Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander on tears, fears and homophobia

He’s the frontman of one of pop’s most promising acts, an acclaimed actor and he’s swiftly becoming a poster boy for mental health, too. Olly Alexander talks success, fear and homophobia with Hermione Eyre
Dior Homme jacket, £1,550, and trousers, £770, at Selfridges (
Cameron McNee
Hermione Eyre10 March 2016

For a pop star riding a wave of success, Olly Alexander is exceptionally self-effacing. During our hour together he manages to condemn his own tattoos (‘really embarrassing… just doodles on my body’), his own brain (‘creative but rubbish at logical thinking’) and even his band’s fortunes at this year’s Brits, where Years & Years were nominated for four awards including Best British Group. When we meet during the run-up, he says, with a squeaky, baby-bird giggle: ‘I think our chances of winning are next to zero!’ Modest, but, as it turned out, accurate. Not that it stopped him enthusiastically live tweeting on the night (‘was just buttering some bread and Cheryl Cole came and hugged me. I WON ALL THE BRITS’).

When I meet him in a West London café, he sits hunched on the sofa, twiddling his hair as a nervous tick. He looks much younger than 25. His voice is street casual and, dressed in a sea blue sweatshirt with a teddy bear ring given to him by the mens-wear designer Bobby Abley, he seems utterly average until you notice his uncannily luminous eyes and his powerful commitment to telling the truth about himself.

‘When I was starting out as a musician five years ago, I made a decision to be as authentic as possible,’ he explains. ‘I can be a really awkward frontman on stage. I’m a rambling mess sometimes, but other times I come off thinking, “That was a genuine interaction with the audience and that was so much fun.” ’ He writes about his boyfriends in his music, a rare move in an industry often content to play the personal pronoun game. ‘My lyrics are about same-sex relationships, because that’s who I am. It was important to me that I felt comfortable expressing myself.’ His catchy cries from the heart went to number one last year, with the single ‘King’, about a controlling ex-boyfriend, selling more than a million copies in the UK. ‘I’m always touched and humbled by the number of people who come up to me and say they connect with my sexuality in the songs,’ he says. ‘Other people just like the songs. But Sam Smith already proved an important point to the very risk-averse music industry, which is that you can be an openly gay male artist and sell records.’

Olly Alexander in pictures

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Alexander has also been transparent about his mental health issues (on which more later) and today he owns up to an unlikely crush. ‘I’m a real left-winger. I fancy Jeremy Corbyn!’ He gives a little shriek of laughter. Despite the Labour leader’s ‘scruffy’ appearance on the front bench? ‘Maybe it’s naïve of me to have this romantic political fantasy but I like the way he looks like he’s always about to head off to a march or a protest.’

As well as being a musician, Alexander is also an actor, pulling off a ‘slashie’ portfolio career with remarkable skill. He gave subtle performances in the 2009 film Bright Star (playing the younger brother of Ben Whishaw’s John Keats), 2012’s big-screen adaptation of Great Expectations (as Herbert Pocket) and in the 2014 film The Riot Club, giving a hilariously well-observed performance as an Old Etonian. He has been writing songs and singing since he was young and has never stopped. He was recruited to join Years & Years in 2010 after he stayed over at a friend’s house and bandmate Mikey Goldsworthy overheard him singing ‘Killing Me Softly’ in the shower.

Burberry coat, £2,495, shirt, £695, and trousers, £550 (uk.burberry.com).GH Bass loafers, £125 (ghbass-eu.com).
Cameron McNee

Last year when Alexander got together with Neil Amin-Smith, the 25-year-old violinist with classical-pop hitmakers Clean Bandit, they quickly became a celebrated gay couple (BuzzFeed even ran a ‘14 Times Olly And Neil Amin-Smith Were The Cutest Couple On Twitter’ article). ‘Which was nice but also overwhelming and not nice,’ he says. ‘We split up in November. It’s hard to negotiate any relationship at the best of times but then to have this added pressure… It’s just a very weird thing to have a relationship that’s commented on by the world wide web.’ He is now single-ish, ‘open to suggestions’ and ‘trying not to rush anything’.

Alexander and his elder brother grew up in Blackpool (his father worked in marketing at the Pleasure Beach) and then Coleford, a village in the Forest of Dean. At his local comprehensive in Monmouth his homo-sexuality began to attract attention. ‘I’ve been called names in the street and hit and spat at.’ He knew he was gay before puberty. Watching Disney’s Aladdin for the first time: ‘I fancied Aladdin and I loved Princess Jasmine because she was so beautiful.’

