La Roux is Elly Jackson and Ben Langmaid but that might not be immediately apparent. “He’s not up for doing all the interviews and promo,” Jackson told us of her oft-absent bandmate, “And he doesn’t sing on the record so there wouldn’t be anything for him to do on stage.” But, while Langmaid might be the man behind the curtain, Jackson isn’t just the smoke and mirrors. “It’s a half and half situation, totally,” she says of their working relationship, “We’ll come up with a melody and both contribute lyric ideas, usually about my experiences, but Ben has an amazing ear and knows what will work.”

While she lists Fever Ray, Passion Pit, Friendly Fires and White Lies as her favorite acts right now, Jackson wasn’t always so electro-centric. Growing up on Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, her focus changed when she got involved in the rave scene “I realized I preferred going out to dance music,” she explains, “I didn’t want to sit still listening to someone play an acoustic guitar so I stopped writing that way. I’m not going to play what I wouldn’t want to listen to.”

Why would she? Especially when there is already a lot of music out there that she doesn’t want to listen to. Jackson rejects a great deal of modern popular music, specifically citing American Idol’s British cousins as fonts of banality: “Everyone I know is sick to death of the bland, manufactured music that comes out of shows like the X Factor and Pop Idol but if you say so you’re branded a bitch,” she bemoans. She isn’t afraid to point fingers, either, blaming radio DJs and TV personalities for the proliferation of fluff populating the top of the charts. “There’s a culture of positivity that I think can be damaging,” she goes on, “I see lots of TV presenters and radio hosts saying ‘this song is awesome!!’ when you know they don’t like it but have to say it so no one gets offended. Why can’t radio DJs play what they actually like? I just think there’s a lack of honesty.”

Still, despite Jackson’s ruffling of quite a few feathers through numerous outspoken interviews (“I’m just expressing an opinion and the fact that everyone is so shocked by it just demonstrates my point,” she insists, “I’m only saying what an awful lot of people think.”), La Roux’s own songs are steadily climbing the charts both here and abroad—to the point where Jackson is beginning to resent her lack of anonymity. When we asked how she reconciled her preference for privacy with her compulsive need to stand out in a crowd, she conceded that she has relinquished her private life in favor of her artistic integrity. “I would love to still be anonymous and be able to go for a quiet pint but you can’t have it both ways,” she told us, “I have to stand out and be different because that’s what I look up to in artists I admire like David Bowie. I don’t want to be remembered for looking like everybody else, and you have to have a strong visual identity to make an impact as an artist.”

While the gamine redhead with a flair for dressing like her aforementioned idol certainly would garner her fair share of rubberneckers on the streets of any town, she’s been enjoying her time on tour in the U.S. “You get to sightsee in the U.S.!” she gushes, “It’s somewhere new so we walk around and just walking around is exciting. Town centers in the UK are all pretty similar, you know exactly what’s going to be there: a Boots, Primark, Topshop… it’s not new so it’s not exciting. Plus when the weather’s bad those places are extra depressing.” She apparently is not aware of the pandemonium the opening of a TopShop caused in New York—but I guess the grass is always greener…

–Jessie Rogers