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The ‘It’s a Sin’ actor reveals one of his Years and Years bandmates is returning as a touring member, only a year after departing the group in March 2020.

May 2, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Olly Alexander has confirmed Mikey Goldsworthy is staying in Years & Years as a touring member of the band.

The pop trio – which originally formed in 2010 – became a solo project for Olly when, in March (21), it was announced that founding members Mikey and Emre Turkmen would be departing the electropop group.

Olly, 30, has now revealed that only Emre has left the band full-time, as bassist and keyboard player Mikey will continue to tour with him.

He said, “I love Mikey and Emre, we met over 10 years ago when we started Years & Years.”

“Honestly, the truth is we just changed in that time, people change, we grew apart in the way that we make music. The pandemic just made us have a totally honest conversation about where we were at and this made the most sense, it’s definitely different.”

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He added, “Mikey is still going to come on the road with us, he’ll still get some perks.”

Olly also revealed he scrapped an entire album’s worth of songs for his third LP after deciding in lockdown that he wanted to make a record packed with up-tempo dance tunes.

He said, “I started working on new Years & Years music straight after we released the second album back the end of 2018 and in 2019. ‘It’s a Sin’ started filming towards the end of 2019.”

“Then last year, 2020, I scrapped all of the music I had been working on and started again because I wasn’t happy with it and I just listened wanted to listen to upbeat dance music so I was like, ‘OK, that’s what I want to make now.’ In my head it’s quite difficult to remember everything.”

After receiving rave reviews for his performance in Russell T. Davies TV drama “It’s a Sin” – which was set during the 1980s AIDS epidemic – Olly is very keen to continue acting and is dreaming of a role in in racy Netflix period drama “Bridgerton”.

He said, “Oh my gosh, I could be in Bridgerton Season 3, I could be a gay, something.”

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Even in a normal year, the competition’s unique traditions can be confusing to newcomers. Here’s what you need to know.LONDON — The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s biggest music competition: a fiercely competitive, always surprising, sometimes surreal Olympics of song. Broadcast live across the world, the competition has taken place since 1956, making it one of the longest running television shows of all time. More

