📍Devonport, Auckland, New Zealand
1996 – 2014“Ella Yelich-O'Connor grew up in Devonport and Bayswater, leafy seaside suburbs on Auckland's North Shore, across the harbour from the city. Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is an award-winning poet of Croatian descent, and her father, Vic O'Connor, is a civil engineer of Irish descent. The family home was full of books and music: jazz, soul and Fleetwood Mac on the stereo, and shelves of Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut and Sylvia Plath that she was free to read. She took drama classes from the age of five and read voraciously, winning school writing competitions. Devonport's quiet streets, volcanic hills and ferries across the harbour were the backdrop to an ordinary suburban adolescence: friends, parties, long walks, buses and boredom. She went to Vauxhall School, Belmont Intermediate and Takapuna Grammar. At twelve she performed in a school talent show with her friend Louis McDonald, and his father sent a recording to Universal Music, who signed her to a development deal. She worked with the producer Joel Little in a studio in Morningside, writing songs about the lives of teenagers in the suburbs. In 2013, at sixteen, her song Royals, inspired partly by a photograph of a baseball player and by her own unglamorous world, went to number one in the United States and won two Grammys. Her music, from Pure Heroine to Melodrama and Solar Power, has kept returning to the light, landscapes and friendships of the North Shore. Devonport remains proud of the girl who wrote so vividly about it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google