Post by troublepet on Mar 10, 2009 16:17:13 GMT 1
The Times
What it is to be (Will) Young
Luke Leitch
Will Young turned 30 on January 20 - Barack Obama's inauguration day. “Two great moments!” he says brightly, before running me through his celebratory schedule; he went to the South Bank Show Awards and then, afterwards, to his local. The South Bank Show Awards? Going to an awards ceremony, however glam, seems a pretty lame way to celebrate your 30th.
Before I can lob this at him Young leans forward - we are sitting by the window in Julie's, an artfully ramshackle restaurant just around the corner from that local - and introduces the pre-eminent theme of our hour together: his psychological health. “Actually, I think I have had a bit of a thirties hangover. I'd thought I was fine with it [turning 30]. I thought: ‘Well, you haven't done badly.'”
Young grew up, with his twin brother Rupert and older sister Emma, in Hungerford, Berkshire. Their father, Robin, and mother, Annabel, sent Will to Horris Hill prep school, and then on to Wellington public school. In 2001, he graduated from Exeter University and began a musical theatre course. Then, seven years ago, Pop Idol happened. Since beating Gareth Gates in the nail-biting final, Young has produced four albums, sung with Elton John, James Brown and Burt Bacharach and won an intensely loyal fanbase. Admittedly, his is a musical career acclaimed more popularly than critically (ten Brits nominations, no win).
Yet that mellifluous voice, it emerged, was not his sole forte. In 2006 he was Bafta nominated for his role in Mrs Henderson Presents. The theatre critics, their perceptions perhaps less skewed by his Pop Idol provenance, adored him as Nicky Lanchester in The Vortex, and - armed with his 2:2 in politics from Exeter University - he appeared on Question Time, boosting its rating to 3.6 million viewers. This month he is the subject of a South Bank Show, the reason that we are sitting here today.
And a South Bank Show, complete with an introduction by Melvyn Bragg, is an accolade indeed, although Young had to be asked twice, he says, before he agreed to take part. Why on earth would he refuse? “I was a bit ‘why would you want to do it?'” This allows me to raise the awkward question: why does Young believe that The South Bank Show - which was once accused of dumbing down for a programme on Dolly Parton - would be interested in a pop star who was discovered on a talent show? But when Young continues his sentence, that opportunity is suddenly cut off: “I just think: ‘Why? What's the point?”
“Oh”, I interrupt, to clarify what he means: “why would you want to do it.” He nods, guilelessly. Maybe the question that The South Bank Show, or anyone else, might think that he is an artistically lightweight subject hasn't occurred to him. After all, despite Pop Idol, he is now a multimillion-selling singer-songwriter in his own right.
Melvyn Bragg, though, did understand the question when he was asked by the East Anglian Daily Times if he expected a show dedicated to Young, a “manufactured pop star”, to provoke accusations of dumbing down from observers. “Yes, they will,” he replied, adding: “It's been the case now for 30-odd years and it's unlikely to change: what I'm looking for is quality and not category . . . You can find good-quality art in pop music and if you say that good-quality music is only in the category of classical music, you're missing something.”
But Young isn't talking about using his 30th birthday as a moment to assess the state of his career. He's talking about using it to assess the state of life, his universe - the whole Will Young shebang. “You look back, and go: ‘What am I doing with my life?', that kind of thing. ‘Do I like myself? Do I like my friends?' And I was ticking boxes, thinking: ‘Oh, you know, yes! I'm happy with this! I still look OK. I kind of like my friends, I kind of like myself. I think I've done OK.'But since then,” he says, ominously, “there have been repercussions.”
The first “repercussion” he mentions is fretting about replacing his clapped-out six-year-old car with something swankier that doesn't break down because “you think: ‘Nooo! You're being 30! You're being boring!”
This seems a weird thing to be angsting about. “I know! I wouldn't say I'm angsting, though. I would say it's a moment where maybe I'm having more of a problem with being 30 than I realise.”
