From rock star to Specks saver

Ella Hooper, the new face of Spicks and Specks.
Source: News Limited

AFTER 15 years fronting bands, Ella Hooper has reinvented herself as a multimedia star, but not without overcoming the odd crisis or two.

She may be days away from turning 31 and in the midst of a successful new career as a radio and TV host, but to many Ella Hooper will forever be frozen in time as the dreadlocked, pierced teenage singer from Killing Heidi.
“It’s bizarre, it’s really strange,” says Hooper, one of the new team captains, alongside Adam Richard on the revamped Spicks and Specks.
“I don’t know whether it’s that particular look or that particular time, but I just don’t know why people can’t move on. Maybe being on TV one night a week (will change things) … but I bet I’ll still get a tonne of emails going, ‘Wow – you lost the dreadlocks!’
“Yeah, that happened close to 15 years ago.”
There’s been an awful lot of water under the bridge since Killing Heidi’s Reflector album went five times platinum in 2000. Hooper, who dropped out of school at 17 to capitalise on her stardom, fronted the band until it broke up in 2006.
Her next band, The Verses, also with brother Jesse, enjoyed a brief run of success with debut album Seasons before it too fizzled out. And so it was that a couple of years ago Hooper found herself without a band, in the grip of a major life crisis.
“I had your typical late-20s Saturn returning – that’s an astrological term for freaking out,” says the good-natured Hooper, tucking into the world’s largest salami pizza at Blue Train Cafe on Southbank. “Where is my life going; what do I want out of the next 10 years?
“Moving on: You know you need to do it but you don’t know how. I realised I didn’t have the skills. I’d just been a singer in a band for 15 years. I went, what if I don’t want to be a singer in a band, what else have I developed? And the answer was: not much.”
The first step towards Ella 2.0 was getting a gig on Austereo’s nationally syndicated Australian Top 20 radio show with Ben Wasley. “It was really emancipating,” she says. “I saw that I could do other things and do them well.”
Hooper was named best newcomer at the 2012 Australian Commercial Radio Awards for her work on the network’s now defunct digital station Radar. She’s proud of the Top 20 show which features all-Australian, all-new music and gives her the chance to interview artists such as 360, Bliss n Eso and Gosling.
The one question she won’t ask a band: How did you get the name? “I vowed never to ask that question, that one I’d heard too many times,” she laughs.
The musical knowledge she’s gained from the show, and a lifetime’s fascination with rock trivia, will stand her in good stead on Spicks and Specks.
“I’m sure there’ll be moments when I am completely stumped about something completely obvious, but there are only a couple of ways my brain works and one of them is remembering useless facts about music and movies,” she says. “I didn’t get the gig because I’m funny or good looking, I got the gig because I already am a music trivia buff.”
The fact she’s funny and good looking didn’t hurt though. She’d already been a semi-regular on the “classic” Specks, where she fitted in so well there were jokes “in the past about finding me a spot on the show”.
Both Alan Brough and Myf Warhurst were happy to provide advice and tips, and it seems to have worked, given the first episode of the revamped show seems to have recaptured much of the humour and spirit of the original.
That’s in part practice – Hooper can’t even name how many dry runs and rehearsals they’ve done – but it’s also by design. The motto is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
“It didn’t need any kind of an overhaul,” she explains. “That makes it tricky because you’re not even looking to improve upon something, you just want to bring it back and do it justice. Everybody is so fond of how it was and I think that adds a little bit of pressure.”
Hooper has also recorded a solo album of “grungy, edgy, spiky, modern pop” called In Tongues. Two singles, Low High and Haxan are already out, with the album expected to be released independently later on this year.
“I’m loving 30,” she says, her crisis a distant memory. “I feel like things have been going up and up and up, and blocks have been unblocked. I made a lot of changes that needed to be made and then all of these incredible opportunities started coming and now I feel like I’m going into a season of, hopefully, doing a bit more reaping, than sowing.”
Spicks and Specks returns to ABC1, next Wednesday, 8.30pm

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