Fame doesn’t sit easily with rising star Ellie Goulding but – as TIM HUGHES finds out – she’s just going to have to get used to it.

UNREQUITED love. It’s always been a rich seam of inspiration – for poets, writers, artists and, of course, musicians.

There’s nothing like a bit of heartache to prick the emotions and fire up the creative senses.

Take Ellie Goulding. Though still a petite 23-year-old, with precious little experience of life’s minor falls and major lifts, the singer-songwriter’s work is replete with tales of doomed attraction and shattered relationships.

“I’m a hopeless romantic,” she sighs. “I’m always thinking about what love is.”

The girl from deepest rural Herefordshire – who, after pocketing a BRIT Award and winning the BBC Sound Of 2010 poll, has been tipped as the name to watch out for this year – admits to having been heartbroken more than a few times, always falling for the wrong boy or, at least, ones who don’t love her back.

“I go through periods when I’m really unhappy,” she admits.

"I think a lot, so inevitably I end up being quite sad, whether it’s things that are happening in the world, or in my own life and relationships. I think so deeply about things that I end up really worried, so that’s basically why I’m a hypochondriac. At least it makes me write constantly about how I feel.”

It’s that honesty which has set the music industry alight – even before the release of her debut album Lights.

But being touted as the voice of 2010 has brought its own problems.

“It’s funny,” she says. “People want to knock me just because I’ve been hyped up.

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

“Maybe people are starting to believe in me a bit more?”

If Ellie seems relaxed, that could be because she is studiously avoiding having to confront her showbiz side. She claims to have only recently seen herself on telly and has only “once or twice” heard herself on the radio.

“I’m basically in a world being oblivious to it all,” she says.

Not so for the rest of us though. That would be just too hard. Her debut single Under The Sheets has been all over the place and Lights has been excitedly received.

But rapid fame is just too much to live with for this shy artist from the sedate Welsh borders. She confesses she hated the early attention.

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

“I think I was having a bit of a breakdown. Not a mental breakdown; I just started getting anxious and panicky.”

And things got worse when she met her 2009 counterpart Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine, who won the Brit Critics’ Choice Award last year.

So panicked was she after the meeting, and worried over her own career, she took herself off to hospital thinking she was about to have a heart attack. “We cancelled some things so I could have two weeks off,” she admits. “The break did me the world of good.

“I went back to the countryside, which I’m used to. Then I came back ready. Now my body has accepted how busy I am. I feel better anyway.”

She still admits to being a terrible worrier though – something which shines through on the album.

“I’m quite questioning, I suppose. But then I answer the questions as well. In one song I say ‘Who are we to be emotional, who are we to play with hearts and throw everything away?’ “I’m questioning human behaviour, asking why we act the way we do when we’re in love and infatuated with someone, but I offer some answers too.”

And there is also some hope for her heart – with songs like Salt Skin showing it is possible to find one’s match.

“It’s quite uplifting,” she says cheerfully. “It’s about wanting to run to someone, and this time the guy wants the same thing, and wants me – which is quite rare. Some people think the ‘salt skin’ in the title is from tears, but it’s actually about sweating!”

Tomorrow Ellie plays the O2 Academy Oxford, in Cowley Road. It promises to be a lavish show – she hints at “strings, other singers and a female choir.”

“I have all these big ideas about my live show, because I want it to grow and I want people to come and see me and think it’s been worth the money,” she says enthusiastically.

“I’m proud of my album. Really proud in fact. They’re songs that I’ve been writing since I was 18.

“It’s how I want to sound, and there’s a wide audience of people that can, and will, enjoy my music.”

Ellie plays the O2 Academy Oxford tomorrow. Doors open at 7pm. (Tickets have sold out) Her album Lights is out on Polydor.