Lee Ryan

 If the words Lee and Ryan don’t immediately bring to mind throbbing basslines, pulsating electro beats and synth riffs a-go-go you may need to adjust your expectations.  With new single ‘Secret Love’ the 27-year old singer has turned in a track so 2010 you could chuck a general election in the middle of it - and this is just the first of many surprises on an album that seems destined to re-establish Lee as one of British pop’s finest vocal talents.

The sounds may feel different, but the soulful tones at the beating heart of each track are instantly, reassuringly recognisable as those behind Blue’s 11 Top 10 singles and three Number One albums. Behind closed doors - doors which, to be fair, were not exactly being beaten down by people demanding a second Lee Ryan solo album - the singer has been crafting something rather special. Three years in the making, this album is the soundtrack to Lee’s growing up, as an artist and as an individual. Much of this new-found clear-headedness was achieved when Lee took himself off to LA for two years. “I was by myself,” he recalls. “Nobody knew me and there was no-one for me to call. I very quickly realised that there was more to life than the life I’d been living.”

In 2010 you’ll find Lee to be both different and, at the same time, comfortingly familiar, a combination brilliantly illustrated in the fact that he on one hand spent a lot of the last few years penning heartfelt and deeply personal poetry, eventually filling two notebooks with the stuff, then - in a classic Lee Ryan twist - managed to lose not one but both notebooks. All is not quite lost, though, as many of Lee’s more personal thoughts are brought to life now with music that’s by turns contemporary and classic, private and inclusive. 

Despite the varied musical styles of this album there’s a strong theme running through all Lee’s new music: it’s Lee Ryan being Lee Ryan for the first time. The record’s coming out thanks to a brand new contract with the newly relaunched Geffen Records, so it’s a fresh start in more ways than one, and Lee recalls that just before he signed his deal his label asked, as labels sometimes do, “who are you, as an artist?.” “It was the first time anyone had ever asked me that question,” says Lee. The answer? “Right now, I’m the journey I’ve made since I came out of Blue.” It does seem these days as if some singers can’t even go down the shops for a pint of milk without subsequently finding it necessary to recount their ‘emotional journey’ while a haunting piano ballad plays over a montage of tear jerking video moments. But, while journeys may be two a penny Lee’s positive that his own, has, he says, always had a destination. At a point when being an ex-popstar is a career in itself - as Lee can attest, there’s always an episode of Celebrity Come Dine With Me in need of contestants - Lee has found a clarity and a sense of purpose since identifying that his job is not simply being Lee Ryan. It’s making pop music.

Making pop music is, after all, something Lee has been doing all his adult life. At the age of 16 the Kent-raised teenager found himself enrolled in Blue and by 17 - in the summer of 2001 - he was on Top Of The Pops for the first time. The band achieved the platinum albums, played the sold-out arena tours and enjoyed the international success one expects from a boyband at the top of its game, and Lee indulged in the partying that came with it. Sometimes, as they look out over an arena of 15,000 fans, members of pop bands wonder to themselves how it could possibly ever end. Lee, perhaps more thoughtful an individual than the photographs of him mooning out of car windows once suggested, took the opposite view. “I wondered how it could possibly continue,” he remembers. “I thought any day now it would all be over, so I lived in the moment, and I lost my sense of reality.”

In the end Blue lasted five years. They split in 2005 and following the band’s split Lee could barely catch his breath before the solo album reared its head. Second time round, the team that worked with Blue didn’t work quite as well with Lee. “I said, ‘I want to do a soul album - Donnie Hathaway, Michael McDonald, Marvin Gaye’,” Lee remembers. “They sat me down, opened up Music Week, pointed at the chart and went, ‘indie, indie, rock, indie, indie: you’re doing a singer songwriter album, but you’re not writing it’.” The first single and album went Top 10, but things didn’t go exactly according to plan. “I actually asked the label to drop me,” Lee says. “Well, they were going to anyway but it’s better to get in there first isn’t it?” He laughs, and then suddenly stops. “I just didn’t understand why it didn’t work. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.”

Lee was discovering that the frustrating parts about life in a boyband, those rules you have to play by and those roles you have to play out, are immediately the things you miss when you’re on your own. While his mates had been at college or uni and had grown up, Lee was late in adjusting to adult life. Without a deal, he wrote 15 songs in two weeks - “an uptempo, crazy, rebellious scream” - then sacked off the lot, packed his stuff and moved to LA. “I was overweight, doing things I shouldn’t be doing, partying too much. There was nothing for me in the UK any more,” Lee says. He was, as he explains, “in a bit of a bad way”. “I thought, ‘if I’m gonna sort myself out, I’m gonna do it, and I’m gonna do it properly’.” So he did it, and he did it properly: he immersed himself in the Venice Beach lifestyle - he trained, got fit, went down the beach. Bought a dog, bought a piano.

It perhaps didn’t seem fortunate five years ago, but by 2008 Lee was grateful that Blue’s hopes of breaking America came to very little: Lee wasn’t famous. “Nobody was pointing or shouting some absurdity at my face,” he recalls. “I’d sit on the beach and play my guitar.” This went on for two years. He’d watch sunsets on the beach and get early nights. Lee stayed away from Hollywood, made some new friends, jogged in the mountains. He’d come back to the UK for the shows singers do when they’re not singing - he lasted three days on Hell’s Kitchen, and on the fourth day he was on a plane back to LA. As his guitar playing got better, he started songwriting more. And the more he wrote, the more he realised that for the first time he had something to say. “I never had anything to write about before, really,” he admits. “I hadn’t been though anything. I was a 16-year-old kid who got in a boyband and had a great time.”

Now we’re in 2010 those songs from the beach - and some others to boot - have been torn apart, stuck back together, bashed into shape and polished to perfection: they’re now an album, and it’s an album Lee’s been waiting to make since he first vocalled ‘All Rise’. There’s a maturity you’ll hear in epic ballad ‘Perfect Strangers’, with its smoky, atmospheric nods to George Michael, perfectly countered by ‘Confessions’, with its big hook of “baby sit down, I’ve got this confession”, and devastating payoff “I feel so ashamed, she’s more than a friend”. The latter was recorded with Stargate, the production outfit who were responsible for Blue’s signature tunes and who’ve since crafted hits for the likes of Beyonce and Ne-Yo, Beyonce, but are here reunited with Lee for this sparky electronic number. Later songs, meanwhile, were written when Lee’s girlfriend was pregnant: the upbeat, funky track ‘Black And Blue’ is from that period and captures some of the hopes and fears of parents-to-be: neither happy nor sad, Lee says, “just in-depth”. Then there’s the lead single; “Secret Love is about a relationship you can see going wrong and you are scared that the person will become a secret love, a person you adore but who you can no longer make a life with.”  The album also contains one cover: a defiant ballad titled ‘I Am Who I Am’, which Lee fell in love with the first time he heard it performed by Ben’s Brother. “I’m not precious about singing a song by someone else,” he explains. “I can relate to this one almost as much as the songs I wrote from scratch. As soon as I heard it, I knew it had to be on my album.”

Out of all the disorientation of the last five years Lee Ryan, a little bit older and wiser, has pulled off something incredibly special with this new album. On one level it’s a celebration of that remarkably simple pop formula: big tunes and exciting sounds. On another level it tells the story of the happy-go-lucky 16-year-old who loved singing and was swept up then dumped down five years later, and it tells the story of that individual finding his way in life. It’s the sound of someone growing into himself, and liking what he’s become.  As Lee says himself, “I grew up in Blue, but I became an adult when I left”. This is the sound of a transformation, and it sounds pretty great.

March 2010

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