A lot has happened since the last album, Palo Santo, released in 2018. The Covid-19 pandemic has of course been there, but above all, the three members of the group Years and Years separated amicably last spring. Now, singer Olly Alexander operates solo, and is doing more than well with Night Call, new funky, electro and dancing album, released on January 21, which takes us back to the 80s.
“When the lockdown hit in the UK I was living alone in East London and I went back to where the music I was making started because I felt like my projects were no longer relevant. and I missed going outside, dancing, meeting people, says Olly Alexander.
“I listened to a lot of dancing things: the Pet Shop Boys, but also Sylvester, Prince of course, and the whole explosion of electronic music, New Order, Joy Division… and the music that I fell in love with as a child and teenager. I thought, ‘This is how the album will be’.”
Olly Alexanderat franceinfo
For the singer, things have also changed. His charisma and his popularity in the first place thanks to his remarkable interpretation of Ritchie Tozer in the series It’s a Sin, created for the anecdote by Russel T. Davies, already at the controls of Queer as Folk and the series Years and Years, another English program that has had great success in recent months.
Very committed to societal issues and LGBT + themes for years, Olly Alexander has become its emblem. “It was very emotional to do and I learned a lot, he says. It helped me to understand the years during which I had grown up in this country, the AIDS epidemic, homophobia… I understood a lot of things and today I am doing my best to make my proud community, and me at the same time.”
If music remains his passion and his main activity, he has received several other role proposals since and he enjoys it. But he would especially like to play a gay superhero one day: “It’s only a matter of time before we have gay superheroes, and some of them probably already are and we don’t know, but as I’m very vain, I want to be able to play a character that would be super sexy!”