Only Girl is 27-year-old Goldsmiths University graduate Ellen Murphy.

“Music is my career and ultimately what I want to do with my life,” says the South London-based singer. “I got into music after I left uni, as before then I was always really set on becoming a photographer (which is what I studied at Goldsmiths), but never quite had the confidence or self-belief to really throw myself into music. But after uni, I joined a band and we played together for about two years and it made me realise I wanted to do this as a career. It also helped me to build my confidence on stage and really hone my craft and developing my songwriting. Even now I find my songwriting is much better than it even was, say, a year ago.”

“My biggest musical influence growing up was my dad as he always had his guitar out, playing and singing old rock & roll and Johnny Cash, with us kids dancing around. We always had a piano in the house, so that’s where he taught me to play chords when I was about nine or ten, and I’ve been writing music ever since. The first groups I was really in awe of was the Spice Girls and Eternal; I used to buy Smash Hits magazine every week religiously and plaster my bedroom walls with all of the song lyric pages. As I was going into my teens, I loved singers like Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child. Then later on, as I began to discover a whole world of music, bands with strong female frontwomen like Distillers and Pretty Girls Make Graves really inspired me to be on stage. So a pretty eclectic mixture.”