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YUNGBLUD: “The world is ready for rock music and the world is ready for f*cking rock stars”
Raised on rock’n’roll since he was born, music runs through the veins of Dom Harrison. Known throughout the world as YUNGBLUD, this weekend the 27-year-old trailblazer is staging his own festival to promote the next generation of artists, give a middle finger to the industry, and show everyone why the music he loves is back and better than ever…
- Words:
- Luke Morton
- Photography:
- Tom Pallant
“I got kicked out for being gobby,” grins Dom Harrison, rolling a toothpick around said incriminating mouth. “But I just kept coming back and coming back.” The man known to millions as YUNGBLUD is reclining on a black leather sofa with a pint of lager, remembering his first time here at The Hawley Arms in Camden. The early afternoon sun streaks through the window into the top floor nook we find ourselves, known as The Amy Room, named after the late Amy Winehouse whose pictures adorn the walls and various possessions – including a jukebox – receive pride of place.
Dom loves Camden. Years ago he lived in Tooting with his guitarist and drummer, an area chosen for its affordability but also proximity to the northern line and thus easy access to the music capital of London. “We’d Oyster card up, with two of us close together going through the barriers so you can get an extra pint in,” he laughs at the memory. “I’ve always gravitated toward it. Obviously it’s romanticised but it’s fucking it. When you come here it’s infectious.”
Two decades ago, when the man sat opposite Kerrang! was still learning to tie his own shoes, Camden was the height of cool thanks to bands like The Libertines and local celebs like Kate Moss and Noel Fielding. Music fans across the country made pilgrimages to the infamous market and the litany of pubs. The tabloid press was full of stories from the streets. But before long, with tragic inevitability, the culture of the town was co-opted and turned into mass market skinny-jeaned banality, with terms like ‘indie trash’ and ‘heroin chic’ filling up the racks at Top Shop. What was once edgy and counterculture was now mainstream and manufactured. It became an aesthetic. It was no longer real.
Dom has had similar accusations laid at his door for the majority of his career so far. Despite being one of the UK’s biggest homegrown acts, the face of alternative for an entire generation, and putting on his own festival (the aptly named Bludfest) this weekend, he routinely faces accusations of being a plastic punk. Or an industry plant. Or that it’s all for show and he’s playing dress-up for some cynical financial gain. Put this to him and he takes a long pause.
“I think that it used to bother me a lot because, ‘Oh god, maybe they’re right?’ And all I was trying to do was fucking be myself. Of course I love punk rock music, that’s what I grew up on. I had Joe Strummer on my wall – Billie Joe, Joe Strummer, Angus Young. I feel like it’s just who I am and I’m sorry people feel that way, but I’m going to work the rest of my life to prove them wrong. And if I don’t, I don’t fucking care because I’m having a fun time.
“I try and turn hate into positivity. It’s a challenge to me. Come to my show if you think that, and say it when you’re walking out. I dare you,” he drawls in a thick Donny accent, with you firmly pronounced as ya. “It’s the best fucking rock show in the world under 30. Come and see my gig and tell me I’m a fake plastic fucking whatever, and then I might listen to you. But if you’re doing it on a keyboard because you’ve seen a couple of videos and followed the narrative of Twitter or TikTok, you’re more plastic than me. If you’re listening to Twitter you’re a fucking sheep. If you want to have a bit of a scrap then I’m down.”
Pointing to his friend and “mentor” Oli Sykes by way of example, Dom explains that in the early days of Bring Me The Horizon it was “a bloodbath”, but now they’re the biggest band in the world, proving every single detractor wrong. Of which there were many. However he doesn’t believe this reactive negativity is necessarily a symptom of how his music sounds or how he looks, it’s just the way rock music has always been.
“The one thing I like about our genre and love about rock is it’s a lifelong game. No-one was ever liked in the beginning. If you make it past 35/40 years and you become part of the furniture, that’s when you become a rock legend. If you don’t, that’s the game of rock’n’roll. And that’s what I fucking love about rock – it’s savage but it’s the best genre in the world.
