OLLY ALEXANDER

Olly Alexander, a 101AttitudeFilm, TV and Music trailblazer, takes us on a stroll through Hampstead Heath to discussPolari, his new album named after the secret gay slang, why gay sex should be celebrated, andthatEurovision controversy

Words Alim Kheraj

OLLY WEARS JACKET AND JEANS, BY ALEC BIZBY, SCARF, BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

Photography El Hardwick

OLLY WEARS TOP AND NECKLACE, BY STEFAN COOKE

O lly Alexander arrives outside the former Jack Straw’s Castle pub in Hampstead on a Lime bike. “I can’t believe you saw me riding one,” he says, embarrassed to be spotted whooshing around London on one of the luminous green electric bicycles for hire.

It’s a bright but freezing January afternoon, and Alexander is wearing a thick black coat, a scarf and a woollen hat. He suggested our meeting place: he likes the Hill Garden and Pergola in the north-east section of Hampstead Heath. “I also read At Your Own Risk by Derek Jarman,” he says after depositing the bike. “He talks about doing the trip from Jack Straw into the Heath. Even in the last years of his life, he would still come here. He would do his little trips to London while he was living in Dungeness.”

This part of the Heath was, and still is, known for cruising. For decades, men have met each other in among the trees and bushes for sex — as Jarman writes in At Your Own Risk: “It’s completely Queer, rooted in sex — a completely Queer space.” As we walk towards the Pergola, there’s no obvious signs of such activity. Aside from a few dog walkers, it’s quiet.

Still, this notion of public sex is one that Alexander has long been fascinated by. “I remember being a kid and seeing messages scrawled in toilets and being really scandalised by the idea that men would look for intimacy with other men in that way,” he says. “I think it’s quite woven into certain parts of gay subculture in quite profound ways. Obviously, we weren’t allowed to meet each other publicly for so long, so we had to find other places and ways to congregate and communicate.”

This idea is sort of why we’re meeting today. Having performed as Years & Years for over a decade — initially as a band and then, with 2022’s Night Call, as a solo artist — Alexander is about to release his first album under his own name. Titled Polari, the record is named after the slang adopted by some gay men in the first half of the 20th century. Thought to date back to at least the 1700s, Polari grew in prominence during the 19th century, where it was predominantly spoken among travelling performers, sailors, criminals and other groups on the fringes of society. Incorporating Italianate words, rhyming slang, Yiddish and Romani, this coded dialect was later picked up by gay men, giving them a secretive means to identify and communicate with one another at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.