It's all about the Familia for Sophie Ellis-Bextor

THERE'S no such thing as a holiday when you're about to release an album. Sophie Ellis-Bextor is overseas with her husband, Richard, and their four sons, trying to relax, when we speak on the phone.

"I do enjoy not being busy," she says, "but people wanting to speak to me is never a bad thing."

Familia is her sixth album. Just as with her career-invigorating previous LP, Wanderlust, she wrote it with Ed Harcourt, who also produced it. However, where their previous collaboration resulted in Eastern-European-inspired baroque pop and orchestral folk, Familia sees Ellis-Bextor return to the soft disco sounds she's best known for.

Although better known for his own sumptuous, late-night torch songs – his brilliant seventh album, Furnaces, has just been released – Harcourt was introduced to disco while playing keyboards for the Wanderlust tour.

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"He thought it was going to be easy, playing my old songs," says Ellis-Bextor. "But, firstly, it ended up being far more difficult than he imagined, and secondly, he had tremendous fun doing it. That really set us up to start work on Familia."

She says she's spent her whole career looking for someone to collaborate with solely, having for so long been signed to major labels who'd pair her with whichever songwriter-for-hire was going.

Her 2001 debut, Read My Lips, for example, features contributions from 10 different songwriters and a further five producers, while 15 songwriters and another handful of producers have credits on 2007's Trip The Light Fantastic.

Familia, then, benefits from this almost singular vision, and was recorded in just 10 days.

"In the olden days, every time I wrote a song, I'd write with so many people and then it'd get sent back to the record label and there'd be a committee meeting about what I was doing. I always wanted to squirrel away a bit more, to get on with my thing and then present an album when it was all done. How we work now feels like a more grown-up way to make a record."

She believes the consensus approach she was subjected to in the earlier years was counter-productive, that it's impossible to second-guess what makes a hit.

"The thing with a hit is that whatever emotion it gives the listener, they have to get it every time they hear it. I've definitely got a couple of those, but I didn't know they were going to be hits beforehand."

She's referring to Groovejet by Spiller, the Balearic handbag house song she wrote the verses for in 2000. The song was a phenomenal hit, so too was Murder On The Dance Floor a year later.

In the years since, she's also had four children. Newest arrival, Jesse, was born last November, and was in the studio with his mum when Ellis-Bextor was recording Familia.

Life hasn't always been rosy though. She left her record label after releasing her third album, and 2011's Make A Scene, her first album on her own label, remains her least successful. She maintains starting out young prepared her career ups and downs.

She was 18, just before sitting her A-Levels, when her band, Theaudience, were signed to a record label and released their debut album. By the time she was 20, the band had split.

"The band taught me a great deal all those years ago, and Alex James from Blur once told me that no-one's career is a solid upward trajectory, that there are peaks and troughs, so I know just to go with it. If things go too well, I start to freak out anyway."

She adds: "For now, it's still a novelty. I'm very excited about this album, and just I want people to hear it."

:: Sophie Ellis-Bextor's sixth album, Familia, is out today.