Young Hearts Run Free
Will Young shakes off the shadow of Pop Idol
With domestic album sales topping the 3,000,000 mark and a meaty acting role alongside Judi Dench to his name, Will Young is much more than a mere Pop Idol
words: paul flynn
OVER A BREAKFAST appointment with Will Young, at his members’ club in Soho, central London, it quickly becomes apparent that the boy is a fidgeter. He takes his hat on and off, smoothes down his hair and toys with a croissant on the table. His coffee cup keeps going up and then, depending on the moment’s inspiration, down. There is something quite conspiratorial about him.
It goes without saying that in the British pop arena, which has favoured the compliance of stage school desperadoes over genuine characters, he is one of the few clever young men to try his hand at the genre in the last 10 years. You get the immediate impression that he still doesn’t quite know where he fits in.
When serious, Young speaks in a hushed stage whisper. When he is saucy – which is often, but must mostly remain off record, for decency’s sake – he lets out a throaty laugh. It’s then that you can see exactly where his popularity stems from, aside from his music. He is no longer the Pop Idol’s Pop Idol. He rescinded that title three years ago, when he defied the reality show’s template to become a genuine, saleable singing star, refusing to follow the crash-and-burn trajectory of entering the public realm at the peak of prime-time fame and following the natural path downwards from thereon. And now he is the country’s ideal dinner party companion. I would wager that he’s an absolute hoot when drunk.
Young, 27, can look at himself objectively – as if he is observing a fictional character in a peculiar pop narrative, not quite the reality that he is living. He knows where he stands in the public imagination and condenses it with coruscating effectiveness: “Well,” he says, “at first I was the guy who won Pop Idol. Then I was the guy that defied Pop Idol.” Fidget, hat, coffee. “Then there was the gay thing, which was my story for a short while.” Fidget, coffee up, coffee down. “But I feel that it hasn’t moved on from that guy who’s defied what he was supposed to do. Is that my lot? I wonder if, in 10 years time, I’ll be that person that’s still around…”
He does himself a disservice. When he triumphed over his contemporaries in the national talent contest, the assumption was that he would take flight for as long as the public remembered the show and then swiftly disappear, exactly as Hear-Say, Liberty X and Michelle McManus had done before him off the back of similar, frenzied television competitions. But domestic album sales of over 3,000,000 hints at prosperity beyond his beginnings.
For his first year in the public spotlight, Young moved tentatively. He says now that he had to choose his ‘no’s carefully, something that may prove trickier than you imagine for a wide-eyed new kid on the block when faced with a strong-arm management team, seasoned in orchestrating the careers of bona fide heavyweights Annie Lennox and The Spice Girls. Abject mistakes were made, including a duet with his Pop Idol compatriot Gareth Gates on an opaque cover of the Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road. I mention that you can practically hear Linda McCartney turning in her grave at that one and he says, “Hmmm, well, I can see why some people might think that, but to me it was an end of the Pop Idol thing. It was the full stop on that period. And besides, you should see some of the things I turned down!” He refuses to be drawn any further, but the mind boggles at the prospect.
Yet there were other things on Young’s debut album, From Now On, that pointed at longevity for the fledgling star. He had worked with esteemed songwriter Cathy Dennis – a friendship that still continues – and genuine legend Burt Baccharach, on You & I. Maturity was hinted at from the outset, though the singer is quite clear on the song that broke him, the Westlife b-side Evergreen. The track was polished to perfection, ready to be farmed out to whoever won the show. It is still the 13th bestselling single of all time in Britain. “But I had eight months of intensive promotion for one single,” he recalls, “and that song was so not about me. It was a memento of the show.”
He expresses ambivalence towards the Pop Idol and X Factor formats now, although he remains grateful for their ability to provide a short cut to public recognition. And he still thinks Simon Cowell is a sly genius. “He plays a role, like Jeremy Irons as the quintessential English baddie. He’s wonderful at it.” And besides, “there’s nothing different about those shows than goes on in real life. There are tonnes of artists being developed. I know of one guy at 19 [Young’s management company] who’s been around for years and is still being developed. Hopefully it’ll happen for him but you just don’t know. It’s a snapshot of that world you see on TV. Reality TV is the harsh reality of the entertainment industry.”
If you suspect that there has been a slight case of finger-burning in Young’s ascendancy into pop stardom, then you would be right. Astonishingly for a pop star, Young puts his hand up to admit it. “I think I’ll always struggle a bit with that disillusionment of going into a job where you are used to being a fan. I used to adore music. Suddenly I can’t watch MTV. It just does not relax me. I find myself thinking either ‘who directed it, how much did it cost, why have they done that, oh, that’s really good! Why haven’t I done that?’ It’s not switch-off for me and that is one of my biggest regrets. I don’t know if I’m as honest in my taste as I once was.”
Mindful of how all this may come across in print, he qualifies the last statement. “But I know what I am now, which has been the hardest thing to establish. Everyone who arrives in the public arena has been allowed to make their mistakes before they arrive. I wasn’t.” I ask if there’s anyone whose career path he’s thinking of in particular.
“Someone like KT Tunstall, whom I love. She’s 30; she’s been around. She’s a finished, polished thing. Whereas I came with nothing and have had to keep my place in one of the most fickle industries in the world, make mistakes but still survive them and defy all these odds at once.
