It isn’t melodramatic to say that Olly Alexander’s debut solo album comes at a crucial moment in his career. Four years ago, his ever-escalating success seemed assured: his brilliant performance as Ritchie, the lead character in Channel 4’s lockdown hit It’s a Sin, had been garlanded with award nominations; his band Years and Years, who had scored a string of huge hits in the 2010s, had been repurposed as his solo vehicle; and he was a star turn at the 2021 Brit awards, reclining on Elton John’s piano and singing the Pet Shop Boys song that gave the series its name, surrounded by drag queens and queer clubland luminaries.
But the subsequent Years and Years album, Night Call, met with a muted response – it wasn’t a flop, but nor was it anything like as successful as its two predecessors – and last year Alexander gamely entered a Eurovision song contest that became mired in controversy over the presence of Israel. His song wound up coming 18th, provoking yet another round of why-oh-why handwringing about the UK’s dismal record in the contest, in which the Daily Telegraph excelled itself, opining that Alexander’s performance failed because it was too gay, thus presumably upsetting the many viewers who annually tune into Eurovision expecting a feast of unreconstructed heterosexuality.
From sure-fire success to placing 18th at Eurovision: clearly, Polari is an album that needs to redress the balance.
It’s produced by Danny L Harle, an impressive name to snare – his CV spans everything from Yeule to Liam Gallagher to Dua Lipa. Harle hails from the same PC Music collective as Charli xcx’s chief collaborator AG Cook, and at its best, Polari feels a little like Brat’s gay BFF, also shooting decades-old club music through a modern pop lens. But while Brat reworked the sound of the mid-00s illegal rave scene where Charli xcx began her career, Polari sets its sights further back, before either Alexander or Harle were born, to the music that predominated in mid-80s gay clubs and the mainstream pop it influenced.
The four-on-the-floor beats and relentless low-end throb of Cupid’s Bow or Shadow of Love feel less rooted in house than the Hi-NRG that preceded it as the queer clubbers’ soundtrack of choice. As an added period detail, the latter track comes decorated with clanking, ominous electronics that recall the sound of Depeche Mode circa Some Great Reward (former Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke actually turns up on Polari, producing Make Me a Man, although its combination of synthesiser and acoustic guitar more closely recalls his latterday outfit Erasure). The chugging Miss You So Much carries a distinct whiff of Italo disco. The album’s vocal effects eschew Auto-Tune in favour of the old-fashioned “n-n-n-n-nineteen” stammer: a sound that, like Polari’s preponderance of blaring, echoing synth stabs, automatically evokes the era when samplers first became widely available. It feels like a ballsy move to include Dizzy, the song with which Alexander came to grief in Eurovision – a fainter heart might have cut it from the album, as if the whole business in Malmö never happened – but its Pet Shop Boys and lyrical nods to Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) make more sense in this context.
But context can’t make Dizzy a better song, which leads us to the first of Polari’s problems. There are really good things here: the writhing sound of Cupid’s Bow perfectly complements its lyrical exploration of cruising; Whisper in the Waves is a fabulously icy ballad; Miss You So Much has a far less cheesy melody than a lot of the Italo-disco records that inspired it. But other songs feel slight in comparison with their musical setting. Blaring synth stabs, stammering sampled vocals, rhythms that recall Hi-NRG … these are brash, bold sounds that need big melodies, but you get the feeling that Harle and Alexander were enjoying themselves so much deploying the former that sometimes they forgot to come up with the latter. Worse, there are points where the pair seem to lose faith in their vision and pull back into a more familiar space: When We Kiss and Heal You are worryingly close to the amiable but unremarkable 21st-century pop with which Radio 2 DJs pad out their shows.
Alexander obviously wants the music he makes to have a certain edge – hence the collaboration with Harle – but clearly hankers after the kind of mainstream audience that prefer their pop edgeless: you don’t agree to Eurovision unless you’re after the aforementioned Radio 2 crowd. Squaring the two impulses isn’t impossible, but it’s undoubtedly difficult. Polari has its moments, but in the language that gives it its title, it’s bona, rather than fantabulosa.
This week Alexis listened to
Uwade – Call It a Draw
The Nigeria-born, North Carolina-raised sometime Fleet Foxes collaborator returns, marking out an entirely charming space between pop, alt-rock and the sparkling guitars of highlife.
