Lovely article posted on D - from the Shropshire Star:-

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v420/maroon5er/willpix/shropstar.jpg

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sheila.bull/images/Misc/Heat11apr.jpg

 

Thanks to Badgirljo and Sheilab on D.

 

Edited April 11, 200619 yr by munchkin

No comment. Thanks for posting anyway Munchkin.

No comment. Thanks for posting anyway Munchkin.

 

 

Mm - see where you're coming from. Nice he feels he can go out and about but not so nice. He hates camera phones too. Shall I delete it?

Mm - see where you're coming from. Nice he feels he can go out and about but not so nice. He hates camera phones too. Shall I delete it?

 

I bet "Nina's" kicking herself for not getting a pic on her phone of them kissing, she'd have got more than the 200 quid Heat normally pay, no wonder Will gets p*ssed off. :rolleyes: mind you I wouldn't mind seeing it, I know, I'm such a perv. :lol:

I bet "Nina's" kicking herself for not getting a pic on her phone of them kissing, she'd have got more than the 200 quid Heat normally pay, no wonder Will gets p*ssed off. :rolleyes: mind you I wouldn't mind seeing it, I know, I'm such a perv. :lol:

 

I've a feeling the kiss is more the figment of her imagination, Though like you suggy I'd pay good money to see them in action. :lol:

I've a feeling the kiss is more the figment of her imagination, Though like you suggy I'd pay good money to see them in action. :lol:

 

 

It could have been nothing more than the two of them arriving seperately and kissing on meeting. Quite normal behaviour I reckon. They are hardly likely going to shake hands :lol: I do feel very happy for him though.

Edited April 11, 200619 yr by munchkin

Not the best picture of Will!

Mm - see where you're coming from. Nice he feels he can go out and about but not so nice. He hates camera phones too. Shall I delete it?

 

Confused again.

 

Is it only ok to kiss in public if it's a male and a female then or is that not what's being implied on this thread

 

Mm - see where you're coming from. Nice he feels he can go out and about but not so nice. He hates camera phones too. Shall I delete it?

 

Sorry Munchkin - meant no offence. I'm having a bad day obviously. Just thought it a dreadful pic - presumably taken on this girl's phone - the eyes! And if she really did see them kissing, why then didn't she take a pic of that!!!!

 

I think we are all thinking along different lines here :lol: I thought Chrysalis wasn't happy on the fact that Will had been papped and I'd posted it up, but she's explained anyway. No probs.

 

And if she really did see them kissing, why then didn't she take a pic of that!!!!

 

 

It made me laugh the way she says "and I saw him kissing Conor in front of all his mates" - my my - shock horror :lol: Maybe she thought she'd get a bit more money if she mentioned the kiss. :lol:

Edited April 11, 200619 yr by munchkin

So glad he's out and about with Conor..it's odd..because i want him very much to enjoy his private time..but also would LOVE to see a picture of them kissing..sorry...but it's true. :wub:

Will and Conner kissing :wub: Would sell my granny for a lookey at that ;)

Very interesting article posted by griff on Devoted.

 

Thin k I need to print this one off to absorb all the info.

 

 

Will Young: a self-made man

CATHERINE DEVENEY

JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR

AN INTERESTING insight into Will Young comes right at the end of our interview. Just days before, I had been asked to talk about journalism to a group of sixth-year pupils, and I took the opportunity to gather teenage opinion on the first winner of Pop Idol. But when I tell Young this, his face freezes. It is honestly no exaggeration to say I see fear in his eyes. "I don't want bad comments," he says flatly. And if he weren't wedged in at our table in a Soho club, between the wall on one side and me on the other, I almost think he might make a break for it. "I am not interested in any nasty ones."

 

Will, I say, you have sold 3.5 million albums since winning Pop Idol in 2002. Doesn't that thicken your skin? "No. No. Because you are always... I mean, someone can say you are this, and I can now say, 'Well, thanks for your opinion, but, you know, I don't really care about your opinion...' But you still have to bat it off. I don't read anything. I don't think it's helpful. If there is real criticism it will come through the people I work with, and then I'll deal with it."

 

The comments are not that bad (given his reaction, I censor the worst). One says, "If you have to get attention by entering a reality show, you should be ignored, because the grit and determination needed to make it in showbusiness is absent in manufactured artists." What does he think? "That's very mature," he says, but looks uncomfortable. The comments were meant to direct our conversation to the profile of his audience, but his reaction is proving more interesting.

 

How about this one? "He appeals to middle-aged women and very young girls, rather than teenagers." True? "I am very happy with my audience," says Young, a little stiffly.