Right. Can he think of any other examples of this problem? “I had a moment of thinking: ‘Should you be in a relationship?' I was: ‘It's OK, 'cos you're gay, so you don't mind so much about kids.' I thought: ‘It's fine!' and then I had a bit of a moment. Maybe it's not fine.”
Young has been single for a while now. His most recent break-up, from a longish-term boyfriend (a dancer called Conor), hurt. Love, as he says rather sweetly on The South Bank Show, sends him “potty”, and love's end depresses him. Does heartbreak hit him often? “There have been three people that I have been in love with. And it sets me back a lot... I take it very seriously, you know? And I think that I quite enjoy the melancholy of the heartache.”
So he revels? “I think I do, I do revel... I think I get inspiration from it, which is slightly annoying.”
But Young says his post-30 “should I be single?” angst was fleeting, along with the stop-smoking question (he hasn't) and another post-birthday worry: “Eyebags! Bags, under my eyes! Where did those f*****s come from?” (He says that he would be up for cosmetic surgery if it worked.)
Young, it seems, could do with a little help. But he worked that out for himself some time ago. He's not sure what particular flavour of therapy he's undergoing, although “it might be cognitive”, but his therapist, he says, is “so clever”. And as well as the one-on-one sessions, he “occasionally goes on courses, and that's quite fun... I stand up and I go: ‘Hello, I'm Will!'” He mentions selfesteem and overwork as issues and that, although he has never been on any medication, he's not against it.
The depressive episodes to which Young has sometime succumbed are, he says, a family trait. Another Young family tendency is a dependence on alcohol. “I've just done a week of not drinking, actually,” he says. “I try and keep an eye on that.” His brother, Rupert, was a fully fledged alcoholic depressive prone to self-harming until, in his mid-twenties, he sought treatment.
Now Rupert has set up a charity, the Mood Foundation and, his brother says, this has liberated him to tackle the subject in public himself: “It's nice to be able to talk about it because I never did... because I was protective of Rupert.”
Before Young found solace in therapy, he flirted with God: he says that after Pop Idol he stood up to his management. “I said I won't work on Sunday. I want to go to church.” But , he says: “I went away from it for a bit and thought: ‘I don't know if I can believe in that.' Now I'm sort of nothingy, I think.”
Young outed himself with an interview in the News of the World immediately after his Pop Idol victory. His friends and family were already up to speed on his sexuality, but the public outing - “I call it my second coming” - was forced upon him when his advisers discovered that another Sunday tabloid was preparing to run the story. “It all got very serious. Late-night meetings with heavy lawyers.” Afterwards, the press staked out his flat en masse, but Young resisted his management's advice to move into a hotel. “I haven't really thought about it, but it was terrifying. I mean really terrifying. And I had a massive panic attack, my first ever, in the Tesco around the corner on Cromwell Road.” He says that he thought everyone was staring at him, that some might “not like” that he is gay. “I left my trolley in the middle of the supermarket.”
Young believes that, when he is down, he gets “a little bit OCD” and is especially particular about closing doors in his kitchen: “I don't realise I am doing it. I think I am just being tidy.” That, though, isn't something he's noticed for a while, although his last dark period, he says, occurred just before this interview. “Unfortunately I had a bit of a bad patch about a week ago. But it doesn't last as long as it used to.”
That “bad patch” coincided with his visit to ITV to watch a rough cut of The South Bank Show. It was made by Matt Cain, the producer who filmed Sam Taylor-Wood for last year's series. The final cut, 50 minutes edited down from 90 hours of footage, is endearing. It shows the inanities to which Young is subjected (one journalists asks him to name his favourite biscuit), his return to talent TV as a mentor on The X Factor (at the prospect of seeing his old nemesis, Louis Walsh, he says: “In my head I'll be thinking: ‘You complete c***' - but I shan't be saying that!”), as well as an appearance at the Oxford Union and that debut on Question Time (he tells me that he has since been invited back). We learn that Young thinks he looks like a “d***” when he smokes and that he never reads his own press.
