“I feel like you’ve caught me on quite a vulnerable day,” reflects Olly Alexander as he unpacks his rebirth as an actual proper solo pop star. Everything feels bigger. The songs. The image. The attitude. The pressure. It’s all there as one of our most beloved pop personalities of the last decade takes a bold step into a new future.
It’s certainly been a whirlwind few years for Olly, so you can understand if he’s ever so slightly tender. He’s rushed from the split of his chart-topping band to a solo-but-not-really postscript album for Years & Years to the small matter of a starring role in one of the most acclaimed television dramas of all time. Oh, and he did Eurovision. More on that later.
Through all that, Olly has sought to define what makes him an artist and embrace all his glorious Olly Alexander-ness to make a career-defining pop statement. “I’m really nervous, honestly,” he admits. “I don’t know what it’s like giving birth, but I hear that you forget what it’s like all the way up until you’re in labour, and then you go and have another kid, so I’m like, maybe I’ve forgotten what it’s like to put an album out? It’s so nerve-wracking.”
It might seem like a purely cosmetic change. Just a simple bit of admin. How can a name really change anything? That’s to underestimate, though, the added resonance of something so dear to you being unquestionably yours for maybe the first time. ‘Polari’ is the album that Olly has been waiting all his life to make. It’s a debut, technically, but one from someone who has been doing this a long time and understands the pop machine.
“It’s been such a large portion of my life now,” he says as he recalls his early days of dreaming of stardom. “15 years. It’s not quite half my life, but it’s a chunk of it. I think back to being a teenager at comprehensive school when I was in a band with my two friends doing covers. I was obsessed with Jeff Buckley and would be reading his album booklet lyrics and dreaming of being an artist. That, to me, was the pinnacle of creative freedom and expression.
“Those moments foster your ambitions and dreams for the rest of your life. I’ve always been trying to chase that feeling. It develops and changes over the years. It’s so funny; I have this feeling of trying to keep up with the things that happen in my life, and sometimes I just can’t. It changes too quickly, and oh, I’m in a different place now.”
That sense of perpetual forward motion and slight careening out of control has characterised Olly’s career. You don’t reach the levels he has without that drive and ambition, but Olly is remarkably honest as he details how he hasn’t always felt so confident and assured.
“I feel like that’s been my challenge, as trusting my own instincts has always been hard,” he explains. “As an artist, I like to take these leaps of faith and take risks, but I don’t always have the confidence or self-esteem to back it up, so I always feel like I’m chasing myself a bit. I think that’s why being an artist is fun, though, and that’s why I’m an artist.”
Olly was destined to be an artist; he’s been one since he was an actual child. “I started making music in my bedroom at age 10 or whatever, having songbooks, having lyrics and diaries, making little tapes and being in bands with friends,” he says as he recounts his early years before starting Years & Years. With the band, though, Olly had to find a way to compromise his own star power and pop vision, and it’s a development that is instructive in pointing the way to how he has created ‘Polari’.
“Years & Years started, and then the songwriting process changes, and you’re collaborating in a different way,” he says. “It wasn’t a totally smooth process, but it worked in a way that we got signed and made ‘Communion’ and felt like it went really well. After ‘Communion’, even the way that was made, once you sign a deal, you start working with external producers and external writers, you have the label A&R, and the process changes really drastically over the years. That’s natural anyway, but the influx of people, especially on your first major label album, was insane.”
This was the first instance of the pop machine tightening its grip as Olly grappled with fitting his own vision in with the bigger picture of ‘the project’. Years & Years were incredibly successful with actual Number 1 singles and pop bangers for the ages, but behind the scenes, Olly wasn’t exactly having the time of his life.
“I didn’t enjoy being in the studio; I found it so difficult. It was always fighting over ideas. I would write the lyrics; sometimes, I would come with a song to the studio with lyrics ready to go, but we could never agree on production. That’s typical for a band, though; sometimes, it’s good to have those conflicts. The second album was made differently with different producers and different writers.”
All of these experiences meant that he had to take a different approach when it finally came to doing a proper solo record. “By the time I got to now, to make ‘Polari’, I thought, if I’m working under my own name, I don’t want to work with any writers,” he says. “Working with writers is great, and I’ve had amazing experiences doing that, but I want to make this in as small and focused a way as possible with just one person. That was my goal. It has to be from me with one person who gets me, and that’s what we’re going to do.
“It took me a while to find who that person was but that was really important to me. The next record I make might be totally different, but for this one, it had to be really condensed and press myself into the record.”