 

The interlude illustrates the dichotomy between what fame looks like from the outside, when you are a member of the public pressing your nose up against the window, and what it actually feels like when you are behind the glass being gazed at. It is sometimes assumed that success brings invincibility, whereas up close you can often smell the insecurity it generates. Little wonder. If you are creative for a living you have to put yourself in it, and rejection becomes personal. Young's reaction suggests the one thing that definitely goes into his music is a great big slice of himself. "If I was manufactured, I wouldn't care, because it wouldn't have me in it. If I didn't care, I wouldn't worry."

 

Doubt doesn't dictate his career, but it is part of it. "Sometimes I feel very vulnerable. Sometimes. Even last week I had a moment where I just thought, '$h!t, what would I do?' I see people every day, people who are just hot, hot, hot, and you can't get enough of them. And then it goes like a brick. I have been in the Best Male category three times at the Brit awards, but people have changed through that and you think, 'Well, where is he now?' You can disappear very quickly."

 

He reaches out for his cigarettes, which he has placed on top of the book he carries: How to Give Up Smoking. Chapter nine, he jokes, so he is still allowed. Once he gets to the end there'll be no more cigarettes. He's on 20 a day, his worst ever tally, and has been told off by his producer and his engineer. "My singing is horrendous." He lights up.

 

Perhaps the more success you have, the more secure you feel? He shakes his head. "I think when you've been around for ages it can get worse." The more you have, the more there is to lose.

 

WILL YOUNG has turned up looking a bit like a painter's apprentice. He is wearing a peaked cap, and either he has had an accident while painting the garage or his jacket is what is fashionably called 'distressed'. Closer inspection suggests it's new, so presumably the very realistic paint splodges (you get what you pay for) are not really paint at all. In the past you identified pop stars by their extravagance: purple sequinned jackets, indecently tight trousers or very silly platform shoes. The nation's fathers muttered darkly from behind newspapers during Top of the Pops, and contorted their faces if they inadvertently caught sight of 'them' on screen. Any parent stumbling across Will Young would invite him for Sunday lunch for a good feed and slip him 20 quid towards a new jacket.

 

Such a nice boy (everyone says so). And so posh - though he hates it when people say that. "I've never liked being labelled, and I think in this society people like to label very quickly. It means you can be marketed more. I just think it's so much better to be yourself, so I hate it when people say 'gay Will Young' or 'posh Will Young' or 'stylish Will Young' or 'unstylish Will Young'."

 

So how privileged was his upbringing in Berkshire? Young says he keeps family private. I like Young and find him very genuine and down to earth, but I find it odd that a man who makes a video described by commentators as a homoerotic pastiche of Top Gun to promote his single, 'Switch it On', and then strips to the buff for his cameo role in the film Mrs Henderson Presents, should have trouble with a question such as "What is your dad like?" It's a bog-standard question for an interview, but he looks at me as if I've asked something slightly embarrassing - "How often do you change your sheets?", say, or "Are those yesterday's socks you're wearing?"

 

It would almost make me suspicious, but he insists that he is actually very close to his parents. Later, when I realise how much of himself he feels he gives away in his music, I think he probably redefines interview parameters constantly to try to give himself some artificial protection. He never used to talk about relationships, but does admit the break-up of his first real love affair heavily influenced his new album, Keep On.

 

Anyway, reluctantly, we establish that his father did indeed run his own company and the family now own a plant nursery, which his mother and older sister work in. He has a twin brother and says, "It's wonderful, because you always have this really close friend who's always with you," but he doesn't think he and his brother are particularly alike. And, yes, there was privilege. "I did go to public school. I am middle class. I'm proud of that. I think there's nothing more unattractive than people who pretend to be something they're not." He laughs. "People think I am far more intelligent than I am." Because he went to public school? "Yes. When, actually, I am very stupid."

 

It's his ability to defy the labels originally stuck on him that makes Young interesting. Being a Pop Idol winner is the most manufactured product possible in the music industry. He was up against 17-year-old Gareth Gates in the final, and quite honestly Gates looked the more likely winner because he was very cute and very commercial. Indeed, Gates went on to fulfil exactly what we would expect of reality-show winners. A half-baked career, a few attempts at reheat, and then leftover pie ad infinitum.

 

Young was different. After fulfilling his contract, releasing the ballad 'Evergreen' and a successful first album, he insisted on taking a year to produce his own music for his next album, Friday's Child. The result surprised many. It hinted at an artist who just might be around a bit longer than the other microwave stars of Pop Idol (30 seconds and they're done), and sold 1.5 million copies.

