Olly Alexander On Going Solo With ‘Starstruck’ And The Agonising Experience Of ‘It’s A Sin’

When Olly Alexander announced in March that Years & Years — the synth-pop trio that he’d fronted for a decade — would be his own solo project from now on, it wasn’t exactly surprising.

His lead role in Russell T. Davies’ five-part AIDS drama It’s A Sin, released earlier this year to critical acclaim, was a career-shifting moment. Fans were reminded Alexander was an actor before he was a pop star — but most of all, it introduced him to a whole new audience.

Alexander, 30, has been a UK household name for years. Beyond Years & Years, he’s been a charming regular on late-night shows, forthcoming in the press about his progressive, pro-Corbyn, anti-Brexit views, and was the host of his own BBC series, Growing Up Gay. But now, thanks to a BBC/HBO partnership for It’s A Sin, Alexander had bridged the Atlantic divide.

He’s never shied away from his aim to be famous, recently telling The Guardian he lined up a therapist to coach him through fame the moment Years & Years signed to a major label. Nothing less was ever an option.

Enter ‘Starstruck’, Alexander’s first solo single under the Years & Years moniker. It’s a bit of an odd branding decision, and when I ask him about it over Zoom, it seems like emotions battled out against the marketing team.

“It was something we discussed, myself [and ex-bandmates Mike Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen, with the latter to continue to be involved in live performances],” he says. “Honestly, I’ve been writing Years & Years songs for so long, and I just wasn’t ready to stop.”

‘Starstruck’ is their most infectious, joyful release yet.

“We talked it over and we sort of weighed up or try to weigh up possible pros and cons. It just felt like it made the most sense…. It’s a bit different, for sure, but it’s still going to be still Years & Years. You know what I mean?”

Alexander, Goldsworthy and Türkmen had been in Years & Years since 2010, when Goldsworthy heard Alexander singing in the shower the morning after a party. A decade later, they’re in their ’30s: as Alexander puts it, the COVID-19 halt made them reflect and realise they “want to do different things. We just have to accept that things change, and that’s natural and normal.”

Hearing ‘Starstruck’, it clicks why Alexander held onto the band name. Y&Y trade in synth-pop about desire, and ‘Starstruck’ continues the trend. Their most infectious, joyful release yet, the song captures the sugar-rush of a new obsession — which, as the music video suggests, is also Alexander’s love song to himself, after years and years of struggling with self-acceptance.

I Get Starstruck Around Myself

Olly Alexander is forthcoming: in the past decade, he’s spoken at length around his own experiences with bulimia, depression, self-harm, self-confidence and sexuality.

Born in Yorkshire and spending his youth in small towns, Alexander moved to London as an adult, and, as happens, found himself free within queer nightlife — much like his It’s A Sin character, Ritchie.

His acting CV was impressive — late-era Skins, roles in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void and Jane Campion’s Keats biopic Bright Star, to name a few). And after Years & Years signed to Universal imprint Polydor in 2014, he continued acting, though it fell to the wayside after their second album, 2018’s Palo Santo.

Alexander never ‘came out’ as gay, though was advised to hide his sexuality: instead, their first single ‘Real’ called the love interest a ‘boy’, waiting for a journalist to ask. Years & Years’ first album, Communion, is filled with ’80s-inspired dance melodies about anguished love and power imbalances that feel good in their pain (“I was a King under your control”) — turning queer shame into something you can sweat out.

Palo Santo kept the queer self-flagellation theme up. Lead single ‘Santfiy’ even included a reference to a queer literature classic, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From The Dancer (“I breathe the richness of the dancer’s dance”), a nod to how those before Alexander have found release on the dancefloor — and hook-ups facilitated by nightclubs.

While in sound it might not be too far removed from Palo Santo, ‘Starstruck’ has one noticeable difference: a lack of tension. It’s all-in, candy-coated pop without the darkness that marks much of Years & Years’ most popular tracks. Alexander says it was also one of the first songs he wrote that wasn’t about a particular person or relationship.

