Back from my scarecrowing so just looking around. :dance:

This has been posted up today by Vasil on Devoted, it's from the 20th of July

but I'm sure we've not seen it before, he might be going all Robbie on us next. :lol:

 

http://img320.imageshack.us/img320/2373/9lj6.png

This has been posted up today by Vasil on Devoted, it's from the 20th of July

but I'm sure we've not seen it before, he might be going all Robbie on us next. :lol:

 

http://img320.imageshack.us/img320/2373/9lj6.png

 

Don't even joke about it suggy! :wacko:

Please no :o Not hip hop Will, please :wacko:

he might be going all Robbie on us next. :lol:

 

http://img320.imageshack.us/img320/2373/9lj6.png

 

 

:huh: :huh: :huh: Wash your mouth out suggy :lol:

 

Lovely smiley pic, thanks for posting :yahoo:

Love the pic of Will, but as for anything else I'm not even going there.

Thanks to Jo on Devoted.

 

The Times supplement 05/09

 

Being gay, there are still things I can't do

The Andrew Billen Interview

 

Will Young is a pop star who seems to manage his talent rather than enjoy it

 

Sorting out my kitchen the other day, I found a Marks & Spencer chocolate disc marking the original series of ITV’s Pop Idol. At the centre of the phoney CD is a headshot of the contest’s winner: Will Young. Obviously, it’s a collector’s item and I am open to offers, but what amused me — apart from the warning on the back “do not place in any audio equipment†— was its “best before†date: 06.08.02. I show it to Young when we meet, pointing out that, at the time the disc was released, people must have been taking bets on his own sell-by date. Yet here he still is, all of 27 years old, with nearly four million copies of three albums sold, an acting career launched and chatter that he is “the next Robbie Williams†(to which he, reasonably, replies that he would prefer to be the first Will Young).

He examines the memento. “Oh my God! I remember seeing that but I also remember thinking ‘Who made the money out of it?’ †He checks the small print and announces dispassionately that the product sold using his face was licensed by Fremantle, owners of Pop Idol. This is literally the first exchange of our meeting and I note (a) his lack of nostalgia for the moment he found fame and (B) his financial savvy. “I’m sure lots of people said that about me not lasting but I didn’t think that. I thought that there was more to come, and every decision was made based on that fact. I’m still making decisions that are based on me being around, hopefully, in ten years’ time. Otherwise you go for the quick buck but the decisions you make will be more damaging in the long term.â€

 

He is eating a cheese sandwich in a rehearsal space in South London where he is preparing for a national tour. Dressed in cargo pants, he looks at me through stunning, pale green eyes and speaks in articulate, non-bitchy camp. He is most energised when he is talking about these commercial decisions of his — how, for instance, it is sometimes more important to get high up the Radio 1 playlist than to have a No 1 single. He talks not of his career but of his “jobâ€, not of showbusiness but of “businessâ€.

 

“I think the hardest thing after I won Pop Idol was that suddenly I was running this business in an industry which is famed for people being here one day, gone the next. I don’t really hear criticism, but if I do — on the street, if someone says, ‘You’re a w****r’, I turn round and go: ‘You try to maintain a business for five years and learn and develop.’ We all need to make mistakes to learn, but you can’t make mistakes in this business because then you’re out. It’s hard. I went one day from being an ex-student to running a company. Ridiculous.†And his product was himself? “Yeah, and it’s really hard.â€

 

During the Pop Idol run, Young, who was brought up in Berkshire by millionaire parents called Robin and Annabel, was known in the papers as “Posh Idolâ€. It made the final sing-off between him and a Bradford postman’s son called Gareth Gates all the sexier. Describing Young as posh, however, misses the point. He is a scion of the entrepreneurial class that prospered in the Thatcherite Eighties. His father built up an engineering firm in this period, making sacrifices to send Will and his twin brother to a boarding prep school and then to Wellington College. His mother owns a nursery.

 

“We’re not as rich as everyone likes to think. But the posh thing’s interesting. There have always been posh pop stars anyway.†Such as Mick Jagger? “Exactly. The ones that are posh but aren’t posh! But I remember my uncle saying, ‘When you go to university suddenly people will judge you on the way that you speak’. And I remember thinking, ‘Don’t be so stupid’. I relished going to university because it was great to meet a broader section of people, but I remember thinking, ‘$h!t! I’m driving a Golf. I am such a stereotype. I must stop wearing loafers’. I didn’t judge people on the way that they spoke.†But he felt judged at Exeter University? “I did, and I’ve always had a massive problem with being stereotyped. I just hate it.â€

 