The tour footage is the heart of the film: Young, whose merchandise includes cups and saucers (“My next one, I want to do an ironing board cover! We haven't done an apron! There's so much scope!”), gives good gig. So, despite the fact that he was having a bad day when he saw the film, he walked out of the screening uplifted. “I was saying it to Fay [his PA of seven years] during the thing: ‘Oh, that sounds good! I kind of get this guy! I get this!'”
In conversation Youngappears forthcoming, probably in part because of the confidence established by Cain. More profoundly, though, his frankness stems from the self-knowledge granted to him by therapy. As he says: “Once you have a better understanding of things, then you can talk about them. I guess in the past I didn't have such a great understanding.” He is one of the most obliging and conversationally generous borderline depressives with whom you could share an hour.
Despite the smoking, the eyebags, the OCD, the old car and his single status, Young is extremely cheery, even bouncy - and he has reason to be. The singer has houses that he adores in Brighton, Cornwall and here in Holland Park (he lives with a housemate, an old friend from Wellington who is now a teacher). He is content in his music, with new but nascent plans to do an album of Noël Coward songs and the itch to start writing his own again. That voice is still as honeyed as it was when it won Britain over in 2002.
Where would Young like to be when he hits 40?
“F*** off! What are you doing!”
Come on, I say, it's only ten years away, before adding that to go to an awards ceremony on your 30th sounds just a mite tragic.
“No!” Young says, outraged (but not crisis-struck). “Ronnie Wood said happy birthday to me! I got a fanfare! I rubbed my face in Tracey Emin's boobs!”
But going back to his 40th..? “I'd like to be in a relationship. I'd like to have done lots of wonderful things and seen lots of places. Managed to get my voice to where I'm happy with it on an album.”
And does he hope to be more comfortable with himself?
“Oh, yes please. I don't know if I'll ever be 100 per cent.”
Because he's neurotic?
“Yes, I am neurotic. But I'm OK with that. I think.”
On Young's current single, Let It Go, the chorus goes: “Let it go/ Let it go/ Because it's out of my control/ Heaven knows what I'm stressing for.” Whoever his therapist is, he's good.
Will Young is on The South Bank Show on ITV1 on March 17 at 10.35pm
Luke Leitch
Will Young turned 30 on January 20 - Barack Obama's inauguration day. “Two great moments!” he says brightly, before running me through his celebratory schedule; he went to the South Bank Show Awards and then, afterwards, to his local. The South Bank Show Awards? Going to an awards ceremony, however glam, seems a pretty lame way to celebrate your 30th.
Before I can lob this at him Young leans forward - we are sitting by the window in Julie's, an artfully ramshackle restaurant just around the corner from that local - and introduces the pre-eminent theme of our hour together: his psychological health. “Actually, I think I have had a bit of a thirties hangover. I'd thought I was fine with it [turning 30]. I thought: ‘Well, you haven't done badly.'”
Young grew up, with his twin brother Rupert and older sister Emma, in Hungerford, Berkshire. Their father, Robin, and mother, Annabel, sent Will to Horris Hill prep school, and then on to Wellington public school. In 2001, he graduated from Exeter University and began a musical theatre course. Then, seven years ago, Pop Idol happened. Since beating Gareth Gates in the nail-biting final, Young has produced four albums, sung with Elton John, James Brown and Burt Bacharach and won an intensely loyal fanbase. Admittedly, his is a musical career acclaimed more popularly than critically (ten Brits nominations, no win).
Yet that mellifluous voice, it emerged, was not his sole forte. In 2006 he was Bafta nominated for his role in Mrs Henderson Presents. The theatre critics, their perceptions perhaps less skewed by his Pop Idol provenance, adored him as Nicky Lanchester in The Vortex, and - armed with his 2:2 in politics from Exeter University - he appeared on Question Time, boosting its rating to 3.6 million viewers. This month he is the subject of a South Bank Show, the reason that we are sitting here today.