 

He is not comfortable being associated with a celebrity-obsessed culture. "When I did Pop Idol I think it was more of a talent show. Talent shows are fantastic. But now it's about becoming famous. Now there's more emphasis on 'This will change your life. You'll be famous and have loads of money.' I think that's a very dangerous message to send out to people." But wasn't that his reason for entering? "No. I remember one of the questions asked of the contestants was, 'Why do you want to do this?' Literally 99% said, 'I want to be famous.' I was one of the few who said, 'I want to sing.'"

 

Unlike some of the contenders on the likes of X Factor since, Young wasn't trying to win to take his family out of a financially precarious life. They were already comfortable. Singing simply made him feel good. He didn't have the confidence to do it at school, and concentrated instead on excelling in sports, particularly running and rugby. "I was more of a lad than now," he laughs. He still has the ambivalence to money that only the comfortably-off can afford. "I grew up around very rich people - a billion times richer than I was. I knew people who had a £60 million inheritance at the age of 18 and they were miserable."

 

Money buys you Armani jeans or a Prada bag. It doesn't buy you protection from insecurity, broken relationships or disloyalty. Young, who graduated with a politics degree before going to drama school and then entering Pop Idol, found himself examining the whole fame phenomenon that engulfed him quite academically.

 

"I think the world of the press is what I have found most interesting. I was just amazed by how untrue things were. I got very disillusioned by it, because I saw it translated into other areas - society in general. It's across the board that things are untrue. But I like the enlightenment. I am pleased I know. I was always very interested in the press and its role in democracy - whether it shapes people's opinions, or whether people shape the press's."

 

Society, he says "dumbs down" too much. The music industry is guilty of it too, so he feels fortunate to have the relationship he does with Sony BMG. He fought for the up-tempo 'Switch It On' to be his first single release from Keep On, though the company wanted a more typical ballad. The record reached number two in the charts, but Young felt vindicated because the song was included on the A-list part of Radio 1's playlist, something he had never achieved before.

 

He admits to being a control freak when it comes to career decisions (and in ordinary life - he hates being a passenger, prefers to drive, and is not keen to surrender his fate to pilots). But let's be realistic. If his decisions didn't result in commercial success, the creative green light would soon turn red, wouldn't it? "I think that's a really good question. My current album will probably not sell as many copies as the last one, but it will probably still sell a million, and that's great. If you sell 50,000 copies - which is not enough in the pop world to earn any money back - then, yeah, I think the situation would change completely. I think that's where the challenge comes. But I don't know any pop artist who hasn't had that. I mean, Kylie Minogue got dropped by the same company who signed her up a year later."

 

In the first flush of fame, Young felt he lost himself a bit. "Not massively. Not badly. But suddenly everyone was going, 'You're this' or 'You're that'. Suddenly I had all these labels. 'You're the new George Michael.' 'You're Mick Hucknall.' 'You're Robbie.' And I thought, 'I'm not any of these people. I'm just me.'"

 

He says he felt most truly an individual as a teenager. Strange words for a 27-year-old man. For most people it's only when they stop being a teenager that they realise their 'individuality' wasn't so individual after all, that it was the same as almost every teenager's before them. But either Young was a very mature teenager, or his subsequent growth was stunted by the industry he was in. "I just kind of felt that at 18 I was more of an established person than I was at 25. I think I was really individual then. I wouldn't shop anywhere other than Oxfam. I would wear the most ridiculous... But I just didn't care..."

 

Now he feels more confident again, but worries how fame might spoil him. "I love being a successful artist, but I also feel that perhaps I have become too acclimatised to this life. I would hate to think I base the happiness in my life on the fact that I live in Holland Park, whereas before I lived in a flat in Ladbroke Grove. If you took that away, where would I be? I hope that who I am is not based on material things or the amount of records sold."

 

After winning Pop Idol, Young was outed in the tabloids. "I already knew I was gay and so did everyone else. You think that it's going to be the biggest deal in your life to come out, and then everyone goes, 'Big deal.' It's almost disappointing."

 

It was bizarre, though, to find photographers camped on his doorstep. "I was really tempted to wear a dress. I had my grandmother's old dresses, which I had been selling to get through drama school - they were great vintage dresses and I was right on Portobello market, and I'd thought, 'I'll nick her dresses while she's not looking and sell them.' Then I thought, 'God, I should wear one of the dresses. It would be hysterical.'"

 

He's of an age now, at 27, when countless wedding invitations from friends have suddenly dropped through the letterbox. But he doesn't have any major regrets about not being a conventional husband or father. "Occasionally I think about it, if I'm seeing my nephews, or if I see kids being greeted at school playgrounds, and I think it must be a wonderful feeling to pick up your child. But I think I have probably conditioned myself from an early age that it is just one of those things... I won't have kids. I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't think I would have kids. I would need a very stable relationship."