That one person is mad pop scientist, super hip pop producer and noted extremely tall man, Danny L Harle. With a background from visionary 21st-century pop label PC Music and an innate ability to subvert experimental electronic music into the greatest pop you’ve ever heard, Danny has turned out to be the perfect collaborator for Olly to truly dive into his very specific pop sensibility and be the best version of himself. ‘Polari’ feels incredibly tight and well-defined and is rich in both mood and texture. This isn’t like a pick-n-mix grab-bag selection. It’s more like if you have just the best flavours of Cadbury Roses (undoubtedly strawberry and orange) condensed in one great big bowl. Anyway, back to Olly and ‘Huge’ Danny.
“We connected as people first,” smiles Olly. “You really need to trust someone if they were going to be my producer and my everything on this record. Musically, he actually is a genius. He’s so smart and so talented. I would always be jaw on the floor with him in the studio. He’s so quick, and his ideas are so leftfield, but he understands pop and has such a reverence for pop music.”
Together, the pair crafted an album that pays homage to Olly’s formative pop influences but does it in a way that feels fresh and invigorating. “How he saw what I bring to pop music helped me see where my lane is or where it could potentially be. I had actually resisted a little bit doing anything that felt like it was pulling too much from the 80s,” he laughs. “I thought maybe it was a bit too obvious or a bit too connected to It’s A Sin, but then I fully came back around to it and thought this felt like a place that was right for me.
“Danny helped me see the way 80s music was created and the attitude towards the production feeling out of place or surprising. It’s really heart on your sleeve and not cynical but has this playful edge and a wink to the listener. It really blossomed from that, and I realised, oh, actually, this is actually a rich font of inspiration for me because it feels so gay. I went back to my gay heroes like Pet Shop Boys and Erasure and Jimmy Somerville. All the legends. That’s been such a huge inspiration for me forever. This record is like a love letter to that spirit of music and being gay and trying to carry that torch into now.”
“This record is like a love letter to that spirit of music and being gay and trying to carry that torch into now”
That’s where the concept of Polari and how it defines the album enters the chat. It was both nostalgic and optimistic for the future at the same time. “’Polari’ means so many things, but because it was a word from the past, it actually felt futuristic,” explains Olly. “Star, Polari, space, this world that felt like a mixture of different timelines. It made sense to me.”
Let’s unpack just what Polari is, then. According to the officially very smart people at the Oxford Dictionary, the word Polari is “a form of slang incorporating Italianate words, rhyming slang, and Romani, used originally as a kind of secret language in England by people in theatres, fairgrounds, markets etc. and adopted by some gay people in the 20th century.”
What might feel like an archaic relic of the past actually turned out to be a rich source of inspiration for Olly as he went through the transformative life event of really reflecting on how his gay identity shapes who he is as a performer and a person as he was researching his role as Ritchie in It’s A Sin. It’s all part of the realisation that there was no way he could do anything but an album under his own name now. He had come too far on his journey of exploration with the inspiring spirit of Polari as a kind of guiding star. “Once I put ‘Nightcall’ out in early 2022 the experience of putting that out as Years & Years made me realise that actually it was something I wanted to leave behind,” he explains. “Not that it was a bad experience, but I just knew it was putting me in a place that I had just moved on from.”
The power of language in Polari and how influential it was within culture was something that really inspired him. “Communication is everything,” he says. “On a personal level, being gay, I found it fascinating diving into the history of Polari and what it said about my history and where I’ve come from, also for British culture as well. There are different versions of Polari and different cultures across the world because, as human beings, we use language to define our realities, and there are always going to be people who are marginalised and need to find ways to subvert the language around them for whatever reason. I’m a professional communicator. I’m an artist. Every song is a message.”
It’s in those messages that you can see the throughlines of Olly’s whole career across ‘Polari’. “It made me think of when I was writing ‘Take Shelter’ from the first Years & Years album,” he recalls. “It was very much code. I thought it was funny because one of the lyrics is ‘You go down, you reach round’. The song is a read about being sexually dominated in a way, allowing yourself to be submissive. You can read it in different ways but I got such a thrill that a song like that can be played on the radio. That is a grand tradition of pop music. The language may be updated and not defined as such, but the spirit of Polari lives on in how we all communicate today.
“Polari to me was, we’ve been doing this. You have your own language with your friends. We all find these different ways to communicate in our own secret ways. That’s how I thought of the songs. Some of them are really obvious, like ‘Make Me A Man’, even though there are no specific Polari words you know what it’s alluding to. The song ‘I Know’ is literally I know what your sexuality is. It’s also because people have always said to me, I know what you are like; you’re not even a person and just a thing. I thought I’d flip that. I’d try to employ in my mind what I thought were Polari conventions. Double meanings, hidden symbols and a playful take on the lyrics.”
