begin my mornings by recording my dreams in a bedside table notebook, but I’ve learnt that some things are best forgotten. Not in a deep ‘welcome to my dark, twisted mind’ way. Some of them are plain boring. I take a similar approach when songwriting; if a topline comes to me and I can’t recall it the next day, then it’s simply not a winner.
11:00AM → Today is a band rehearsal day, and like anyone without a rigid schedule, a looming task - in a mere 8 hours’ time - preoccupies my mind as I fritter through admin and chores.
It is worth noting, reader, that I do a series of undignified, off-brand jobs to keep me financially afloat, so I handle my ‘music days’ like a newborn baby, filled with angst and joy in equal measure.
1:00PM → I assemble a sandwich the average lunch enthusiast cannot even begin to comprehend. The Sandwich’s Sandwich. High IQ luncheon.
2:00PM → I continue the slow psychological erosion of a Vinted seller I’ve been chipping away at for weeks. Every day, I hide behind my avatar and, coward that I am, send them an insultingly low ‘offer’ on a vintage jacket that I cannot afford. One day, she will break. Online marketplaces are a hotbed for psychosexual war games. I wrote a short story on this topic at university that I pray will never resurface.
3:00PM → I tinker around with a song I’ve been working on over the last week, transcribing scribblings from my pocket notebook to the notes app. I feel sorry for my future memoirist, who’ll have to trawl through to-do lists and half-baked business ideas to find any unreleased material.
5:00PM → With rehearsal starting at 7, 5 pm marks the start of an embarrassingly early tea. Europeans look away now. We have festivals coming up this summer, and I’m always aiming to transport audiences to the ‘Ellie Bleach Cinematic Universe’, adding in certain old-school elements to the structure of the set so it almost feels like a cabaret.
7:00PM → I meet the band at the practice studio and perfect our headline set. It’s commonplace for bands like ours to bash out 8-hour-long rehearsals, but I much prefer little 3-hour chunks over several sessions, or I enter a fugue state.
11:00PM → I return home from rehearsal with my guitarist, who also happens to be my boyfriend. Moderately knackered, we pick up a sweet treat from the offie and watch something awful on telly, only to talk over the whole thing. Love is beautiful.
12:00AM → I retire to the bed chambers in my signature sleepwear, an oversized slogan t-shirt and wait for the dreaming to commence. ■
