“I’m on cloud nine, man,” Yungblud tells me on a video call from his tour bus in Chicago. “It’s f**king mental out here. The UK run was great, but the gigs here are mad. We’re a little less invasive in the UK, but over here they follow you around everywhere. It’s crazy. It’s changed a lot since I was here last year.”
As if out of nowhere, Yungblud, born Dominic Richard Harrison in 1997, has become one of the biggest stars in the country, while also becoming one of the fastest-growing artists in the US. Having spluttered around for nearly a decade – trying this, trying that, attempting to become a pop singer, an actor, anything in front of an audience – his breakthrough came last year with the release of his album Idols. It was a record of modern goth rock songs that focused on alienation and teenage angst, and made Yungblud the unlikely hero to young misfits everywhere, a 21st-century Jim Morrison in eyeliner and black-painted fingernails, who also appeals to Bud Light-drinking midwestern Americans in chinos and chambray shirts.
“One of my big attributes is being so open, but it does exhaust you,” he says. Having just started a US tour, the 28-year-old northerner is relentlessly upbeat, if a bit tired. He is one of those performers who loves meeting his audience, as it obviously validates him, but he’s finding it harder as the crowds get bigger.
“You can’t do a gig here, and then meet 300 people after the show, and then another 50 the morning after when you go for a f**king coffee. I might have to figure this out. I don’t want to be stuck in my room – I want to go out. I don’t want to be in a spa hotel with a f**king shaman. I ain’t f***ing Bono! Yet! My security guards keep telling me to let them know when I’m leaving the hotel. But it’s both a blessing and a curse, which is what you work for.”
The Yungblud audiences, he explains, are louder and bigger than last year as the age demographic is getting wider. “It’s like Ozzy Osbourne or Queen or Aerosmith or INXS at Wembley. It’s a crowd like that. It’s not as angry anymore. There’s less teenage pent-up energy. Now I know Yungblud has the legs to go the distance.” He talks about himself in the third person, but then he always did. Yungblud, after all, is a persona, one he has worked hard to define.
Yungblud, pictured on stage at the O2 Arena London last month, says he wants to be a stadium artist (Photo: Tom Pallant)
At the age of 13, having decided he needed to spend his life as a performer – his father owned a record shop, which would turn out to be the formative part of his education – the Doncaster-born Harrison asked his parents if he could go to stage school. Ever supportive, they enrolled him at the Arts Educational School in Chiswick. He quickly got parts in Emmerdale, a Disney TV show, and a theatrical production of Bugsy Malone. Keen to perform in any medium, he then formed a band before creating a suitable alter ego, Yungblud, a 3D platform for all the pent-up frustrations he was starting to manifest. He has continually cited the fights with his parents as the reason he started to externalise his inner turmoil, although increasingly this seems like a convenient story to mirror his reinvention as a tormented goth rocker.
He gets on with his parents now – they’ll come to visit him on this tour – and his venom now is with British critics.
“I’ve always had a problem with critics in Britain, as they are hesitant to jump on something new. It’s a cliché, but in Britain we don’t like success. People in the US say, ‘Go get it, kid.’ They love success. I represent an idea that is so wrapped up in darkness and drug addiction and the party, but I’m a happy guy, and that vibe doesn’t necessarily correlate with people. I’m pretty straight, I don’t do drugs, I work out, I love rock music, and I’ve got a girlfriend, and I love my fanbase. And I think that’s what got me into trouble from a critical perspective. I want to exude positivity. But maybe I don’t need that validation anymore.”
He brings up a newspaper review of his Liverpool show a couple of weeks ago. “The Times sent one f**king older journalist who gave me a three-star review and said I needed more hits.” (“Alas, as a songwriter, he still lacks the world-class anthems to back up this messianic swagger,” wrote the critic.) “Really?” continues Harrison. “I’ve got 16,000 people coming to see me in Liverpool who say otherwise. A bit like Led Zeppelin or The Clash. Some people miss the point of Yungblud. I’m not Sabrina f**king Carpenter.”
