“I’m all about playful subversion,” declares Olly Alexander with a grin on the final night of his UK tour. Clad in a series of outfits whose shiny buttons nod towards London’s pearly kings and queens and the dressing-up box – there’s one handily located on the left side of the stage – he is outlining the essence of Polari, the slang once used by the LGBTQ+ community, showfolk and the denizens of London’s Soho, as was.
Evolving out of the vocabularies of Italian immigrants and Travellers to evade the understanding of law enforcement and mainstream society in the 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, Polari also doubles as the title of Alexander’s latest, queer-club pop-themed album. Released two months ago, it was the first under his own name; previously, he had traded as Years & Years, first as a band, then as a solo project.