And a South Bank Show, complete with an introduction by Melvyn Bragg, is an accolade indeed, although Young had to be asked twice, he says, before he agreed to take part. Why on earth would he refuse? “I was a bit ‘why would you want to do it?'” This allows me to raise the awkward question: why does Young believe that The South Bank Show - which was once accused of dumbing down for a programme on Dolly Parton - would be interested in a pop star who was discovered on a talent show? But when Young continues his sentence, that opportunity is suddenly cut off: “I just think: ‘Why? What's the point?”
“Oh”, I interrupt, to clarify what he means: “why would you want to do it.” He nods, guilelessly. Maybe the question that The South Bank Show, or anyone else, might think that he is an artistically lightweight subject hasn't occurred to him. After all, despite Pop Idol, he is now a multimillion-selling singer-songwriter in his own right.
Melvyn Bragg, though, did understand the question when he was asked by the East Anglian Daily Times if he expected a show dedicated to Young, a “manufactured pop star”, to provoke accusations of dumbing down from observers. “Yes, they will,” he replied, adding: “It's been the case now for 30-odd years and it's unlikely to change: what I'm looking for is quality and not category . . . You can find good-quality art in pop music and if you say that good-quality music is only in the category of classical music, you're missing something.”
But Young isn't talking about using his 30th birthday as a moment to assess the state of his career. He's talking about using it to assess the state of life, his universe - the whole Will Young shebang. “You look back, and go: ‘What am I doing with my life?', that kind of thing. ‘Do I like myself? Do I like my friends?' And I was ticking boxes, thinking: ‘Oh, you know, yes! I'm happy with this! I still look OK. I kind of like my friends, I kind of like myself. I think I've done OK.'But since then,” he says, ominously, “there have been repercussions.”
The first “repercussion” he mentions is fretting about replacing his clapped-out six-year-old car with something swankier that doesn't break down because “you think: ‘Nooo! You're being 30! You're being boring!”
This seems a weird thing to be angsting about. “I know! I wouldn't say I'm angsting, though. I would say it's a moment where maybe I'm having more of a problem with being 30 than I realise.”
Right. Can he think of any other examples of this problem? “I had a moment of thinking: ‘Should you be in a relationship?' I was: ‘It's OK, 'cos you're gay, so you don't mind so much about kids.' I thought: ‘It's fine!' and then I had a bit of a moment. Maybe it's not fine.”
Young has been single for a while now. His most recent break-up, from a longish-term boyfriend (a dancer called Conor), hurt. Love, as he says rather sweetly on The South Bank Show, sends him “potty”, and love's end depresses him. Does heartbreak hit him often? “There have been three people that I have been in love with. And it sets me back a lot... I take it very seriously, you know? And I think that I quite enjoy the melancholy of the heartache.”
So he revels? “I think I do, I do revel... I think I get inspiration from it, which is slightly annoying.”
But Young says his post-30 “should I be single?” angst was fleeting, along with the stop-smoking question (he hasn't) and another post-birthday worry: “Eyebags! Bags, under my eyes! Where did those f*****s come from?” (He says that he would be up for cosmetic surgery if it worked.)
Young, it seems, could do with a little help. But he worked that out for himself some time ago. He's not sure what particular flavour of therapy he's undergoing, although “it might be cognitive”, but his therapist, he says, is “so clever”. And as well as the one-on-one sessions, he “occasionally goes on courses, and that's quite fun... I stand up and I go: ‘Hello, I'm Will!'” He mentions selfesteem and overwork as issues and that, although he has never been on any medication, he's not against it.
The depressive episodes to which Young has sometime succumbed are, he says, a family trait. Another Young family tendency is a dependence on alcohol. “I've just done a week of not drinking, actually,” he says. “I try and keep an eye on that.” His brother, Rupert, was a fully fledged alcoholic depressive prone to self-harming until, in his mid-twenties, he sought treatment.
Now Rupert has set up a charity, the Mood Foundation and, his brother says, this has liberated him to tackle the subject in public himself: “It's nice to be able to talk about it because I never did... because I was protective of Rupert.”
Before Young found solace in therapy, he flirted with God: he says that after Pop Idol he stood up to his management. “I said I won't work on Sunday. I want to go to church.” But , he says: “I went away from it for a bit and thought: ‘I don't know if I can believe in that.' Now I'm sort of nothingy, I think.”
