The Flight of the Doves: An interview with Dove Ellis
Dove Ellis has become one of the most hyped artists in recent months. From only a few songs on Bandcamp and Spotify, to supporting Geese, to a debut album released to critical acclaim. His fast rise is unexpected but not surprising; a uniquely talented musician, his debut album Blizzard was one of our favourite albums of last year, and we were privileged enough to see him headline at Sidney&Matilda for the Music Culture Society. A few members of the Music Culture Society were able to chat with him and his band members ahead of the gig. Here is their interview.
Since the release of his acclaimed debut album Blizzard, an unfounded myth has circulated around Dove Ellis: that the mystique surrounding his persona is due in large part to the fact that he had, until very recently, “still never done an interview”.
Music Culture Society would like to officially put this rumour to bed.
The fact is, we sat down to talk with him last year just after the release of his first single, ‘To The Sandals’, and moments before his headline show with us at Sidney&Matilda. Needless to say, the gig was phenomenal – I’m sure you’ve already read Jarred Up’s review of a night, which genuinely felt like the calm before the storm of an artist’s trajectory. But despite what seemed an effortlessly graceful performance, Dove Ellis (real name Thomas O’Donoghue) revealed an unexpectedly chaotic creative process behind the carefully woven final product. “I’m pretty bad at being consistent with writing in any one way,” he told us. “I don’t really have like one process, if you know what I mean. A lot of the time I tend to start with a chorus, or I have a lot of verses kind of scattered about the place in my room or like lyrics with a melody or whatever and over time I stitch them together.”
Dove Ellis headlining at Sidney&Matilda (Photo: Noah Clark)
As is the case with any successful songwriter, though, a vital element of the ‘Dove Ellis sound’ comes from the musicians he works with. The band met whilst studying at RNCM in Manchester, from which they’ve only recently graduated, and provide a delicately punctuating instrumentation that he deems indispensable. “It used to just be kind of like me playing guitar and him [Fred] doing stuff with sax - he's really into running his saxophone through pedal setups and stuff like that. That was like the earliest point, I guess, at which we really clicked, just like working together as musicians now. And then I met Matt, who plays drums with me now, last year. So yeah it was all in university and we just moved down to London. I’d be fucked without them.”
After asking the hard-hitting questions regarding London pubs (during which he asserts his local, The Brockley Barge, as an ‘unbelievable Spoons’), we decided to lighten the mood a little bit by discussing whether or not it’s possible for a modern artist to ever be truly original. See, this is another familiar aspect of the discourse surrounding Dove Ellis; his blended use of chest & head voice, as well as his insistence on performing with a band, have garnered inevitable comparisons to the likes of Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke. When asked whether he’d prefer to be thought of as his own artist, he told us, “I kind of just guess, if you’re getting any kind of traction online, I think that tends to happen quite a lot. Yeah, I mean, I don’t mind it at all. I'm kind of just like, that’s sick, you know what I mean? If that's a compliment on your end, then I'll take it as a compliment.”
Is it possible for new musicians to exist without comparisons?
“I don’t know. I mean it’s such a big part of music – never mind just like people online [or] on forums – like just music press in general. I kind of find a big part of what that is, is trying to pitch young artists in the UK or Ireland or whatever as like the thing that happened 20 years ago in a new way.”
Comparisons aside, discussing his wide array of influences made it clear that Blizzard shouldn’t merely be assessed in relation to those with whom he shares a similar vocal style. “Growing up, or in my teenage years anyways, the music I listened to most was Prince and like, Sly Stone. Prince is kind of his own thing, but I was very, very much into 70s funk. And then once I got to the UK, it was just after I'd like got my first acoustic guitar and I started playing a lot more acoustic guitar and I got a bit more into like Americana and folk and like the likes of Gillian Welch and stuff – she's one of my favourite songwriters.”
Finally, we closed out the interview by asking the most original question a musician could ever hope to hear. We just couldn’t resist. Apparently, the origins of the name Dove Ellis are equal parts pensively considered and randomly selected. “It comes from kind of nowhere, but basically, there’s a children’s book called ‘The Flight of the Doves’, which is about these two kids who flee Liverpool from their abusive family members to go and see their grandmother in Galway,” we’re told. “It’s kind of stuck with me. Ellis is just nothing. I didn’t want it to be one name – I don’t know where that came from.”
At the risk of sounding like the aforementioned and reductively comparative music press, Blizzard, at the time of my writing this article, seems like it could be the Heavy Metal of 2026: an album released after the critics had already finished writing their end-of-year lists, and gaining the traction it truly deserves in the new year. And maybe, just maybe, our conversation will have given him a sufficient enough warm up for when the bigger names inevitably come knocking for their interview.
Words: Constance Golden, Elliott Salter, & Jake Quinn
Photos: Noah Clark & Elliot Salter
