From Kate Bush to Amy Winehouse, Britain has long proved a wellspring of strong, singular, and iconoclastic female musicians. Elly Jackson, better known as La Roux, is nothing like Kate Bush or Amy Winehouse, of course, except in one key regard: “We’re quite ballsy women,” she says. “There’s definitely an attitude there.” She recalls being thrown out of classes for challenging the teachers. “I’ve always just questioned everything, and some people find it infuriating in me, and some find it refreshing,” she says, before quickly reconsidering. “Actually, very few people find it refreshing.”
Away from the classroom, Jackson’s spiky, playful, anti-authoritarianism has found expression in two terrific albums. The first, her Grammy-winning 2009 debut, La Roux, put Jackson and her then-collaborator, Ben Langmaid, on the map as exponents of a…