Young outed himself with an interview in the News of the World immediately after his Pop Idol victory. His friends and family were already up to speed on his sexuality, but the public outing - “I call it my second coming” - was forced upon him when his advisers discovered that another Sunday tabloid was preparing to run the story. “It all got very serious. Late-night meetings with heavy lawyers.” Afterwards, the press staked out his flat en masse, but Young resisted his management's advice to move into a hotel. “I haven't really thought about it, but it was terrifying. I mean really terrifying. And I had a massive panic attack, my first ever, in the Tesco around the corner on Cromwell Road.” He says that he thought everyone was staring at him, that some might “not like” that he is gay. “I left my trolley in the middle of the supermarket.”
Young believes that, when he is down, he gets “a little bit OCD” and is especially particular about closing doors in his kitchen: “I don't realise I am doing it. I think I am just being tidy.” That, though, isn't something he's noticed for a while, although his last dark period, he says, occurred just before this interview. “Unfortunately I had a bit of a bad patch about a week ago. But it doesn't last as long as it used to.”
That “bad patch” coincided with his visit to ITV to watch a rough cut of The South Bank Show. It was made by Matt Cain, the producer who filmed Sam Taylor-Wood for last year's series. The final cut, 50 minutes edited down from 90 hours of footage, is endearing. It shows the inanities to which Young is subjected (one journalists asks him to name his favourite biscuit), his return to talent TV as a mentor on The X Factor (at the prospect of seeing his old nemesis, Louis Walsh, he says: “In my head I'll be thinking: ‘You complete c***' - but I shan't be saying that!”), as well as an appearance at the Oxford Union and that debut on Question Time (he tells me that he has since been invited back). We learn that Young thinks he looks like a “d***” when he smokes and that he never reads his own press.
The tour footage is the heart of the film: Young, whose merchandise includes cups and saucers (“My next one, I want to do an ironing board cover! We haven't done an apron! There's so much scope!”), gives good gig. So, despite the fact that he was having a bad day when he saw the film, he walked out of the screening uplifted. “I was saying it to Fay [his PA of seven years] during the thing: ‘Oh, that sounds good! I kind of get this guy! I get this!'”
In conversation Youngappears forthcoming, probably in part because of the confidence established by Cain. More profoundly, though, his frankness stems from the self-knowledge granted to him by therapy. As he says: “Once you have a better understanding of things, then you can talk about them. I guess in the past I didn't have such a great understanding.” He is one of the most obliging and conversationally generous borderline depressives with whom you could share an hour.
Despite the smoking, the eyebags, the OCD, the old car and his single status, Young is extremely cheery, even bouncy - and he has reason to be. The singer has houses that he adores in Brighton, Cornwall and here in Holland Park (he lives with a housemate, an old friend from Wellington who is now a teacher). He is content in his music, with new but nascent plans to do an album of Noël Coward songs and the itch to start writing his own again. That voice is still as honeyed as it was when it won Britain over in 2002.
Where would Young like to be when he hits 40?
“F*** off! What are you doing!”
Come on, I say, it's only ten years away, before adding that to go to an awards ceremony on your 30th sounds just a mite tragic.
“No!” Young says, outraged (but not crisis-struck). “Ronnie Wood said happy birthday to me! I got a fanfare! I rubbed my face in Tracey Emin's boobs!”
But going back to his 40th..? “I'd like to be in a relationship. I'd like to have done lots of wonderful things and seen lots of places. Managed to get my voice to where I'm happy with it on an album.”
And does he hope to be more comfortable with himself?
“Oh, yes please. I don't know if I'll ever be 100 per cent.”
Because he's neurotic?
“Yes, I am neurotic. But I'm OK with that. I think.”
On Young's current single, Let It Go, the chorus goes: “Let it go/ Let it go/ Because it's out of my control/ Heaven knows what I'm stressing for.” Whoever his therapist is, he's good.
Will Young is on The South Bank Show on ITV1 on March 17 at 10.35pm