“[Rock] holds its morals tightly – rap gives it away quick, whatever’s poppin’, whatever’s a hit, it gives it the crown. Pop music, whatever’s a hit, it gives it the crown. Rock music is a very sacred territory because it’s painful to be a rock fan, and in the past when people have called me a plastic punk or a fake rocker or whatever, that’s part of the fucking journey into trying to navigate this genre and belong to it. And fuck yeah, I’m down for it and I’m down to fucking rock ’til I’m dead.”
“I’m bored of vapid art, surface-level sh*t, and I can tell people are bored of it too”
As you’ll have no doubt gathered from the above quotes, swearing comes as naturally to Dom as breathing. As does his infectious positivity. His inability to sit still and rev himself up countless times throughout our hour-long conversation speaks to a wide-eyed wonder and unashamed love for the music he makes and listens to, what he earnestly refers to as “our genre”. It’s a refreshing departure from the conveyor belt of media trained artists one often encounters.
He darts down tangents without a moment’s warning. Having originally explained that he started YUNGBLUD because “I felt fucking caged,” and wanted to show the world that “this is what I wear and this is how I talk,” his firework-like attention switches to the wider topic of the music industry, and its recent fascination with the dopamine-spiking cookie cutter bullshit that clogs up our phones – and why our genre is coming back harder than ever.
“The music industry for the past couple of years has been so vapid and surface-level,” he begins, with the focus of a man who’s clearly been thinking about this night after night. “I’m not saying music’s shit, but a lot of things have been easy to consume and digest – two-minute songs, TikToks, quick things because we were all fucking inside and we didn’t want to think too deeply. In COVID everyone went to the depths of themselves in their house because they had no fucking choice, so we needed two years of vapid art, surface-level shit, and I’m bored of it now and I can tell people are bored of it too.
“I feel like people are ready for depth, people are ready for stories, you can see they’re ready for journeys, for niches, and it’s such a sick time for rock music in my opinion because you can see it’s spherical. Punk shit is happening at the minute with Amyl And The Sniffers and IDLES, hardcore with Knocked Loose and Turnstile… It can’t be, ‘That band saved rock – it’s saved!’ It’s got to come back as a charging force from all fucking angles. And I can feel it at the minute and that’s because two-minute TikTok songs have been dominating everyone’s life for years.
“I feel like people are ready for crazy shit.”
Dom was always going to be a rockstar. Before moving to The Big Smoke with nothing but eyeliner and a dream, he grew up in Doncaster, an oft-ignored part of the country near the South Yorkshire/Lincolnshire border, whose main musical export is Louis Tomlinson from One Direction (or MC Devvo & Shady Piez if you’re a real one.)
But he had no interest in pop. As a kid, he’d lose himself in Kerrang! magazine and “rinse Kerrang! TV all day” at his “posh nan’s” house – known as such because she could afford Sky. But his indoctrination into all things rock’n’roll began at his dad’s guitar shop, pretty much as soon as he was born. “I was just hours old and there’s a picture of me on the counter,” he smiles. “I had my music education there. I was listening to The Exploited and Machine Head at six years old.”
With such ready access to not just guitars but other, older rock fans, Dom describes his time growing up in the shop as like going to School Of Rock every Saturday, “but my whole life I had it drilled into me that you will not make it. My dad and my grandad and people in the guitar shop said not to be a musician, it’s too painful. If you work in a guitar shop it’s almost like the fucking graveyard of rockstars, but they gave me my education, so for them now it’s mental.”
Sitting opposite Kerrang! today, Dom looks every inch a rock fan, with his vintage The Cramps sleeveless T-shirt, wild hair, tattoos, shades, and the trademark creepers with pink socks. Although comfortable in his own skin now, growing up in Donny, he says, it was “fucking brutal up there for someone like me who wants to wear make-up,” and faced questions about his sexuality and gender from a young age.
“In school my teacher would be like, ‘Why the fuck have you got nail varnish on?’ in front of the whole class, and that shit affects you. I still feel like I’m getting it in the stomach. ‘Why have you got that, that’s for girls.’ I was wearing drainpipe jeans and listening to Suicide Season and wearing a Nirvana hoodie. It was not fucking accepted.”
