Wolf Alice Artistfacts

2010-
Ellie RowsellVocals, guitar2010-
Joff OddieGuitar, keyboards2010-
Sadie ClearyBass2010-2012
James DCDrums2010-2012
Theo EllisBass, keyboards2012-
Joel AmeyDrums2012-
Lead singer Ellie Rowsell attended Camden School for Girls, the same prestigious North London school founded by suffragette Frances Mary Buss in 1871. At school, Rowsell wrote stories and poetry before picking up guitar at age 14 and later developing her songwriting using GarageBand.
Ellie Rowsell's first gig was at an open mic night at age 18. She told The Telegraph she was so bad that she "literally couldn't play guitar and sing at the same time." After, Rowsell started searching for musicians on internet forums to find like-minded collaborators.
Their name comes from Angela Carter's short story Wolf-Alice, about a feral child raised by wolves. Rowsell had borrowed the book from her local library, and by her own account, never returned it.
In an early flash of DIY spirit, Ellie Rowsell admitted she once rushed to set up a MySpace page for Wolf Alice before the band even had a name. That eagerness to upload demos - first on MySpace, later SoundCloud and Bandcamp - helped Wolf Alice build a word-of-mouth following.
The band didn't quit their day jobs until 2014, when they signed to Dirty Hit. Guitarist Joff Oddie was working as a supply teacher (he's a trained primary school teacher), Ellie Rowsell was patching up denim in a repair shop, and bassist Theo Ellis had the strangest résumé entry of all: "mannequin," which turned out to mean in-house model for a fashion designer.
Theo Ellis has a sporting past: He played football for Arsenal's youth team before swapping the pitch for the stage.
Wolf Alice are proudly genre-slippery. As Rowsell put it, being hard to label is their superpower, not a drawback. One song might drift toward dreamlike shoegaze ("Bloom Baby Bloom"), the next into alt-rock grit ("The Sofa"). The upside, she says, is that fans don't feel betrayed, because the band never promised to stay in a single lane.
Michael Winterbottom made a feature film about Wolf Alice called On the Road in 2016, which followed the band's 2015 tour supporting their debut album. Winterbottom spiced it up with fictional actors playing crew members and a romantic storyline alongside real footage of the band's 16 different gigs.
When Wolf Alice won the Mercury Prize in 2018, bassist Theo Ellis famously celebrated by demanding a "Jagerbomb" on stage. The band said they planned to use their £25,000 prize money to build a recording studio for their third album.

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