As it became clear that he would emerge among the finalists on Pop Idol, he had a meeting with its producers to discuss whether to make his homosexuality public. He said that if anyone asked directly he would not deny it. Shortly after he won, his management learnt that The Mail on Sunday planned to out him. “We kind of gazumped them,†he gloats. And so it was that The News of the World’s front page barked one Sunday: “WILL: ‘I’M GAY!’ â€

 

There was no significant consequence, perhaps because most of us had guessed anyway, but his public statement did make the aeons that it took Elton John and George Michael to declare themselves seem a little ridiculous. “I think it was the right time. A gay guy had won Big Brother. It was building up to it. Now we need a gay footballer. We need a gay sportsman, I say with my activist hat on.†What did he think of George Michael’s recent protests, after he was caught on Hampstead Heath, that cruising was his “cultureâ€? Young prevaricates, says how much he admires Michael. When I press him, he eventually says: “I don’t know if I’d fully agree with what he said. That’s my comment.â€

 

Young, who knew he was gay at the age of 8, did not come out until he was at college. His parents heard the news second-hand. “It was difficult for a short time but it was not, ‘You will never darken this doorstep again’.†But the ruction clearly happened at a difficult time for him — a period when he admits he came to the brink of a breakdown, “whatever that means†.

 

“I do have ups and downs, and that was probably the most down I’ve ever been, actually. But I learnt so much from it. It was my second year at Exeter. There were loads of things to deal with. I had entered this competition for being in a boy band and that didn’t work out — and I’m thankful it didn’t. Then I flunked all my exams bar one, so I had to retake those. I wasn’t driving because I’d lost my licence for drink-driving a while back, which was a bit stupid but, you know . . . and I’d come out that summer. There were loads of big changes. It was difficult.â€

 

The business plan for Young’s life, however, assumes difficulty and counts on his emerging leaner and meaner from it: “By the time I got to Pop Idol, I’d dealt with being gay. I knew who I was,†he explains. His self-possession was such that when the Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell told him one week that his performance had been distinctly average, he politely told him where he could go. “That was a seminal moment. It was the beginning of a different side of me, the awakening of more confident, more forthright, less demure me.â€

 

His first single, launched on the back of his victory, was Britain’s fastest-selling. His debut album, From Now On, entered the album charts at number one. His follow-up, Friday’s Child, even won over the critics. The Will Young business was going even better than its CEO could have hoped. Yet he was not happy. He sang about love but all he had known of it in real life was rejection. He had had sex, of course, but not a relationship. “Unrequited love’s wonderful. You can just sit there and wallow in it and write about it. I have huge unrequited love for Orlando Bloom. I did actually see him in a pub once and I couldn’t finish my food; it was so embarrassing. But I’d spent so many years alone that I think I’d been quite protected. I felt in control. I’d give advice to everyone else about their boyfriends and girlfriends. Then, suddenly, I was with someone myself and it was different. It was difficult, but it made me see that you can’t be a robot in life. I was quite controlled and you can’t be like that, really.â€

 

He has never said who the boyfriend he acquired when he was 25 was, or why they split up after six months. Switch It On, the first single from his current album, however, reflects the anxiety of the period. “I’d dried up a bit, I think. I wasn’t depressed but I’d just lost my way as a person. It sounds so clichéd.†But they’re real feelings, I say encouragingly. “They are real feelings. I was just trying to think of a new storyline for myself: ‘My Painful High Heels — Will Tells All!’ No, I just think that I was 25, I’d kept it together with the whole fame thing, but in other ways I hadn’t developed at all. I hadn’t moved on socially. I hadn’t moved on sexually. And then I had my first relationship, which was great, but it threw up a whole load of things and I was thinking, ‘$h!t, you know, what is life about?’ â€

 

It must have been strange for him to see the famous Will Young on posters and not be sure who the real Will Young was? “It is a bit of a — and you won’t be able to print this — a head-f***. But as long as you know that, it’s fine. I’m so happy at the moment, so pleased. I feel on top of what I do again.â€

 

He has, he confirms, been in a relationship for the past eight months. The gossip columns say that the man’s name is Conor, but Young seems positively delighted that nobody knows anything else about him. His wish to be in control extends to the careful release of the details of his life to journalists. Come to that, it extends to controlling the environment in which he talks to us. At the beginning of the interview, he closes the door to the room and when someone wants to make a call on the veranda outside, he tells him to knock when he wants to come back in.

 

This is not to say that he will not take creative risks. He does. Taking a role in the Judi Dench film Mrs Henderson Presents was a gamble, if one that came off. This winter he will act in Noël Coward’s The Vortex at the Manchester Royal Exchange, and knows that the critics will not necessarily treat a pop-star-turned-thespian kindly. But the idea of selling himself in America alarms him. “I’d find that hard, because I can’t control things as much.â€

Switch It On is probably the song that exemplifies the contradictions of its author more than any other. He chose to release this angsty number from the Keep On album just before Christmas last year because it was the LP’s most serious, credible and writerly offering. It did not reach No 1. But the video he made to accompany the single — a homoerotic pastiche of Top Gun — got plenty of attention. Attitude, a magazine aimed at gay men, called it “bold†— although the video had nothing to do with the lyrics at all.

