Years and Years
November 28, SEC Hydro, Glasgow
“I want to take people on a wild and wonderful adventure through my dreams to a world that’s very different from our own," said Olly Alexander ahead of the release of Years and Years's comeback single in March, Sanctify.
The first new output by the London trio since autumn 2016's Meteorite – a characteristically lean cut of disco pop which formed part of the soundtrack to Bridget Jones's Baby – Sanctify was darker, more brooding, its lyrics referring to Alexander's relationship with a straight man over sultry, r'n'b-influenced beats.
Whereas he had couched his sexuality in more ambiguous terms on 2015's number one debut album
Communion, Sanctify was overt, Alexander singing that: "You don't have to be straight with me, I see what's underneath your mask”.
Commenting on the development of his writing, the Hereford-born artist said he felt empowered to be "even more confessional", concluding that: "I feel like being gay is a blessing. I wanted that to come through in the song".
The video was extraordinary: a film-quality production set in a Blade Runner-style near future of neon and concrete. This, we were told, was the "android society of Palo Santo, where humans have become a rare commodity". The remaining humans are to be found in the "wild ruins", a poverty-stricken wasteland not unlike the districts of Panem, the fictional country where author Suzanne Collins sets her Hunger Games.
In the video (an astonishing near-9.5 million plays on YouTube), Alexander is taken by an unnamed man (played with gravitas by cult Thai actor Vithaya Pansringarm) to an audition where dances for the androids, who perhaps see his impressive, passion-fuelled contortions as a proxy for what they desire most – to feel human emotion.
"It's the first part of a bigger jigsaw puzzle and my hope is that it confuses the hell out of people but also excites them in a mysterious and sensual way," said Alexander of the video. "We've deliberately hidden lots of different meanings and I want people to come up with their own interpretations, I'm asking people to jump down the rabbit hole with me and let their imagination run free."
Certainly, Sanctify was an exhilarating taster for second album, also called Palo Santo.
Released in July, it came with a 15-minute short directed by the band's frequent visual collaborator Fred Rowson and was narrated by Dame Judi Dench.
The Academy Award-winning actress and Alexander had met back in 2013, when the latter starred as Peter Pan in West End play Peter and Alice. He was an actor before his pop career, featuring in the BAFTA Award-winning Summerhill back in 2008. Further credits include zeitgeisty drama Skins and God Help The Girl, the 2014 film written and directed by Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch.
Now 28, Alexander is a man you can't help but picture in the spotlight – both metaphorically and literally. Imagining the moment in 2010 when Australian musician Mikey Goldsworthy – who had recently formed Years and Years in London with Emre Turkmen – heard his future frontman singing
in the shower, no doubt there was one trained on him then. Soulful, vulnerable, exciting – and with plenty to say, if 2015's Communion positioned him as worthy contender for being a voice of a generation with the showbiz smarts to boot, with Palo Santo he makes good on that potential.
“The thing I love most about pop music has always been fantasy and escapism,” he says. “So I thought: 'Well I guess I should try and be the pop star I want to see in the world and make the most ambitious and freaky and sexy thing possible’.”
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