British singer Ellie Goulding has to have a drink before she goes on stage because she insists she’s “too shy” to perform without a little liquid courage.
The ‘Burn’ hitmaker may have played gigs across the globe, but she’s still “too shy” to get up on stage without a little Dutch courage, as she says she almost always has a drink before her performances.
Speaking to a popular British publication recently, she said: “I generally have a drink or two before I go on stage – I’m too shy otherwise. I’ll have a vodka soda or something, nothing too heavy. I can’t drink whisky. White wine is not really my thing either. I like a gin and tonic.”
Ellie, 32, performed at the royal wedding reception of Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank last year, after having previously played a medley of covers and her own tracks at the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Duchess Catherine.
And the singer admitted recently that the experience of performing in front of the royals put her in “nervous robot mode”.
She said: “I’m always nervous at the best of times, I’m just quite a nervous person but I try and use it to my advantage. I think with those two particular gigs I just thought, ‘God I have to have to be professional, just do the job, they want to hear the song, they want me to sing them well, and then go.’
“Sometimes I go into professional, robot mode and just got up there, perform the songs, do them as best I can and then go, and hope they had a good time. I’m good at doing that thank god.”
The ‘Close To Me’ hitmaker also previously explained that being on the road for long periods of time can be hard to “take on” by herself.
She added: “I realised I was the one on stage and had my band, incredible team and my team around me, but really at the end of the day it was me up there, so it was hard to take on and a lot by myself. I signed my record deal when I was really young and then it was my life in my 20s.”
Goulding released her third studio album, titled Delirium, on 6 November 2015, with ‘On My Mind’ as the album’s lead single. In December 2015, she received her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Solo Performance for her single ‘Love Me Like You Do’ which was the soundtrack to the film adaptation of the erotic romance novel ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.