 

It now turns out that Young regrets it. He wishes he had done something darker. “That would have been more me, I think. The video wasn’t really me: it was almost like me trying to be Robbie.â€

 

He says this about being a gay mainstream commercial artist: “There are still things that I can’t do, being a gay man. You have to think carefully about things — about, for instance, prancing around with my top off in jeans. Now if Robbie Williams prances around with his top off he’s a big hunk. Do you know what I mean?â€

 

So there’s a degree of homophobia among the record-buying public, I suggest. “Such a dangerous word! I don’t know if it’s homophobia. I always think I’m like a walking MORI poll and I don’t come across prejudice that much. I don’t think it’s homophobia. I think it’s just that people probably just don’t want to see it.â€

 

Not for the first time, I find myself talking to a marketing man rather than a singer-songwriter; someone who is managing his talent rather than enjoying it. The walking MORI poll gives the public only as much of himself as he thinks it can take. For that reason alone, he will doubtless stay on the shelves well after his rivals’ best-before dates have come and gone. I think I’ll hang on to that chocolate CD for a while longer.

 

The Keep On live tour begins on September 12 at Cardiff International Arena. Visit www.willyoung.co.uk. The album Keep On is out now

 

What a deep thinking, articulate young man. Quite a contrast to someone who shows his fun side in his tour merchandise. :wacko: Well he's always been an enigma & that's what keeps me fascinated.

 

Interesting comments on the SIO video. Maybe he thinks portraying in such a way takes away from the angst & doesn't mirror his feelings.

Edited September 5, 200618 yr by truly talented

Thanks for bringing that over TT. The video for SIO relates to nothing in the lyrics. It's all about feeling trapped which is why I see his point about wishing he'd done a 'darker' video. The video for ATL fitted the song perfectly and I think brought the song to life.

 

I :heart: the bones of the man - he just shows a little more of William in each interview. I've never felt this way about a pop star before - and I know exactly why - he's not like other pop stars I've known.

I the bones of the man - he just shows a little more of William in each interview. I've never felt this way about a pop star before - and I know exactly why - he's not like other pop stars I've known.

 

He really is unique & special isn't he munchkin. :heart: That's why I know I'll always be a fan.

Thanks for bringing that over TT. The video for SIO relates to nothing in the lyrics. It's all about feeling trapped which is why I see his point about wishing he'd done a 'darker' video. The video for ATL fitted the song perfectly and I think brought the song to life.

 

I :heart: the bones of the man - he just shows a little more of William in each interview. I've never felt this way about a pop star before - and I know exactly why - he's not like other pop stars I've known.

 

He really is unique & special isn't he munchkin. That's why I know I'll always be a fan.

 

Thanks for posting this article up TT, Will is such an amazing man and that's why we love him so much. :heart:

Have you managed to get rid of the family suggy so you could get on here? :lol:

 

Just off to the shops to get my copy. :D

Edited September 5, 200618 yr by truly talented

Have you managed to get rid of the family suggy so you could get on here? :lol:

 

Just off to the shops to get my copy. :D

 

Yes I have the house to myself again now, obviously the electrified fence and barbed wire wasn't a good enough deterrent. :lol:

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i142/nodgersboots/Timescalendarpic.jpg

 

Huge thanks to *Jue* on Devoted for scanning this. It looks awesome in B&W - almost like a painting. :wub:

Edited September 5, 200618 yr by munchkin

Just read on Devoted that Will is a guest on Capital Drivetime on Friday. :yahoo:

 

Can't wait to hear his voice. :wub:

Thanks TT, I'll be at work but i'm sure there'll be an mp3 when I get back.

Just read on Devoted that Will is a guest on Capital Drivetime on Friday. :yahoo:

 

Can't wait to hear his voice. :wub:

 

 

It seems ages since we have heard his voice :cheer:

 

Thanks TT :D

Article in Glasgow Evening Times - posted by cocopop on Devoted:

No More pop by numbers ...will gets tough

 

It's not that Will Young is suffering from an identity crisis. The inaugural PI winner, who shot to instant celebrity status thanks to the TV talent show in 2002 is just a little misunderstood.

