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Olly Alexander: Polari review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
The actor-singer’s solo debut proper looks to 1980s gay clubland for inspiration, but plays it too safe under all the retro synths and stammered-vocal effects
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. 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. 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.
Or read this on The Guardian
