Olly Alexander deciphers queer identity on Polari

Olly Alexander has been smashing it in showbiz for more than a decade.

The 34-year-old’s been a star on screen – like in the hit show “Skins” and in music, as the spirited front man of the Brit-pop-rock band Years and Years.

But his newest album — Polari — is a solo journey in a language all his own.

Years and Years disbanded in 2021, after Alexander and his bandmates had “grown apart musically,” but he released one album under the band’s moniker.

Now that he’s dropped his band name, you could almost call Polari a debut.

“It’s kinda funny. I feel like I’m sort of starting out again. I kind of feel like a debutant,” Alexander says.

The album opens with a whirlwind of a song.

In less than 2 minutes, the title track sets the tone for the whole record.

“Me and Danny [Harle], my producer, who literally just pulled up a session [and] was taking kind of bits and synths and samples from, from lots of our other tracks and demos and ideas, putting them in one file and giving me the mic and telling me to improvise. So I was just going over the top of it like ‘doo do dooooo,'” Alexander says.

“We were just kind of pushing each other to make something that felt really experimental. But in this kind of Casio keyboard kind of way… [just a ] dry dj sample going like one, one, one, and then, you know, like Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation drums, which [are] like super industrial.”

Alexander’s lyrics and voice, combined with producer Danny Harle’s frenetic beats evoke some of the most popular gay dancefloor classics from the 1980s and ’90s.

It’s a kind of music Alexander feels connected to in more ways than one.

“I suppose I did a lot of research on my gay history, let’s say, when I played Richie in It’s a Sin, which is a TV show set in the ’80s,” Alexander says.

The show gets its title from synth duo Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 song of the same name.

And the album’s sound is also partly inspired by that band and so many others.

Olly Alexander played Ritchie Tozer in It’s a Sin — a young, gay aspiring actor who moves to London during the AIDS crisis.

“When I was researching that role, I really immersed myself in figures from the 80s who were writing about that period,” Alexander says “And one of the authors, Derek Jarman, he [did] some work in Polari. I got quite fascinated by it and then when I was making this album I sort of went back to that.”

The album’s namesake, Polari, is a set of a few hundred words and phrases, like camp, or drag — a small language of sorts — primarily used between the 18th and early 20th centuries mostly by sailors, theater actors and circus performers.

And in later years Alexander says “it became adopted by some gay men and became a way for them to communicate with each other in secret to avoid being criminalized.”

“It’s just left such a mark on culture, and especially queer culture… and so I just tried to take that as a kind of blueprint for my album,” he says.

Like his coming out process, Olly Alexander’s reintroduction isn’t linear.

And like the early years of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, some songs are filled with longing, maybe a tinge of sadness, even foreboding.

While others like Cupid’s Bow bring to mind the buoyant party culture of club cruising.

That dichotomy — bliss and pain, pride and shame — it’s a reflection of gay life and growing pains, Alexander says.

“I tried to just sort of make the album that I was just the most fully realized version of who I want to be. Obviously, a lot happens in 10 years and as an artist, and just like a human being, the ways I feel about myself and my identity and how I fit in everywhere have really changed and fluctuate a bit,” Alexander says.

“I’m just so proud to have gotten to this point and put out this record and everything and I really just try and follow that feeling because I don’t always feel it.”

He may not always feel like it, but Alexander’s piercing vocals sound as confident as George Michael’s especially on songs like “Make Me a Man.”

And while we were on the subject, I asked Alexander, as a queer man, what does he think makes a man?

“Um… that has really stumped me. I really don’t know,” Alexander starts. “It took me so long to feel comfortable being a man. Growing up I was always called a girl, I had long hair, I was effeminate and always teased about being girly and stuff and I just never fit in with guys.”

In time — and after a lot of heartache — Alexander found community both in the present with a loving partner and the past, with history as told by those who lived it.

“I find so much courage and inspiration from my queer elders, the people that have been through it. Like being connected to that throughline of resilience and finding the joy,” Alexander says.

Alexander says that’s kind of what the new album means to him. It’s a throughline of queer experience that gives us the words to express who we are.

The album’s dedication reads “I imagined a world that was freer, one where I could be inspired by Odysseus, my boyfriend, Kylie [Minogue] and Derek Jarman. Polari came to encapsulate so many things to me, a creative practice in itself, an artistic refuge, it was a voyage that led me to many surprises – much like the language itself.”

Olly Alexander’s Polari is out now.