The 24-year-old Canadian musician memorializes friends lost to violence on his debut EP, “When Smoke Rises.”LOS ANGELES — In the middle of Mustafa’s potent, chilling and heart-rending debut EP, “When Smoke Rises,” is “The Hearse,” a startling two-minute meditation on revenge in the wake of a friend’s murder.“I was all about the peace/I didn’t wanna risk it all/Oh, I know what’s at stake,” he sings, trying to maintain equanimity in the face of trauma. But his mood, and the song — a soft folk number with fingerpicked acoustic guitar and an almost unconscious, corporeal rhythm — takes a somber, unexpected turn: “But you made yourself special/I wanna throw my life away/For you.”Mustafa, 24, sings these lines with an almost ethereal sigh, like you would serenade a lover, not the enemy in your cross hairs. And yet it is, somehow, a love song. And also an elegy. An indictment of the self. An indictment of the state. A bitter promise.When Mustafa began writing songs a few years ago, there were no other topics but the heaviness of his experiences. “I couldn’t write anything else,” he said earlier this month, in a sparsely decorated Airbnb on the east side of Los Angeles. “It was everything I was dealing with. It engulfed me.”More than 2,000 miles away from where he grew up in Regent Park, Canada’s oldest housing project and one of the roughest neighborhoods of Toronto, he was relaxed, wearing a black sweatsuit and a kufi, and speaking with a sober, sometimes sorrowful peace that comes from years of weathering storms.“When Smoke Rises” is a suite of folk songs about life — and death — in his hometown; the title refers to the rapper Smoke Dawg, a close friend who was killed in 2018. The EP is bracing and beautiful, hopeful and desperate, a solemn prayer for lives that never reached their potential, and a determined act to render their stories with beauty and care.For just this reason, Mustafa wasn’t sure if he was going to include “The Hearse” on the EP — whether it was fair to center his own hurt and preoccupation with those he perceived as enemies. “I thought about some opps more than I thought about friends, I was so obsessed with them,” he said. “This project is about the grace of the friends that I lost, you know? And I’m like, does that take away from that grace?”But ultimately, he concluded, he couldn’t fairly tell the story of his upbringing, and how it has both shaped and undone him, without it. “My grief,” he said, “is incomplete without the rage.”“When Smoke Rises” is full of such cruel, pained calculations: how to memorialize the dead, how to express love in hopeless circumstances, how to protect those you care about when no one else will, or can. “Don’t crease your Air Forces/Just stay inside tonight,” he gently pleads on the weeping sigh “Air Forces.” On the directly anxious “What About Heaven,” he sings as if calling after someone he fears he might never see again: “We forgot to talk about heaven.”The turbulence he sings about is still very much ongoing. Sometimes, Mustafa said, after writing a song, he’d wonder, “Did I just crystallize a feeling that I haven’t even survived?”Mustafa — born Mustafa Ahmed — has been grappling with the weight of injustice since his older sister first encouraged him to form his thoughts into poems in the mid-2000s. His family emigrated to Canada from Sudan around 1995. By age 12, he was getting local media attention for his verse about the challenges facing his community; in 2016, he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Youth Council.None of that changed the cycle of devastation in Regent Park, though, and Mustafa has become something of a community ethicist and mentor, a guide for families dealing with the death of their loved ones, and an outspoken advocate for the Muslim community. He is also something of a guardian: His younger brother Yassir and a young Toronto rapper named Lil Berete were staying in the Airbnb with him. 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And I try to make sure that we’re protected.”As a young person, while many of his peers were finding themselves in hip-hop, Mustafa gravitated to folk music and earthy singer-songwriters: Nick Drake, Richie Havens, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. “I remember being younger and people were mad, like, ‘This guy’s always emotional,’” he said with a laugh. “But the truth is, I was just exploring a sentimental language, you know what I mean?”During the making of “When Smoke Rises,” Mustafa was taken by how Sufjan Stevens memorialized his mother on the 2015 album “Carrie & Lowell.” Mustafa pulled out his phone to read a letter he sent to Stevens via an intermediary, part mash note, part confessional. “I dreamed to bridge the worlds of grief and glory,” he wrote, confiding in Stevens about the ghosts hovering over his music. “The deaths were complicated and violent and unfair, but still they are my own. 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Dukes had been probing Smithsonian Folkways anthologies of Sudanese and Egyptian music, some samples of which ended up on “When Smoke Rises,” bridging Mustafa’s modern-day tales to the past. Mustafa also includes vocal samples of friends who have died, and of his mother, his way of inscribing them into history.Mustafa’s earliest versions of these songs tilted toward pure folk. “I think we always struggled with what the rhythmic architecture of the music was, because it was so guitar-driven,” said Dukes over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Los Feliz the following evening. Working with North African samples helped create an unobtrusive backdrop that deepened Mustafa’s storytelling. “Sometimes it takes a while to arrive at that simplicity,” Dukes said. (James Blake and Jamie xx also contributed production.)Before he started writing music for himself, “I wasn’t being daring at all,” Mustafa said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anything, explaining anything in its full truth.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesThe mood at dinner was lighthearted, with clouds in the distance. Mustafa had spent some time earlier that day in a public back and forth on Instagram with an executive at Warner Records, a minor social media conflagration — “a microcosm of what happens when you’re in full support of Palestinian lives,” he posted — spurred by the recent violence in Gaza.“I’m just using the avenue of music to do the very thing that I’ve always done,” he said, underscoring the complete overlap of his personal and creative lives. He’d just returned to the table after stepping away to find a quiet spot for prayer. “For a lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a seamless transition. He’s saying exactly what he’s always been saying. 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Drake’s ‘Toosie Slide’, which debuted at number one, slips to the runner-up position while Roddy Ricch’s ‘The Box’ stays put at the third position on the singles chart.
Apr 21, 2020
AceShowbiz – The Weeknd has landed another chart double in the U.S. as his hit “Blinding Lights” returns to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
He swaps places with Drake, whose “Toosie Slide” debuted at number one last week – ending The Weeknd’s two-week run at the top of the countdown.
The Canadian singer’s latest album, “After Hours”, scored a fourth week at the top of the Billboard 200 on Sunday, April 19.

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