Next Wave #701: Leon Else

A star in the making, this is pure, extravagent pop music...

The late Lou Reed used to recount one of Andy Warhol’s aphorisms. “There’s only one good thing about a small town,” he’d say, “it makes you want to get out.”

Speaking to Leon Else, those words linger tantalisingly in the background of our conversation. Brought up in Margate, he watched the once flourishing seaside town tumble into monochrome as he reached adolescence. “When I was really young it was booming,” he recalls. “But then as I get to my early teens the beaches got less and less busy, the shops closed down. It was quite bleak.”

In cruel synchronous, Leon’s life also took a downward turn. “For me, growing up was really fucking tough. My stepdad was a bully. And I really went through it was a child.”

Music and performance became twin beacons, a way to express himself, and a way to get out of the constraints of a bleak English town. “Music gave me comfort,” he insists. “I felt like I connected to music more than some people did. I leaned on music more than other people. People just listened to music, but I was taken away with the music. It made me believe that I could get out, and that I could go away and escape all this.”

Nailing a scholarship to a top dance school in London, his ambition began to manifest itself in different ways. A born rebel, he struggled to fit within the rule, but his sheer energy pushed him further and further. Speaking to Leon, you get this sense of being constrained, of a firework just waiting to go off – that slight delay between the fuse disappearing, and the colours pouring out.

“I want to be the biggest artist in the world,” he says, with total, total sincerity. “And I want to be someone that can help change people’s lives – just how music helped me escape.”

New cut ‘Black Car’ is certainly a significant introduction. Expertly controlled emotions spiral into an intense pop maelstrom, with that dynamic, trembling voice somehow holding it all together.

“My biggest inspirations are David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Prince, and Freddie Mercury,” he says. “They’re the kind of people that I look up to, who made great pop music because it wasn’t your typical pop. And that’s what I love.”

“It’s good to evolve, and I think it’s good to experiment and play around. I want to keep people guessing about what I’m going to do. And I think that’s a really great place to be, because I don’t want to be boring. I’m not a boring person – I’m like ten different people in one day. So why is my music going to be one thing?”

Leon Else isn’t someone you can second-guess –just light the fuse, and stand well back. The show is about to begin.

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