“I never expected to do an Olly Alexander record”
What about all those tedious people who frown on things like employing religious imagery, etc etc? “I was doing an interview the other day, and they were like, “You’ve got a song called ‘Archangel’, and the song ‘Make Me A Man’ references Adam and the Garden of Eden. Are you not scared of offending religious people?” laughs Olly. “I was like, well, I think maybe we’re a bit far gone for that. That ship may have sailed on ‘Communion’. I had a song called ‘Worship’. I don’t know that it’s that much of a shock!”
There are lots of themes on ‘Polari’ that are central to Olly’s musical psyche. Sex, religion, gardening. Actually, one of them isn’t quite true. Olly is a keen new gardener, though. “I’ve really got into gardening. I bought a place a couple of years ago in London because I really wanted a garden. Gardening is all about patience, but it’s also super creative. You’re responsible for these living things, so it’s all about cultivating and caring for these plants. It’s a fledgling hobby of mine. I could be the new Alan Titchmarsh.”
Lovely stuff, but enough of that for now; let’s get back to sex and religion – the fun stuff. There is a lot of fun on this record, but it’s set against some quite deep and affecting introspection. It’s grown-up pop but with a playful, silly side, too, like George Michael riding the Vengabus.
“I feel like I’ve learned some lessons,” says Olly as he opens up about writing this album. “I never expected to do an Olly Alexander record. I was so adamant I wouldn’t up until a couple of years ago. A lot of times along the way, I’ve really doubted myself and questioned myself. Is this what I really should be doing? I’ve wondered, with my lack of self-confidence, how can I be low in confidence after everything I’ve done?
“I needed to go through it. I’ve ended up with something that’s meaningful to me in a different way from my other projects and previous albums. It feels closer to what I think being an artist is meant to be for myself. That’s so precious to me.”
It feels like just having this thing out in the world is success in itself for Olly. “I see how all my experiences have led me to this moment and helped me to get into a place where I could go into the studio with Danny and just go, this is the record we’re going to make, and I really don’t care about all the other stuff, like how it performs, will it get played on the radio, what are the streams? Should I do this to please that person? I’ve been growing into this thing, and then ‘Polari’ was the time to do it, and you just have to do it.”
The music ecosystem of 2025 is vastly different to 2015, when Years & Years had a global Number 1 with ‘King’. “10 years plus into a career in the music industry, you really see the rise and fall and the good times and the bad times, the people who want to be your friends and the people who don’t want to be your friends,” he laughs. “I have managed to see markers of success differently, and validation doesn’t come from external sources. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to be in the industry. Every artist feels pressure to perform or isn’t performing in the right way.”
That pressure to perform might have led Olly to jack in the music lark after the wild success of It’s A Sin and just do acting full-time, but there’s always something that draws him back to music as the most beautiful form of expression. “The thing is, I get so much from being an artist,” he replies. “I get to write the song, sing the song, make the music video, do the styling. It’s become my comfort zone to work with the people I love to work with and wake up every day and have the same people I love and trust and who get me. When you do an acting project, and this is why an acting project is good, you’re stepping out of your comfort zone and taking a lot of risks. You’re giving up control. It’s A Sin was so amazing to do, and it needs to be just as good as that to do more acting.”
So, what if telly genius and writer of It’s A Sin Russell T. Davies phoned up and said Olly, I know you like singing and dancing and being a pop star and stuff, but I’ve got this idea for a new show, and I need you to come and star in it and spend three years doing it, what would you say? “I don’t know, you know,” he ponders. “I would consider something like that. I’m definitely going to continue making music. This is the last album on my record deal. I will sign another deal, but I feel like I want to manifest doing another acting project this year. The thought of doing anything for three years freaks me out, though, because I’ve been under contract for ten years, so it would be nice to have a bit of a break. Previously, I would have said definitely not because I just love making music.”
‘Polari’ is a big pop record. It might have been stripped back in personnel, but it is very much maximalist in sound. “I really felt led by the music, and it ended up with each song being a bold, big pop song. That is how I see music in many ways. I won’t always make these kinds of songs, but I’ll have some in the tank, and they kept coming out for ‘Polari’.”
“It’s a lot,” he chuckles. “I do tend to like that in a pop song. It has to take you to climaxes. Big peaks and troughs. Well, it doesn’t have to, but that’s what I like. If we’re gonna do it, then let’s see how much we can push it.”
There was one other person with a similar vision for perfect pop who provided the added secret sauce to Danny and Olly’s sonic concoctions. The ‘nicest man in pop music’ according to Olly, Finn Keane who is fresh off amazing stuff with Charli xcx’s ‘Brat’ and all manner of pop madness. “I know Finn; he was a brilliant third person to come in,” enthuses Olly. “There’s not a lot of cooks, but the chefs are so brilliantly talented,” he laughs. Let’s have just one more for dessert, then in the shape of actual 80s pop legend Vince Clarke from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, who provides production on uber swish banger ‘Make Me A Man’. “It was so amazing to get this piece of music from Vince Clarke,” beams Olly.
