The YouTube star, who could soon become Perth’s biggest pop export, talks about sharing his life on the internet, the legacy of Alan Turing and why Australian marriage equality is inevitable

Troye Sivan says the people at his record label A&R saw him play live only two weeks ago – despite signing the pop artist in 2013. “I know that 15, 20 years ago, record labels used to go and see artists play live 30 times before they even thought about signing them,” he says, down the line from Perth. “It’s definitely a sign of the changing times.”

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Born in Johannesburg, Sivan moved to Australia with his family when he was two. The 20-year-old is a textbook case study of how to become a star in the 21st century. He kicked off his acting career with a role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and starred opposite John Cleese in the Spud film trilogy, but it was YouTube that served as the foundation for his music career.

Dig a little and you can find a babyfaced Sivan singing covers of Justin Bieber and Amy Winehouse. Three years ago, he began to post more regularly. His slick, two-minute talking head vlog is a door into the world of pop and internet culture, sex, fashion and celebrity obsession that make up contemporary teenage life.

One of his more popular videos, Coming Out, from 2013, has clocked more than 6m views. With beguiling simplicity, he tells the story of how he came to take his first nervous shuffles out of the closet (at 14 he confessed to his best friend he “might be” bisexual, which “opened up this thing” in his head, and culminated in telling his parents he was gay several months later). In the video, he says it “feels weird” to have to pronounce his sexuality, “but I feel like a lot of you guys are real, genuine friends of mine and I share everything with the internet”.

Sivan’s hometown of Perth, a city of 2 million people on the far western coastline of Australia, can feel a world away from the epicentres of Western pop culture. Growing up, he assumed he would one day need to relocate to pursue a music career. “For me, even Sydney seemed so far away,” he says.

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But when comments in Italian, Portuguese and Chinese started appearing beneath his YouTube videos, Sivan realised he was reaching some pretty far-flung corners of the planet. His online popularity helped bolster the release of his EPs Trxye (2014) and Wild (2015). Both came in at No 5 on the US Billboard chart and earned the praise of names such as Taylor Swift and Sam Smith. Not bad for a kid who still lives with his parents in the suburbs.

These days, Sivan is just as likely to be in London, New York or Paris. The main difference between his life now and two years ago is that he is “waking up in a lot more places than ever before”.

“As soon as I catch myself being a little too blase – ‘oh yeah I got to pack for London’ – I kind of want to slap myself a bit and be like: ‘hey dude, this is the most insane thing in the world’.”

He’s been “sick as a dog” for the past four days, the result of a particularly intense period of overseas touring. But a short spell at home, sweltering under an early spell of 40-degree weather, has proved the best medicine. “I’d gone from New York City to London to my little grocery store [in Perth] ... barefoot with my dad buying cordial so we could have ice-cold cordial by the pool. I literally felt like I was 10 years old again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Troye Sivan: ‘Growing up, I was super, super aware and conscious of LGBT people and how singers and actors dealt with it.’ Photograph: EMI Music

Perth is his “blue neighbourhood”, he says – the evocative and slightly enigmatic title of his debut album. Blue is a nostalgic colour that makes him feel “happy-sad”. He associates the city with warm weather, the beach, his family and friends, and when he’s away touring it triggers a kind of bittersweet emotion. “It’s like you’re looking back on stuff that’s really, really changed and really, really different now. But you’re looking back on it, hopefully, with some real fondness.”

That nostalgia, I suggest, seems pervasive in youth culture today – from Lana del Rey’s dreamy, tragedy-streaked obsession with 1950s and 60s Hollywood, to the Tumblr cut-and-paste fetishisation of decades gone. “I’ve never thought about it like that before,” Sivan muses. “It’s kind of scary. I hope I’m enjoying everything that is happening and not just trying to make it look vintage on Instagram.”

If he were to remain in Perth, he would feel “suffocated”, he says. “I have a little bit of a complex relationship with home where I’m really, really obsessed with it – it’s my paradise – but at the same time I know that I’m thankful to live the life that I live where I get to go home for two weeks and then leave again before I get sick of it.”

I hope I’m enjoying everything that is happening and not just trying to make it look vintage on Instagram

The intricate, whispery electronica of Blue Neighbourhood draws on Sivan’s love of hip-hop and pop, from Kanye West to Lily Allen. But he has actively resisted the temptation to blindly follow trending sounds, no easy feat for a young artist still growing into his skin. “About a week before we were about to master the album, I was in America and I heard the Weeknd on the radio so many times that I was like, ‘well shit I need to go back and scrap everything and we need to make trap music’,” he says. His management team suggested he “just calm down and wait a little while”. He did, and realised he didn’t need to sound like the Weeknd; he just needed to sound like Troye Sivan.

His glossy trilogy of music videos drenched in indigo tones, also called Blue Neighbourhood, tells the tale of two childhood friends and their budding teenage romance, ultimately torn apart by family dysfunction and repressed sexuality. Sivan says the project came about after watching the 2014 film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the mathematician Alan Turing, who “saved millions of people”, says Sivan, but who was persecuted for his sexuality, with fatal consequences.

“I left the cinema so frustrated and so distraught. I thought so much about all of the lives we’ve already lost and the potential we’ve already lost to LGBTIQ suicide and how much we’re still losing every single day and I just wanted to try doing something about it.”

Much has changed since Turing’s time, he says, noting the marriage equality laws passed in the US in June, but there remains a lot to be done. “I think it’s really narrow-minded to push it to the side and say ‘yup, it’s all sorted’.” Trans children still have “an astronomically higher suicide rate and homelessness rate” compared with the general populace, he says, and in many countries around the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people continue to face threats of physical violence.

Marriage equality in Australia is “inevitable”, Sivan says. “It’s going to happen and it’s just about making it happen as soon as possible. I have a couple of years to wait – I don’t plan on getting married anytime soon, but I feel for the 90-year-old lesbian couple that have been dating for the last 60 years – one of them wants to put a ring on the other one. It’s just really, really sad that it’s taking this long.”

I note that for all the advances made in increasing the visibility of the LGBTIQ people, it is still unusual to see queer romances in popular culture.



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“So, the main goal [of Blue Neighbourhood] was to speak about LGBTIQ suicide but then within the video there was a lot of little mini goals, one of them being putting a teenage gay relationship on TV or in music,” Sivan says. “Again, it wasn’t necessarily some big statement I was trying to make. I’m gay and I wrote the songs, so they’re about boys.”

Was he conscious of the history of LGBTIQ musicians who have omitted their sexuality from their music? “Growing up, I was super, super aware and conscious of LGBT people and how singers and actors dealt with it,” he says. “I saw a lot of covers of People magazine that said: ‘I’m gay’ and people having full-on photo shoots for it and I was like, ‘OK, that’s going to have to be me one day’, and it just seemed really, really terrifying to me.”

But Sivan’s budding musical and acting career was incubated in the YouTube fishbowl. As a teenager struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, the internet became “such an important resource” and the natural place to declare it. “Then I kind of realised that I’d bypassed that whole awkward ‘oh no, now I’m a singer and I have to come out’ thing – I came into the professional music industry as an out person.

“It’s always been really, really empowering and nice to write whatever I want to write and hopefully it will also inspire some other people.”