Yungblud says he doesn’t please British critics: ‘I’m a happy guy, and that vibe doesn’t necessarily correlate with people’ (Photo: Tom Pallant)
Most successful stars like to think they arrived fully formed before their public, magically appearing like an apparition before immediately becoming part of the pop firmament. Of course, the greatest pop narratives always include a period of managerial and advisory oversight at the outset, which involves some kind of strategic playbook. In Yungblud’s case this involved the passionate espousal of superstar publicist Alan Edwards. Having known and worked with Edwards for well over 40 years, I’ve come to know when he truly believes in someone, whether that was Bowie, the Spice Girls or Usher. Which is why, when he went in to bat for Yungblud, I started to take an interest.
I first interviewed Yungblud a year ago, and in the 12 months since we’ve seen each other, he’s become a huge star in the US, a kind of cartoon goth sex symbol, a sort of black leather Robbie Williams. He’s totally caught the eye of disenfranchised American teenagers, who see in him a bulwark against the parental and societal pressures of a world that seems increasingly hostile. But he’s also breaking through with an older audience. Yungblud is relatively tall, relatively sexy, with a relatively good voice that has already wrapped itself around one solid-gold classic, his version of Black Sabbath’s “Changes”.
The rather wonderful thing about him is his complete acceptance that he’s a construct, a fiction, a manufactured pop star whose saving grace is the fact he manufactured himself. Is he fake? Only if you think David Bowie, Johnny Rotten and Bruce Springsteen are fake (never forget that authenticity is a style, too). I like him enormously, and even though he has perhaps exaggerated the war of attrition he says he experienced with his parents, I’m not sure it matters much. All pop personas are built on some kind of fiction, imagined or not.
“Yungblud has become many different things to many different people, which means I can now be more myself. Yungblud used to be shrouded in this juvenile, naïve, political thing, and I was very much judged on this caricature. But it’s different now. There are many different iterations of Yungblud. I didn’t know if Yungblud was going to be a Ziggy Stardust character, but the name is now bigger than a bright kid from the north of England. Even the f**king customs officials at 6am between Buffalo and Toronto know who Yungblud is.”
Yungblud in Michigan earlier this month on the first night of his North American ‘Idols’ tour (Photo: Scott Legato/Getty)
Last year, he cracked the American market by hitting the Billboard Top 10 with his collaboration EP “One More Time” with Aerosmith, secured three Grammy nominations (including Best Rock Album for his Idols record), and sold out a North American tour. Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, a man not in the habit of flinging compliments about, says: “I say this without reservation, and as a fan of heavy metal for 50 years. Dom has one of the greatest voices in the history of music, and as grand as that may sound, there is no hype in what I’m saying.”
He is also loved by Dave Grohl, who once introduced him at an awards show as proof that “rock ’n’ roll is not dead”. His ambitions are obviously different now. “They’ve accelerated because now I want to walk out onto a stadium stage,” he says, smiling. “That’s the dream. I’ve done arenas, I’ve done festivals, but I want to be a stadium artist. I’ve just got to block out false narratives. It’s been a great year, but I don’t like being called the future of rock. I don’t like people thinking I said that. I am a middle-class kid, I never claimed I wasn’t, and I’m just doing my thing. I’m an English kid who loves his country.”
For Yungblud, the future looks black, but in a good way (he’s still dressing like a cross between Gene Vincent, Axl Rose and Jim Morrison in leather chaps and leather vests). After this tour, he’s going to Los Angeles to finish recording a new album with Andrew Watt (who’s recently sprinkled fairy dust on Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney), and will return to the UK an even bigger star than he was when he left.
“It’s so weird. In the past I had blue-haired, liberal, non-binary, queer rock kids at the gigs, but now I’ve got f**king truckers at the same show. And they’re together and they’re having a good time. I f**king love that.”
