IT CAN’T be easy being Ellie Goulding. Less than a year ago, she was unknown outside the music taste-making fraternity but now, after winning a Brit award and topping a prestigious industry poll to find the coming year’s likely stars, she’s close to becoming a household name.

And all that before her album was even released.

“It’s funny,” says the 23-year-old, sipping a giant, fruit smoothie, “people want to knock me just because I’ve been hyped up.

“There was a journalist that came to a show recently and he wrote something about how my success was so pre-ordained he wanted to not like me and he wanted to be sceptical, but he couldn’t because I was good. So that that was very nice.

“I came top of the BBC Sound Of 2010 poll, and when you get something as prestigious as that, people want to knock you. It was mainly people saying, ’I haven’t heard Ellie yet, but she’s annoying’, she continues.

“I have other people who said they didn’t like me and now they do, though, so it goes both ways.”

You would have had a hard job in the last few months not to hear Ellie’s debut single Under The Sheets on one station or another or the current release Starry Eyed.

And while she might be calm now it was a slightly different story for Ellie before Christmas.

“It just hadn’t sunk in and I hadn’t adapted to the extreme nature of what was happening,” she says.