I was an apparition when I arrived fresh out of Pop Idol.” He is warming to the subject, albeit in slightly guarded tones. I suggest that there is nothing less apparitional about someone like Tunstall, who has had to bleach her sound for radio yet still be presented as this ‘quirky’ woman for marketing purposes. She’s photographed a certain way to target a certain demographic. Just because that demographic is Friday Night With Jools Holland and not CD:UK doesn’t mean it is any more real. Young seems a little perturbed by this.
“Do you think she isn’t doing what she wants to do?” I suggest it’s an approximation of what she wants to do. “Watered down? Whether you’re right or wrong, the question is how much you are prepared to compromise. You’ve got to get on radio and TV for the albums to sell. That’s the nature of the job. I can’t see a way in which people can do it only their way. There’s a way you can walk in this industry and I feel like I walk with twice as much suspicion following me because of where I came from. I can never be seen to be trying too hard.”
There’s an implicit suggestion here that there’s some kind of regret in coming out of a reality show. “There’s no regret because I simply wouldn’t be here otherwise. But I have to be really careful in my decisions. I still see all this as a challenge.
I don’t see that I am ‘there’ yet.”
Will Young was born into a privileged family in the home counties and educated at boarding school in Bracknell, near Ascot. He doesn’t regret it for a moment. “I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to say that it’s a better education than a state school,” he muses, “But for me it was better. It doesn’t mean the teachers are any different, though. I’ve got two friends who are state school teachers and an uncle who’s a headmaster at a boarding school. They’re equally good teachers. Ultimately, it’s about the parents.”
He warms to the subject. “I grew up with a father who worked for his money. We’ve always had money but we weren’t brought up to let that mould who we were. My dad was a millionaire who turned up to my public school in his 1960s mini and was pulled over by security. I’m so lucky because I was taught the view that was anti- the establishment. I was always being told off at prep school for something or other.”
Part of his anti-establishment feeling must surely have been the result of his sexuality. Young still remembers the day, three weeks after his Pop Idol victory, when The News Of The World ‘outed’ him. “It was Sunday and I went to buy cigarettes [he no longer smokes] – a lot of cigarettes on that day, as it happened, because I knew it was coming. As I paid the newsagent over the counter, we both saw me on the front page saying ‘I’m gay’. He looked at me; I just said ‘It’s true!’ And then he gave me my change. Thankfully it was only one day and then it passed. It would have been a bit boring if it had dragged on.”
As he has grown up in the public sphere, so too has he grown into his sexuality, playing around with it in his video imagery (“I’m rather proud of that playfulness”). There has been no public boyfriend, although speculation was rife about a relationship between him and the fashion designer Matthew Williamson. Young insists there’s no truth to the rumour. He attended his first gay civil partnership in January, of a couple who had been together for 40 years (“very touching”) and was moved irrevocably by the Oscar-winning film, Brokeback Mountain.
“I remember going to the lesbian and gay film festival last year and with most of the films I saw I was, like, they may as well just whack on some porn instead. That seemed to be what the audience was there for. As a gay man, I find that sort of thing patronising. Hollywood is so idealistic, with straight love stories being about ridiculously good looking people falling in love. So actually I’m chastising these films and then I’m thinking, ‘well, why don’t we have a love story with two gorgeous guys that is properly about love?’ And then along comes Brokeback Mountain. It is an amazing film.”
While Young professes that his third album, Keep On, is his favourite yet (rightly, it’s his best), and is looking forward to taking it on the road this autumn. He has begun spreading his wings further afield, perhaps aware that the cut-throat world of pop might not be all he was destined for. Last year he made his film debut in the Stephen Frears movie about wartime theatre, Mrs Henderson Presents, starring alongside Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. It was a liberating experience for the young performer.
“There was a large part of me that felt at home in that environment,” he says, “It wasn’t just the subject of the film but the people I was working with. Because I was this alien from another industry, I seemed to be quite well liked there. I loved the way they worked. All these people would just rock up, be amazing and then go home again. Whereas with the pop industry you turn up with cars and a stylist and all this accompanying stuff. Before you’ve even got to do a performance you’ll have done endless meet-and-greets. You become acutely aware that you are part of a hype machine. When I was making the film, there was no sense of any artificial glamour.
It’s more democratic and more about what you actually do on the day.”
Again, he chooses to qualify his words. “I’m not complaining about the pop business but it is exactly that: a business.
I get a lot of self-fulfilment out of it and I do well out of it financially. It’s satisfying and I can create something – that’s wonderful. But sometimes I think this is what I do and there is all that s**t over here that I have to do to justify what I do.”
In the light of all this, it’s telling that he is taking to the boards again this Christmas, at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, in a Noel Coward play.
It has taken him a while, but he is discovering the kind of artist he wants to be. “I had a meeting with someone from the label once who said, ‘We can turn you into Enrique [Iglesias]’. The thought whirring through my mind was, ‘I don’t want to be Enrique, thank you very much.’ I’m sure Enrique loves being Enrique but I just couldn’t do that.
And I genuinely believe that it helps you if you’re not that hungry for it. If you can earn enough to have a nice living and do things that are creatively satisfying, well, that is amazing.”
Will Young has a final fidget, finishes his croissant and, on that note, bids farewell.
Will Young’s Keep On Live UK and Ireland tour starts in Cardiff on 12 September 2006. Venues include Birmingham, Newcastle and London (+44 (0)870 400 0688; www.getLIVE.co.uk). The album Keep On is out now