 

The split with his first love is reflected in the lyrics of Keep On. "Intimacy is at the heart of about 99% of the songs. Love is such a basic human instinct." He has been watching the recent BBC nature series Planet Earth. "There was this bird of paradise, I think, doing this massive courtship display, and a female comes up, looks at the male, and it's like, 'Oh no...'" he says, wrinkling his nose with disdain. "And I'm thinking, 'This is just like you see in a club.'"

 

Young still hopes for a serious relationship. "All humans need that." Right now, though, he feels happy and settled - and, ironically, that's not good for creativity. He works best when he is unhappy. "There's more honesty to it. You feel like you have to express yourself more when you're unhappy. I don't feel the need when I'm happy."

 

He comes across as a deep thinker, but insists that he is not depressive. "I can have moments of thinking it's all horrendous, but that's just pessimism, not depression. I'm more outgoing."

 

A self-confessed perfectionist, he is constantly driven to the next goal. He wants his new tour, planned for later this year, to start next week and wants his next film role right now. He takes ballet and contemporary dance classes and has signed up to an acting agent. But can he handle being just one of a cast instead of the main attraction? "For me, that has been one of the best things," he insists. "There's a side of me that doesn't want to be the centre of attention, doesn't want all the fuss, just wants to do what I can do. You turn up, you wait, you're not the most important person in the room, you are part of a whole ensemble of people. I flourished in that environment. Then I went to being the star of my tour, so the two things worked really well. That's why I want to do more. It was like it encapsulated my whole character in two work environments."

 

IRONICALLY, the point about teenagers is that Young is lucky they are not his main audience. Teenage music is transient, and each generation has its own heroes. But while Young believes his longevity will ultimately be tested, and is not looking forward to the day, underneath that insecurity lies a small, hard kernel of faith. "I think, deep down, there is that belief that I will be around. I have made decisions based on that."

 

People can say what they like about disposable pop stars, reality TV and celebrity-obsession. Young is ripping off those labels and sticking them elsewhere. "Me being famous has not made me any happier," he insists. "But me doing what I do for a living has changed my life."

 

He finished making the video for his new single just yesterday. He thinks he makes fantastic videos and says this new one is "brilliant". "It was really hard work and I woke up this morning and thought, 'This is fantastic. I love my life.'"

 

Will Young's new single, 'Who Am I', is released on April 24. He is appearing at the SECC, in Glasgow, on September 21. Tickets are on sale at www.getLIVE.co.uk

 

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=571132006

Agree Gill, there's a lot to take in. He's a tad complex ain't he ;)

Agree Gill, there's a lot to take in. He's a tad complex ain't he ;)

 

He is indeed. Think I see what that other journalist meant when he said he's 'too top for pop.' Bet lots ofjournos get a real shock when the interview Will. :o

Thanks Gill. He's a deep thinker which is why he doesn't like bad comments. He obsesses over them.

 

Constructive criticism - yes. Spiteful comments - no. I think a lot of it stems from that very first article where he says he ended up laughing because it was so bad. He may have laughed but I bet he wasn't amused :(

 

It's why that dj was totally out of her depth :lol:

Edited April 16, 200619 yr by munchkin

Very interesting article - thanks for posting Gill. This bit particularly caught my eye.

 

It is sometimes assumed that success brings invincibility, whereas up close you can often smell the insecurity it generates. Little wonder. If you are creative for a living you have to put yourself in it, and rejection becomes personal. Young's reaction suggests the one thing that definitely goes into his music is a great big slice of himself. "If I was manufactured, I wouldn't care, because it wouldn't have me in it. If I didn't care, I wouldn't worry"

 

I could really identify with that. How often have we ourselves created something, really put our hearts into a project, only to have nasty comments made. How hurt we feel.

But when I tell Young this, his face freezes. It is honestly no exaggeration to say I see fear in his eyes. "I don't want bad comments," he says flatly. And if he weren't wedged in at our table in a Soho club, between the wall on one side and me on the other, I almost think he might make a break for it. "I am not interested in any nasty ones."

 

He's so bloody sensitive, I wanna hug him :cry: :cry: :cry:

 

 

"People think I am far more intelligent than I am." Because he went to public school? "Yes. When, actually, I am very stupid."

 

:lol:

 

He finished making the video for his new single just yesterday. He thinks he makes fantastic videos and says this new one is "brilliant". "It was really hard work and I woke up this morning and thought, 'This is fantastic. I love my life.'"

 

:wub: :wub: :cheer: :cheer:

 

What a deep one :huh: Thanks for posting

 

 

I enjoyed reading that and thanks for posting it up gillwill, I love these sort of interviews done with a journalist who hasn't twisted his words, brilliant. :D