 

Despite the fact that the 27 year old Berkshire fella's now a household name in the UK - quick re-cap for anyone who has been on holiday on the outer limits of the solar system - in less than 4 years he's won 2 Brits, had 4 No.1 singles, 2 No.1 albums, sold out his last tour in 30 minutes, and had the fastest selling singles chart debut by a male artist - few people REALLY know who WY is.

 

For example: ' I went to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and this fan came up to me and said 'Will Young! - what are you doing at a Chilli,s concert?' I'm like 'I've been listening to the chillis for ages!' It was very telling, people thought that I shouldn't llisten to stuff like that!'

 

Certainly, his career to date has been built on his big ballads and clean-cut Mr Nice Guy image. But with the release of his last album, KO, last year, he aimed to lay that particular albatross to rest, moving in a bolder direction which, although id didn't lead him to the top of the charts, with KO peaking at No.2, at the time he said he got much more out of it than mere record sales : it was accompanied by a kind of evolution, letting him get in touch with his deeper emotions and express them, as well as whipping up a few party tunes, and standing up to his record company when they insisted he churn out another ballad while he wanted to funk it up.

 

The publicity machine surrounding him is still carefully directed , with new photos of the PI star being issued with the diktat that they 'may only accompany positive editorial in regards to WY'

This might suggest that his PR bods are more concerned about how he's protrayed in the media than Will himself, who declares that with his growing self-confidence he is more assured both musically and personally, as tracks such as the stomping single SIO, the first from KO , showed.

he confesses though that the road he had to follow to reach that point was at times a tough one, and he had to overcome a low patch of 'feeling really c**p about myself'

he says ' I felt like I wasn't being true to myself. there's the line 'In a 3 piece suit and shoes that don't fit me' which is basically saying that people shove you in all these categories. And I looked around London and saw all these fake people just obsessed with how othe rpeople are viewing them, and I was obsessed with how other people were viewing me. I felt that I'd lost the core of me. I felt that I'd gone back to being 17 again, and a lot of it was because of the job'

 

Part of his evolution has been sticking to his guns when his bosses wanted him to play it safe and release another ballad as the first single from KO, but Will insisted that it had to be SIO, a track he and his production and writing team had spent a long time on, cranking up the attitude with each re-working of it.

'That track took us a year and a half to write' he says. 'I just felt I had to move on and do something that was punchier, and was saying more. I just feel very different from 2 years ago, I've got different things to say, and I think SIO really showed it'

 

'It was a slightly uphill battle to get it as the first single, but I don't mind that - if you're forced to justify what you're doing, it makes you see if you really believe in that song'

 

Since its release, KO became his label SONY BMG's most downloaded album of 2005, and has spawned singles ATL and WAI, which charted at No.11, as well as SIO.

 

But Will says that the songs on his new album were more instinctive, and less pop-hits-by-numbers.

'We didn;t think about it, that was the key. That's why those songs are so good. You know, maybe people are a bit fed up with songs. A well crafted song is great, but there seem to be so many about where you can almost hear the writer thinking 'right, now we're gonna hit them with the chorus at 40 seconds cause that'll get played on radio'. Well, that doesn't have any soul in it. I'd just got to the stage where I thought to myself 'I can't do that' he says.

 

Last November he acted in his first film MHP, and, working alongside JD & BH helped increase his confidence.

'i'm not Mr Tough or anything, but I did needt o be tougher' he says, describing the new songs ATL & ASABPTB as 'rough'

 

And he found himself able to tap into deeper emotions too, for example on the song Home which was co-written with NS.

'I went through quite a tough stage last year, but in that period I wrote some really good tunes that have stuck around. I don't know, maybe you havve to be a bit more angsty to produce believable, true work'

he adds ' You know, I've predominantly sung songs about love before, and, if I'm honest, I didn;t understand them. And just because I've lived a bit more, seen a bit more of life, it was like taking off sun glasses and just going 'ah, this is what goes on'. I just saw so much more in films and painting and plays and music. I had a revelational moment. 'Now i get it'. And it's just a real shame that in life you have to have those moments you have to be really badly hurt'

 

As the revitalised Mr Young prepares to hit the road for a return visit to Scotland at a show at the SECC later this month he says 'I'm really looking forward to spending time doing what I love the most - performing live. My mind has been racing with new ideas, and I can't wait to put them into action'

 

Sorry about the spelling/grammar - I just bashed this out in my lunch hour

 

CCP

Thanks for bringing the article over munchkin.

 

Lovely to read him sounding so self assured & confident about the musical & lyrical content of Keep On. :D

Thanks munchkin what a lovely read :wub:

Thanks for that Munchkin

 

The publicity machine surrounding him is still carefully directed , with new photos of the PI star being issued with the diktat that they 'may only accompany positive editorial in regards to WY'

 

What does that mean :blush:

Edited September 8, 200618 yr by Filthy/Gorgeous