While there were other ‘rock kids’ at school he hung out with, Dom admits he was the one who would always get the blame for misbehaving, “because I looked like I’d crawled out of Satan’s arsehole. Because I’ve got ripped gloves on. It was painful because I was wanting to wear dresses and skirts and shit. Not for any other reason than I’d seen Brian Molko do it and I was obsessed with Placebo and Robert Smith, and they looked so fucking cool to me.”
It was a confusing time for Dom. At school he was the black sheep, wanting nothing more than to devote his life to rock’n’roll. Yet at the weekends in the guitar shop, where every waking hour revolved around the music he loved, he was being constantly warned not to do it for a career.
These warring feelings inside Dom came to a head when he was 15 and moved to London, living with “a mad lady called Marge who looked like Morticia Addams and fuckloads of cats,” surviving on toast and the four lasagnes a week she’d make him.
But it was a means to and end, and he knew that end was rock stardom. Following some unsuccessful stints busking – “I earned four quid for like seven hours’ work” – and turning down The Voice because they wanted him to be like Shawn Mendes, he met his now manager while performing at an open mic night, who ultimately helped Dom create YUNGBLUD. Within a month he had the name, the look and the first four songs all mapped out.
In the years since 2017’s debut single King Charles, YUNGBLUD has become one the biggest artists in the country, with two Number One albums and millions of fans across the globe. He’s worked with the likes of Halsey, WILLOW, Avril Lavigne and Bring Me The Horizon. He’s performed everywhere from Glastonbury to Wembley Arena to Radio 1’s Big Weekend. Even his social calendar reads like a who’s who – last night he was out for dinner with Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, tomorrow he’s at a party with Eminem and Dr Dre. No longer the greebo demon child, he’s rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty on the Graham Norton Show.
“I feel like I’m more of an outsider in that world. ‘Put him on, he’s fucking weird! We need a bit of darkness on the sofa,’” he offers, when asked if he’s become part of the mainstream now. “It’s like Ozzy didn’t mean to get that big, he was just a fucking nutter. You get put in that situation. I’ll sit on a couch and I’ll say something crazy because that’s just my personality and I think they’re into it. And it’s cool. I’m going to fly the flag of rock’n’roll music because it’s the genre I love and it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.”
This weekend, Dom is giving back to the rock community the only way he knows how. Taking over the iconic Milton Keynes Bowl – the enormous outdoor venue that’s hosted everyone from Green Day to David Bowie to Linkin Park – he is staging the inaugural Bludfest. A huge one day event for tens of thousands of his biggest fans, headlined by YUNGBLUD but also featuring the likes of SOFT PLAY, Nessa Barrett, Lil Yachty and Jazmin Bean.
He’s not the first artist to hold his own festival – Ozzy and Slipknot have made entire businesses from it, even Metallica gave it a go – but rather than eyeing this as an extension of brand YUNGBLUD, in typical Dom fashion, he sees it as a big fuck you to the money men and powers that be.
“I felt like it was the next logical step because I didn’t want to do another tour, I needed to do something different, something crazy,” he begins, with a glint in his eye. “On our last American tour, I learned a lot about what’s going on in the industry at the minute. It was the first time I experienced tiered seating. What the fuck is that? This weird fucking American Express or Coca-Cola lounge whatever was there. It was £350 for a ticket, and I had 400 kids outside the venue who couldn’t get in. And this is fucked up. I believe an artist should be able to determine their ticket price. If you want to charge £1000 a ticket then that’s on you, don’t hide behind your fucking promoter. So let’s do an event that’s going to change something.”
Indeed, the price of Bludfest is around half the going rate for a day ticket to one of the summer’s big festivals and less than that of a big stadium rock show. He’s also planning to use the space afforded in the Bowl to recreate his beloved Camden High Street, complete with his own version of The Hawley Arms.
