The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
52 Culture
Music and television
lly Alexander bounds down the stairs of his fl at to greet
me with a hug. It’s a big fl at, stretched over two fl oors,
huge windows overlooking a pretty London park. There
are books everywhere, in scattered piles. There’s a Joni
Mitchell songbook propped up on his piano, and there are
massive houseplants all over the place.
Alexander is lively and charming and clearly very sensi-
tive. His trademark red hair is tucked under a baseball cap.
He is fun and chatty and acutely self-aware: he was in the
audience for the Adele ITV live special recently, among a n
extraordinary buff et of celebrities, and he serves up good
gossip about a couple of them.
Fame fascinates Alexander, and also seems to repel him.
Throughout our conversation, he treats it like a puzzle he is
trying to solve. Now 31 , he has had a fair taste of it, both as a
singer and an actor. From the age of 18, he was an actor on the
up, appearing in, among other things, Skins , and Peter and
Alice in London’s West End, alongside Dame Judi Dench and
Ben Whishaw. When he was 20, he joined the band Years &
Years and became a pop star. Years & Years – of which he is now
the only member – sell out arena tours, win awards, and have
topped the album and singles charts. He has done Celebrity
Gogglebox with his mum, Vicki. In 2021 , he performed with
Elton John at the Brits. The weekend after we meet, he per-
forms his new single live on Strictly Come Dancing.
But at the end of 2019, he returned to acting, playing lead
character Ritchie in the phenomenal drama It’s a Sin , which
came out in early 2021. Ritchie is a young man who moves
to London and hits the gay scene just as Aids arrives in the
UK. We watch as tragedy after tragedy unfolds over the
course of a decade. The show capture d joy as well as pain,
and Alexander’s impish spirit fed into Ritchie’s outlandish-
ness and vulnerability. He has just been nominated for a US
Critics’ Choice TV award for best actor in a limited series,
for which he will compete with Paul Bettany and Michael
Keaton. It has been quite the acting comeback.
But he hasn’t acted since It’s a Sin, and now he’s here
with a third Years & Years album, written during lockdown
and recorded solo. He found lockdown hard, he explains,
though he is careful to point out that, relatively speaking, he
had an easy time of it. But he was living alone; he suddenly
stopped working for the fi rst time in years, and felt the
weight of what he describes as “the world imploding”.
Normally, he loves his own company. “I actually crave alone
time. But then having all of it in one go was just ... it was
quite overwhelming,” he says.
Alexander has been frank about his mental health in
the past. In 2017, he made a moving, raw documentary for
BBC Three called Growing Up Gay , in which he talked about
mental health in the LGBTQ+ community, and shared his
own experiences of being bullied and feeling ashamed of
who he is. He talked about bulimia and self-harm, some of
which was news to his mother, who heard about it for the
fi rst time on camera.
He is something of an open book, I note. “I know! It’s
all out there. I just think, ‘God, there’s nothing else I can
say.’ It’s a compulsion, I think, more than anything else. ”
Alexander made a decision to be honest about who he was
from the very beginning, when people fi rst started to pay
attention to Years & Years. “If people are going to ask about
sexuality or mental health, then what am I going to say? If
you’re honest, you don’t have anything to hide. Everyone
deals with it diff erently, but I thought, ‘OK , I’ll try that.’”
Just before Years & Years released their debut album
in 2015 , Alexander, then a rarity as an out male pop star
clearly singing about men, expressed his sadness that there
weren’t more like him. While there hasn’t exactly been an
avalanche of male-on-male love songs, Lil Nas X , the singer
and rapper who is gay , is now one of the biggest pop stars in
the world. “When Lil Nas X went to No 1, I literally felt like
running down the street naked, screaming in celebration,
because it was such a huge moment for me,” he says. “I had
begun to think ... ‘ Will we ever get someone that is this huge
crossover star, who’s gay?’ I just think it’s incredible, what
he’s done. I’m in awe.”
After 10 years together, Years & Years have gone from
being a three-piece, comp osed of Alexander, Mikey Golds-
worthy and Emre Türkmen , to a solo act. But rather than
start releasing music under his own name, Alexander has
kept the Years & Years moniker. “I just didn’t want to let
Years & Years go. I put so much into it. It was a tricky deci-
sion in some ways, because I think, possibly, it might have
been a bit simpler for everyone if I had just been like, ‘ Oh,
I’m a solo artist now.’ But I just didn’t want to.”
The offi cial line is that the split was amicable. “The new
album has been an Olly endeavour and we’ve decided that
Years & Years will continue as an Olly solo project,” read
a statement put out by the band last March, adding: “The
three of us are still good friends.” Goldsworthy will be play-
ing live with Alexander when the band goes on tour.
But band break ups are rarely so clean. “Bands are like
marriages,” Alexander says. “ Any separation is diffi cult, and
I think it went as well as it could, with us.” He fi rst joined
Years & Years in 2010, and there is a strong sense that he
was calling the shots from the beginning. “They didn’t
really have a singer. And I came in, and I was like, ‘ No, I’m
the singer, I’ll be writing songs.’ So you can see, over that
trajectory, perhaps this was sort of inevitable.”
By the time of their second album, Palo Santo, in 2018 ,
Alexander’s red hair had arrived. He was starting to become
more pop star than indie-pop star, and it became clear that
the band had diff erent ideas about what their music would
sound like. “ Early on, we were more or less on the same
ship, trying to steer in the same direction, and then just
clearly we weren’t any more.” He sighs. “It was defi nitelyINTERVIEW
By Rebecca
Nicholson
PHOTOGRAPHS
Nick Thompson