Cameron McNee

He found a love of acting and enrolled in his local arts college to study drama, but dropped out in 2008 when he was 17 and moved to London. ‘Growing up and moving to London was all I longed to do.’ His first flatshare was in Bethnal Green; he worked in Rokit vintage clothing store and as a waiter at Polpo. He embraced the gay scene, but the name-calling of his youth had left its mark on him. ‘This is my own internalised shame, probably, but I still feel a little uncomfortable holding hands with my partner in public. Homophobia is less overt, sure, but it’s still with us in insidious, institutionalised forms. Gays are still the “Other”, they’re apparently less likely to fix your car or play football. And do we want them as teachers?’ he says with obvious irony. ‘These questions are still around…’

Now he lives in a basement flat in Hackney’s London Fields. He is a big reader who has consumed ‘everything by Milan Kundera, everything by Haruki Murakami, all Margaret Atwood’s novels’. The last book he read was The Vegetarian, by Korean writer Han Kang, in which the heroine is, like Alexander, a vegetarian. She ends up making love with plants. ‘I’ve hugged a few trees in my time,’ he says.

At 16 he was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. His mood would spiral, his sleep would become disturbed by night terrors, and he would struggle to eat. (He is not hugely interested in food at the best of times; I watch him choke down a breakfast croissant in a few big bites.) He has learned, over the years, to manage his condition. ‘I tend to isolate myself… just get into my bed and lock the door. Talking really helps me, so I call a friend and watch Disney movies and don’t leave the house.

Gucci shirt, £570, 18 Sloane Street, SW1 (020 7235 6707). Ermenegildo Zegna Couture pullover, £760, 203-204 Sloane Street, SW1 (020 7201 7000). Dries Van Noten trousers, £220, at mrporter.com
Cameron McNee

‘I’ve had a lot of therapy since I was 19,’ he adds cheerfully. ‘It’s a big help. I see a therapist for an hour once a week and I take medication. I was on Citalopram for three years, but it took a long time for the side-effects to level out. I would get dizzy and faint and my mood would be very low and I’d find it hard to get out of bed. Now I’m on Sertraline, which is much milder in terms of side-effects and it’s quite effective. These are the two major drugs you’re offered if you’re feeling low. They can be really helpful, but they can also take a long time to work and you have to really stick with them.’

He believes it is important to be open about his condition: ‘I talk a lot about my medication. People are often scared to talk about it and at first I felt ashamed of taking medication because it made me feel like I was “ill”. But you don’t necessarily need to take it for the rest of your life. It’s not about becoming a perfect person. It’s about getting through a certain period, maintaining mental health like a muscle.’He is becoming a champion for better care and awareness. He argues that there ‘should be a body that helps people with mental health issues get into employment. We need to educate employers. Because those people are all potentially valuable, smart employees — they just don’t happen to function the same way as the rest of the office.’

He wants to add nuance to our understanding of mental illness. ‘I struggle with language, with the words we’re given for conditions. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, and on the one hand that’s helpful because there is a lot of support and routes out of there, but at the same time it shouldn’t define you, because everyone’s experience is so personal and textured. Being given a word like “depression” can feel really isolating and wrong.’

For Alexander, music is an escape: ‘It has been helpful at times. When I write or sing, I do tend to feel a bit better afterwards.’ It’s a very measured, typically Olly Alexander way of putting it. But to the rest of us, watching him on the red carpet at the Brits, or playing his first Wembley gig next month, he represents a triumph of talent over adversity.

He regularly pops up in front-row seats at fashion shows such as British designers Bobby Abley and Katie Eary, although he insists his wardrobe is not expanding: ‘My room’s pretty small and I never get to keep anything anyway.’ His idea of a good night out is not what you might expect — he’s still raving about the night he cadged a ticket to the Canadian embassy in order to shake Margaret Atwood’s hand — though he laments the closure of East London’s gay clubs such as The Joiners’ Arms in Shoreditch. ‘It’s so sad. A lot of our community has moved online now, but bars are not just places to hook up, they’re part of our history and culture and we need to fight for these spaces.’

He has a US tour coming up in the summer, so to maintain his stamina on the road he behaves himself: ‘I don’t do any partying or drinking. I get paranoid about losing my voice and the show is really energetic, so I try to do some exercise every day…’ Such as? ‘Hip Hop Abs and the Insanity workout videos by Shaun T… It’s fun to do with friends before a sound-check.’ His rider is minimal: ‘I eat a banana before the show.’ Does he have a mentor? His eyes widen with delight. ‘I just have to imagine sometimes that I’m Beyoncé. That helps.’

Years & Years play Wembley Arena on 8 April; ‘Desire’ feat Tove Lo is out on 8 April

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