“The reason I’m doing Bludfest is giving power to the artists and the people. This whole thing doesn’t work without people. That’s a fact. If people aren’t buying your magazine, you’re fucked. If people aren’t turning up to my show, I’m fucked. The reason I started Bludfest and why I’m so fucking vocal online is because it has to change. Music has got categorically worse because of monetisation and market share. You talk to the industry and it’s like, ‘Okay cool, let’s pay the investors,’ instead of, ‘What moves me?’ That’s why I’ve got two stages at Bludfest to put artists on that I fucking like in front of my fanbase. Go find your new favourite artist on that stage.
“I want to inspire other artists to do their own events – because you can. It’s fucking hard but if you wanna work hard at it you could do your own thing. It takes the power back to the artist and their communities.
“It’s all about the fanbase, fuck everyone else. That’s all I give a shit about because they make my world go round. They literally keep this thing going. Nothing is more important than that.”
“The fans make my world go round. They literally keep this thing going”
Fans are more than a number on a screen to Dom. Spotify streams and Instagram followers pale in comparison to the tangible, real-life interactions with other outsiders and those who have nowhere else to be their true selves.
“YUNGBLUD was a coping mechanism, he was a superhero for me, which is why I think so many people got it because it became them,” he says. “It’s why so many people look like me, why we look like each other, because you put it on to protect yourself and belong somewhere.”
Like Swifties and Little Monsters, YUNGBLUD’s die-hard fandom are known as the Black Hearts Club. But what was predominantly a Gen Z movement is now broadening its scope. In recent tours Dom has noticed a shift in older people – or what he calls “Foo Fighters dads” – coming to experience the high-energy spectacle.
“The core look exactly like me; they’ve got the tattoos, they’ve got the make-up… but what’s been beautiful is the way it’s become like everybody because it’s getting bigger. It’s just radiating with people, the message is about unity, and people are like, ‘You know what, I’m a fucking plumber called Gaz, but I’m going to go and get weird tonight at the YUNGBLUD gig.’ It’s becoming that thing. I love AC/DC and it’s the same shit with that – it was the Devil’s music until Back In Black became everyone’s.
“I think the world is ready for rock music and the world is ready for fucking rock stars. The live guitar-based interludes and fire, when we bring whiskey onto stage and more Marshall cabs, people go more mental. I can feel it and and it feels really exciting for our genre because people love a rock show. And that’s what’s fucking sacred about our genre. Fuck the screens, fuck the sugar, a fucking sick rock interlude across this summer festival season has got the crowds going mental.”
“YUNGBLUD was a coping mechanism, he was a superhero for me”
It’s that renewed worldwide passion for rock and heavy music that’s inspiring where Dom goes next. Although recent single breakdown gives off something of an emo Mike Skinner vibe, the fourth LP in the leather-clad career of YUNGBLUD promises to be a something completely different.
Like with the aforementioned spherical nature of rock music coming back in all forms and from all angles, Dom is going back to the roots.
“I want to make a straight down the middle classic rock record that sounds like what the fuck Zeppelin would sound like in 2025,” he beams. “It’s deep and it’s mental – it’s a fucking rock opera. The first song is nine minutes long with two guitar solos in it. We’re going big with orchestras. We got to this point and position where we’re like, ‘Right, what do we love? We love rock music. How do we push it forward but also adhere to what we fucking love? Let’s make a record that we love listening to!’”
It’s a gamble, but nothing in Dom’s life has come without risk. Having made a name for himself with mammoth-sized pop-rock hooks and earworm choruses, will something seemingly verging on a prog rock odyssey connect with his legion of fans?
“It will work if it’s real,” he counters, sitting upright. “Until the end of time, people will think that what I do is not real, but if I know it is then this portion of people are going to fill a Milton Keynes Bowl in every country. Let’s play our story and our truth to the fucking community that got us here, and I want to them know that I love as much as they love me. Going into this record is a fucking big swing, but so is Bludfest. And this is the time for it.”
You want Blud? You got it.
Get your Kerrang! x YUNGBLUD football jersey.
Bludfest takes place at Milton Keynes Bowl on August 11 – get your tickets now.
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