“It felt like a real departure from some of the stuff that I usually wrote, because it was more about this projection of a feeling, [being] just like completely overwhelmed with emotions for someone,” he said.

“And I was like, ‘well, this isn’t something I’m actually going through right now, because usually, I write songs about the guy that I’m not over yet, or about a guy that I’ve met or something that happened in the past’. But [I wasn’t] really feeling much for anything, the lockdown in the UK had been kind of difficult. ”

“It felt like a real departure from some of the stuff that I usually wrote, because it was more about this projection of a feeling.”

‘Starstruck’, complete with dizzying star-synths in its chorus, is powered by limerance — the all-consuming high of a crush, which can veer more towards having a love-object than the objective person themselves. That pedestal projection is all about possession (“not giving you up!/not giving you up!”, Alexander taunts in the chorus), but in the music video, directed by Fred Rowson and choreographed by Sherry Silver, Alexander is obsessed with himself.  He plays two roles: a slightly manic, love-eyed version of himself, dancing and chasing after his less-enthused self in a giant apartment.

It’s the claustrophobia of lockdown where alone our battling selves are forced to butt heads — and you need to look no further than the ‘Imagine’ video to see that celebrities, left without the affirmation of constant attention, simply couldn’t handle being alone with themselves.

“I’ve been trying to figure out this personality split that you experience when you do a job as a performer because you’re always performing a character,” Alexander says. “I guess being in the public eye is another element to it, because you’re performing yourself, but you’re still a character. I’ve always been interested in that balance — there’s actually like a lot of, kind of stuff about identity and reflection, like literal reflections, in Years & Years’ music videos… That’s definitely something I think about a lot, where does Olly stop and Olly the performer begin.”

Rather than seek that affirmation online (“I was at home watching the ‘Imagine’ video and people doing crazy stuff online, and I really didn’t want to do [that]”), Alexander concentrated on finding it in himself. Written while in a difficult place, ‘Starstruck’ is about a crush he didn’t have, but when his choreographer suggested the video involves him dancing to a mirror self — and that the two merge toward the video’s end — it all clicked.

“[The video] added this whole context to the song that I really loved,” he said. “And it made sense with this whole kind of journey that I’ve been on the past few years of my life. I’ve been single and really, really trying to learn to love myself.  I just thought it would be like a really interesting way of expressing the emotions in the song, and also laugh at myself a bit about the situation I’m in.”

Self-love is hardly a new message for pop; at this point, it’s been co-opted by some of our most hollow hits. Alexander’s performance — the pure joy of it — elevates ‘Starstruck’, as does his considered nature. Evidently, he thinks about his stature a lot (possibly too much), and what he can offer with it.

This, he says, was why he was drawn to It’s A Sin, though he agonised over the best way, as a queer man who didn’t experience the worst of the AIDS crisis, he could portray it.

“It [was] definitely daunting for a number of reasons. You want to give a really good performance, know your shit, do the right research and try and get inside the head at the heads of these people,” he said. “It felt like a huge privilege to be telling the story in the first place. I’m not someone that lives with HIV — as a group, you have to treat this subject with the utmost sensitivity, but it’s Russell’s show, and as you say, [based off] Russell’s experience.”

“There is a lot of anger, righteous anger, within the show, but it’s also so funny and it’s also about the ordinariness of these people’s lives and the extraordinariness of normal people’s lives. And I know Russell wanted you to love these characters and to miss them when they were gone and the power of entertainment and a TV story to move people in a way that other texts might not. And he is someone that truly understands how a TV show can do that.”

Similarly, Alexander understands what pop music can (and can’t) do, too. ‘Starstruck’ shrugs off shame and makes it seem easy. Alexander, as a person, admits it’s anything but, though invites you into the myth for a few minutes to dance and pretend.

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Jared Richards is Junkee’s Drag Race recapper and a freelancer who has written for The Guardian, The Big Issue and more. He’s on Twitter.

Years & Years’ new single ‘Starstruck’ is out now.