Sophie Ellis Bextor’s 2001 single Murder on the Dancefloor has matched its original highest chart position, propelled back to No 2 thanks to its part in Emerald Fennell’s hit film Saltburn.
Murder on the Dancefloor re-entered the UK Top 40 at No 8 last week after Saltburn premiered on Amazon Prime on 22 December. Many households watched Fennell’s film about destructive desire across the class divide during the festive season – and shrivelled on the sofa when they realised that the country-house flick, set in 2007, was more debased than your average Downton episode.
In Saltburn, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is a social outcast at Oxford University who becomes infatuated with Felix (Jacob Elordi), a to-the-manner-born fop who invites him to the family’s titular stately home. Murder on the Dancefloor is wielded fairly literally in the final scene, soundtracking Oliver’s triumphant naked dance through the estate that he has acquired without recourse to deeds and the Land Registry. When one fan tweeted Ellis-Bextor to ask if she had envisaged the song being used in such a way when she wrote it, she replied: “Yes, absolutely.”
Ellis-Bextor, 44, has previously spoken of feeling out of place when she was sent to private school, but said her experiences “can’t compare” with those depicted in the film. “Looking back, there were quite a few people who felt on the outside,” she told the Guardian. “I think what Emerald did so brilliantly is that everyone can relate to that feeling of walking into some environment and thinking, ‘Oh my God, these people have been raised very differently to me, and I didn’t realise that was an option’ – observing the differences and feeling like a different breed of person completely.”
Fennell was born into privilege and went to Oxford. “She’s been observing these things for a long time,” said Ellis-Bextor, “culminating in these caricatures, of course, but you still recognise them – that effortless, entitled privilege that goes along with having every advantage in life. We’ve all seen that – people just floating through experiences because if this one doesn’t work out, there’s another one around the corner. Some people live like that all the time.”
One Saltburn TikTok trend shows rich kids prancing through their own lavish homes to Ellis-Bextor’s song (albeit fully clothed), which provoked commentary that either they had missed the point of the film – or that Fennell’s intended class satire had missed its mark. “Insane,” Ellis-Bextor said of the videos. “So funny.” As her song began rising in popularity, she recorded her own dancing TikTok in a hotel on New Year’s Eve. Far from a country house, “everyone thought I was in a Wetherspoon’s”, she said. Elsewhere, Saltburn star Richard E Grant and Paris Hilton have made videos using the song.
Saltburn has found a widespread audience among Gen Z despite divisive reviews. Critic Simran Hans was one of many to pan the film, and theorised that its brash music-video-style set-pieces, such as Oliver’s naked dance, have a “screen-shottable, meme-able quality, to the point where it actually works better out of context” – to wit, Saltburn-themed videos have accumulated 4bn views on TikTok. “It’s telling that it’s resonated most with a Gen Z audience, many of whom have likely enjoyed a piecemeal version of it online,” said Hans.
This week Murder on the Dancefloor – which began life as a demo by the New Radicals songwriter Gregg Alexander – also made its US Hot 100 debut at No 98. It is the latest catalogue hit to experience a chart spike thanks to a well-placed sync or viral moment. Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill reached No 1 in 2022 thanks to a spot in Stranger Things, 37 years after its original release. And in 2020, Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams returned to the charts more than 40 years on after it soundtracked a viral skateboarding TikTok.
Tom Gallacher is general manager at Rhino UK, the catalogue label of Warner Music, who worked on both songs’ viral campaigns. Artists must walk a fine line when managing – or capitalising on – these flashpoints, he said, contrivance being anathema to authenticity-obsessed Gen Z. Fleetwood Mac got involved with the meme, while Bush was moved to give a rare interview to BBC Radio 4. Internally, labels might re-top an act’s greatest-hits playlist with the rising song – Universal rushed out a Murder on the Dancefloor remix EP to capitalise on the clamour – or petition Spotify to add the hit track to various themed playlists to further extend its audience. These careful tactics, he said, can create a wider catalogue spike. “You get new fans who keep on coming back.”
On TikTok, the song’s hashtag has more than 92.2m views and has been featured in more than 418,000 videos – a 444% increase over the past week. The oldest members of Gen Z would have been about five years old when Murder on the Dancefloor was first released. Ellis-Bextor said her five sons have grown up with the song, but are now dealing with it moving from being part of their mum’s history to part of their social world: “My 14-year old is seeing it on TikTok, my eldest is seeing his friends play it in clubs in the US,” she said. “My 11-year-old heard it on the radio the other day and said: ‘I think this song’s overrated.’”
