Ellie Sax New Year's Eve gig at Tileyard North in Wakefield: 'We'll bring 2025 in with a bang'

Any parent can imagine how a toddler with a saxaphone is a hard sell. But Ellie, who grew up in Alvingham near the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, wouldn’t be deterred.

“I bugged them for one,” she says. “There was a piano in the house when we bought the house and they said: ‘Well, if you, if you do grade five piano, then we'll look at getting you a saxophone’. So I worked really hard – I have no natural skills at all on piano – when I was like 10 years old, I got my grade five, and I turned around to them and I said: ‘Oh, so do I get a saxophone now?’ And I think they were a bit surprised that I was persisting with it, but they said: ‘Yeah, a deal's a deal.’”

Their faith was repaid as Ellie, whose real surname is Meredith, grew more proficient through secondary school and went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where she also met her husband and co-performer Harry, better known by his DJ name LaserBoyWonder – and now plays all over the world.

On New Year’s Eve, it’ll be Wakefield, headlining a show to mark the start of 2025 at venue Tileyard North with support from Taylor Shipley, a teenage DJ from near Doncaster.

“We love Tileyard North because it's a really unique, really cool space,” says Ellie.

"We don't get snobby about house and dance music – you'd be amazed, but there's actual snobbery around house music – Harry and I just like playing music that we find fun and that we enjoy, and that if we were going dancing, we'd want to dance to. It can be remixes of tunes that everyone knows, it can be new tunes, but we tie it all in. It's a really fun, high-energy set and so hopefully everyone will have a really fun time and then bring in 2025 with a bit of a bang.”

Before heading off to her course in Manchester, Ellie had been considering a life in medicine, following in the footsteps of her father, a retired doctor, and mother, a nurse.

“I applied for medical school and I applied for music college, just to keep my options open. But it was actually my dad who persuaded me to do music, which is kind of the opposite to a lot of parents. I said to him: “I think I'm just going to do medicine, I think it's the most sensible choice, and I can do music as my hobby’. And he said: ‘You won't do music as your hobby, it’s all-encompassing, so you have to decide. One of them is going to fulfill you and one of them is not, so you've got to decide which one’. Just in that moment, I thought, I honestly can't imagine not playing the saxophone.”

It didn’t take her long to decide. “I thought, right, it’s got to be music then.”

Pursuing life as a working musician was “a riskier choice” but her college experience, learning from Professor of Saxophone Rob Buckland, put her in good stead.

“I think you build a good community of music geeks. You've been at school and you've been the music geek, the one who's the geekiest of all, and then suddenly you get to music college, and everyone around you is just as nerdy, and you're like, ‘Oh, wow, I found my people’.”

Going into dance music, however, was “off the mark of what I was trained to do,” says Ellie, 34.

"I've always loved dance music and when we were at music college doing orchestral saxophone – and I used to sneak off at the weekends and play Tiger Tiger (a bar frequented by students) – my saxophone tutor used to tell me off. He said it would ruin my classical embouchure, which it did. But it's very similar to a jazz embouchure, playing pop tracks or dance music tracks, and you're using a lot of the same scales. I use a lot of the same influences still.”

When she first started, there were not too many saxophonists in dance music. Precedents came in the form of house music sax player Lovely Laura and Ellie was inspired by Simon Willescroft, who has performed with pop groups such as Duran Duran. Ellie uses a custom-made Yamaha 82Z alto saxophone, her “baby”. She has a tenor too, but finds that the pitch of her alto can “cut through” dance music.

After leaving college, Ellie and Harry settled in Halifax around 13 years ago.

Travelling is part of the job, however, and her favourite shows have included closing the O Beach event in Ibiza, but the Maldives, Marbella, Portugal, the Côte D’Azur, Cyprus, and Croatia aren’t too bad either.

She says: “One the biggest pinch-me moments was, we did a gig in New York and it was in the PlayStation Theater on Broadway. We walked out having done the gig and I walked out into Times Square, and I was just like, ‘What is my life? I like this life’.”

Playing the Piece Hall in Halifax, her own adopted town, has also been a highlight.

Meanwhile, Ellie serves as an ambassador for Focus4Hope and Women’s Centre Halifax, two local charities which provide support and resources to those in need.

Her own profession is still has “a lot of boys clubs,” she says. “I think the music industry is asking for more females to be involved, especially in the dance music field. It's very male-dominated and I feel quite passionately about trying to bring a bit more equality into the music industry, so trying to support quite a lot of younger female talent and just give them a bit of a guidance as to what to expect and to try and help them out a little bit."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

For tickets, visit experiencewakefield.co.uk/event/ellie-sax-new-years-eve-party