“There were some tough experiences, but those are the ones that really teach you about yourself and help you to grow”
Ok, so we’ve waited long enough – let’s get to the shiny pop elephant in the room. Is Olly Alexander sick of talking about Eurovision? “No, I talk about it with my therapist all the time,” he laughs. Yes, there’s no doubt Eurovision was a thing that happened when Olly performed his really rather good song ‘Dizzy’, which sounds amazing within the context of the album. “Well, of course, it didn’t go how I wanted it to go,” he says with wry understatement. To his eternal credit, though, he talks about it in good spirit. “I never thought I was going to win. Actually, it’s not that I didn’t think I could win, but I very quickly knew I wasn’t going to win, and I suspected I would potentially do quite badly in the competition,” he admits. “I was prepared. Even before they announced the results, the director said to me, ‘I think you’re about to get zero, so prepare yourself’.”
Does a small part of him regret taking part? “We knew for us the process was so wild and so intense,” he says. “You go through so much, but we ended up with something we really love and are proud of. I still got to do that performance on the Eurovision stage, which is just so bonkers. It was deeply fascinating to see Eurovision from the inside. I will never have an experience like that in my life.
“There were some tough experiences, but those are the ones that really teach you about yourself and help you to grow. There were some hard lessons, and it taught me a lot. I can’t let myself regret it. It was such a fucking nuts experience.”
Onwards and, indeed, upwards as Olly used the experience to channel everything that makes him brilliant to finish the album. “’Dizzy’ is a Polari word and was part of this record that sounded like it. I have to do the record. I have to keep going. That was part of my whole message about Eurovision. I might be deeply unpopular, but despite that, I will still be doing this, and it will be excellent. It’s not really something you can say at the time, but that’s how I felt,” he says passionately.
In any case, there are more serious and worrying things going on in art and wider culture than getting nul points in a singing competition. Olly has been a pioneer in advocating for LGBTQ+ people, and especially queer artists, for a long time now, and he can see how the landscape has changed in positive ways with so many queer artists flourishing, but he also has seen some worrying darker undercurrents.
“The opportunities are there, but it’s feeling more hostile in others,” he reflects. “There’s such an intense backlash happening to anything perceived as woke culture, and LGBTQ+ people are just woke apparently. It’s part of an insidious agenda. Maybe when people talk about pendulum swings back and forth, maybe we’re now swinging back. I think there’s some incredible music, TV and film coming out all the time. I’ve been so inspired by what people are doing and still breaking boundaries in terms of queer people and LGBTQ+ people.”
Sadly for Olly, that more hostile environment is something he experiences regularly. “Personally, I feel like, social media-wise, I get more abuse. Maybe that’s because I’m more famous than I was, so I get more comments. I feel like there’s more homophobia now than there was. Actually, maybe I’m less famous?? I don’t actually know!” Don’t worry, Olly, of course you’re more famous.
There’s a lot of stuff to look forward to for Olly in 2025. Stuff that more famous people do. Like going out on tour. This time, Olly’s show promises to be a little different with a new angle on his work. “I’m going on my Up Close and Polari tour. My last tour was very all-singing and all-dancing, and I want to move away from that, partly because I don’t have the money,” he laughs with endearing honesty. “Even if I had loads of money at this point, I would be putting it into the visuals because I want to create a different experience. I thought of something, but I can’t afford it.
“I also love the pop and dancing thing, and I wanted to push that in the music videos but to do it live in a different way where it was more literally about the music. The tour’s going to be great and more of an intimate experience. For me, in the industry at large, it’s impossible to plan. It’s very precarious. Tours and festivals, I don’t know at the moment. My hope is to always take the biggest and best show on the road, but I have to be realistic. I can’t do that on this record; I just don’t have the budget. It will still be amazing.”
Of course, it’s going to be amazing. People might think they want all the fancy lights and technical wizardry, but what they want is maximum unfiltered Olly Alexander. You can see why he might be a little bit vulnerable. It’s hard out there, but that’s why we need brilliant pop characters like Olly like never before. Pop characters who feel the need to clarify that they can definitely still do the splits. Pop characters who, if they were going to swap themselves for an animal in a Robbie Williams CGI monkey style, would choose a cat because “I just really spiritually relate to them as beings. I feel very cat-like. All cats are insane and perfect, beautiful creatures.”
An insane and perfect beautiful creature. Welcome to the glorious new era of Olly Alexander. It’s good to be vulnerable. ■
Taken from the March 2025 issue of Dork. Olly Alexander’s album ‘Polari’ is out now. The Up Close and Polari Tour of the UK and Europe kicks off on 19th March.
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