Forever Five: Ella Hooper

⚡ The fierce teenage frontwoman who took Killing Heidi from Violet Town to the top of Australian music

🏆 Four ARIAs, a #1 album and the youngest-ever, first female APRA Songwriter of the Year

🤠 Now deep into her alt-country and Americana era

There are voices that become tangled up with a particular time in your life, and for a whole generation of Australians, Ella Hooper’s is one of them.

At the turn of the millennium, Hooper was the fierce, dreadlocked, utterly magnetic teenage frontwoman of Killing Heidi, a band out of tiny Violet Town that somehow went from winning triple j’s Unearthed competition to sitting at the absolute centre of Australian music.

‘Weir’ was the song.

Hooper was just 16 when she wrote it, and more than 25 years later it still sounds wonderfully unlike anything else that was happening in Australian pop at the time. That opening guitar, Ella almost whispering her way into the song, then the whole thing bursting open into that enormous chorus. Vulnerable and euphoric at once, sung by a teenager with a voice that already sounded completely her own.

It was one of those debut singles that seemed to introduce not just a band but an entire personality. Then came ‘Mascara’, Reflector, and suddenly Killing Heidi weren’t the exciting kids from Violet Town anymore. They were one of the biggest bands in Australia.

Reflector went to number one, produced three Top 10 singles and became one of the defining Australian albums of its moment. At the 2000 ARIA Awards, Killing Heidi walked away with four trophies: Album of the Year, Best Group, Best Rock Album and Breakthrough Artist – Album. Ella Hooper was still a teenager.

Then there was the songwriting. In 2001, Ella and her brother Jesse were named APRA Songwriters of the Year. Ella was still extraordinarily young, becoming the youngest person and first woman to receive the award. Not bad for a couple of kids from Violet Town.

But Killing Heidi was only the spectacular opening act of a career that has refused to sit still. Three Killing Heidi albums followed that initial explosion, then Ella and Jesse stripped things back with The Verses. Ella subsequently struck out on her own, moving through synth-folk, rock and increasingly country and Americana, while becoming one of those familiar Australian music lifers who seems capable of popping up anywhere: radio, television, Spicks and Specks, RocKwiz, mentoring, presenting, judging, talking music or, preferably, standing on a stage singing it.

More than 25 years after Reflector, she is still moving.

Her deeply personal Small Town Temple, written around her return to Violet Town and the devastating loss of both her parents within weeks of each other, took Ella decisively into country and Americana, debuted at number one on the Australian Country chart and earned an Australian Music Prize nomination.

Now comes Overnight Success, a wonderfully cheeky title for someone who has been doing this since she was a teenager. Recorded across multiple trips to Nashville, the new album pushes further into the alt-country and Americana world Ella has increasingly made her own. There’s award-winning songwriting, those still stand-out vocals, and an easy-playing, old-school feeling to the whole thing. To many ears, it sounds a little like Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt having a backstage beer with Sierra Ferrell and Nikki Lane. Ella calls the aesthetic she has been chasing “shitty shimmer”: rough but beautiful.

Because beneath all the career reinventions, television appearances, chart positions and trophies, Ella Hooper has always fundamentally been a music fan. And Forever Five is our chance to forget the CV for a moment and go backwards: to the records that got under the skin, scrambled the brain, broke the heart and helped make the artist.

So, from the album that hit her “in the face/heart/soul/brain” as a kid to PJ Harvey being nominated for interstellar preservation, here are the five albums Ella Hooper simply cannot live without.

Ella Hooper's Forever Five

Bob Dylan – Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)

“I honestly listen to other Dylan records more regularly at the moment, but if this one didn’t exist I don’t know who I’d be. It hit me in the face/heart/soul/brain as a child and showed me the full force genius of Dylan, and the plain spoken poetry of simply telling your story.‘Ballad In Plain D’ fucks me uuuppppp.”

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)

“Blows my mind how this album is so wild and free and experimental in some ways but still maintains the core of and the shape of a classic album.PJ skirts the boundaries of but never drops fully into art wank. That’s my personal taste happy place. It ticks literally ALL the boxes for me, melodic, poetic, deeply moving, human, tragic, unexpected.Peak excellence shit right here. Send it to space, put it on the Voyager disc.”

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)

“Just stunning.What else is there to say?Also I love a singer that sounds SO much like the instrument they play (saxophone) it’s like the musical version of dogs who look like their owners.”

Vic Chesnutt – Little (1990)

“Heart-breaking, gut-punching and hilarious. Vic was a singular artist, taking his Southern gothic tragi-comic drawl to these beautiful barely there vignettes of life that hit like Carver stories.I adore him and cried from a deep, sad place for every hard done by this cruel world victim of the system broken down genius that's ever had such a brief rough trot on this weird Earth when he died.”

Judee Sill – Heart Food (1973)

“Another genius who wasn't here for long but alchemised some awful experiences into something absolutely fucking majestic. Almost impossible to choose between this and self-titled, her only other studio album, but this one has ‘The Kiss’ on it, and by God, if there IS a God, they surely stuck some wings on Judee Sill for that song. Hymnal and ethereal but with balls. Timeless, trippy and inspired, Judee's records feel edgy in their purity!? An unusual combination I've never found anywhere else.”

Now listen to the playlist

We kid you not, these playlists always unravel beautifully, like a mini music lesson from the featured artist themselves. Five albums, five rabbit holes, and plenty to discover along the way. Very recommended listening.

Forever Ella

Give the woman her flowers and drop her name into the same sentences we speak when mentioning our Aussie legends. These five records make it pretty clear how deep the music fan runs. Long before Overnight Success, Nashville or Ella Hooper’s current country era, those ingredients were already rattling around in there.

And maybe that is the real pleasure of Forever Five. We know Ella Hooper as the teenager belting out ‘Weir’. The frontwoman staring down the camera in ‘Mascara’. The four-time ARIA winner. The APRA Songwriter of the Year. The artist who became enormously famous before she’d really had time to become an adult, then kept writing, performing, experimenting and finding new corners of herself for another quarter of a century.

But before all of that, she was a kid hearing Bob Dylan and having her face, heart, soul and brain rearranged.

Ella Hooper’s new album Overnight Success is out October 2.