While this viral moment will eventually pass, the song has a lasting significance for Ellis-Bextor. In her 2021 memoir Music, Men, Motherhood and Me, she wrote about being in a contemporaneous relationship with an older man whom she characterised as abusive and controlling: at his worst, she said he wouldn’t let her walk down the street alone and once twisted her wrist until it swelled. The original single’s success, she said, took her around the world and opened her eyes to “experiences and listening to people’s stories”, which helped her leave.
“I was working with a lot of women who were older than me, so I’d listen to their wisdom as well,” she said. “Brick by brick, it gave me the tools to be strong enough, when the time came, to get out of this. It was quite a strange juxtaposition but that’s probably not that unusual in some ways – if you’re in a dynamic that’s unhealthy, and suddenly your work is making you more visible, then the flip of that is the person who doesn’t really like that trying to bring you down a bit more when you’re home.” Months after the song’s release, Ellis-Bextor met her husband, Richard Jones, bassist with pop-rock band the Feeling.
Her pop career was born from “failure”, she says, and happened by accident. In 2000, she co-wrote and sang Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love), based on a track by Italian DJ Spiller, which triumphed in a tabloid-hyped chart battle with Victoria Beckham’s debut solo single that Ellis-Bextor weathered gamely, making one public appearance in a T-shirt that read “Peckham”.
The sometimes punishing nature of the early-2000s pop industry has come under scrutiny in recent years – from Britney Spears to former talent-show contestants – and in an oral history of the British side of the business, Michael Cragg’s Reach for the Stars. Prior to her pop breakout, Ellis-Bextor had been in an indie band, Theaudience, who were signed to Mercury but dropped by the time she turned 20. “Being an early-20-something woman in pop was a much calmer battlefield than being late-teens in indie,” she said. “That was hardcore.”
She survived the intensity of the first phase of her career – four Top 3 songs, a No 2 debut album – by “finding her people”, she said. Among them Sophie Muller, who directed the video for Murder on the Dancefloor, and is godmother to one of her children. In that video, Ellis-Bextor opted to play a villain, sabotaging fellow contestants in a dance-off, as a strike against the kid-oriented “smiley, jazz-hands” pop that prevailed post-Spice Girls. “You put out something extreme and now whatever you say, I’m just playing a part,” she said. “It protected me from being vulnerable – ‘Hey guys, hope you like me!’ – because I felt: maybe you don’t know me that well anyway. It made me feel removed from whatever slings and arrows came my way.”
During the pandemic, long after her 2000s pop heyday, Ellis-Bextor’s guard completely dropped – and her star rose again – when she livestreamed her ad hoc “Kitchen Discos” on Instagram, giving endearing sequin-clad renditions of classic hits with her kids underfoot. The phenomenon spawned a BBC Radio 2 show, a revue-style tour and, last year, Ellis-Bextor’s debut performance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage.
Less visible was the star’s new music: last year she released her seventh solo album, the thoughtful, songwriterly Hana, her third co-written with songwriter Ed Harcourt. She disagreed that nostalgia is necessarily a trap for older female musicians, consistently tying them to their youthful output, and described making those three albums as “a real privilege where I could just go with my heart and not second-guess anything. I don’t know if everybody gets lucky enough to really feel that proper freedom, that you’re not going to get laughed at or made to feel ‘how would radio feel about it?’” Feeling like a failure at 20, she said, left her “high and dry. And so since then, everything I do, all I really wanted was another metre on the plank.”
Any artist has to “go where the energy and momentum is,” she said. “That’s what creativity absolutely thrives on.” Coincidentally, she said, she had begun work on a more dance-oriented album before Murder on the Dancefloor went viral, writing with Cathy Dennis and Richard X. “It’s definitely made me feel like the stars are aligning.”
Having vanquished Victoria Beckham in 2000, Ellis-Bextor’s current chart rivals are Liam Gallagher and John Squire with their debut collaborative single, Just Another Rainbow. Can she take them? “I’m not falling for that!” she said. “Come on, I had to deal with all that the first time around. Let me off the hook! I think it’s a bit churlish to be stamping my foot: I don’t just want my two-decade hit to come back, I want it to be No 1! Whatever happens, it’s all magic.”
That said, she added: “Maybe if Liam’s No 1, he can do a naked dance around a stately home.”
