“When I was young, if I had an argument with my mum and dad, I couldn’t go to bed and I wouldn’t let them either, not until we hashed it out.” It took him a while to apply this confessional instinct to his music. Picking things over, pouring his heart out, is in Smith’s nature. “Can I lay by your side?” he begged on Lay Me Down, inserting the tiniest hesitation between the third and fourth words and in doing so capturing just what is most awful about unrequited love – the self-fulfilling expectation of rejection.
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Or, rather, a miserable non-affair, based as it was on the impossible feelings that Smith, who is gay, felt for a straight friend. On the best tracks of that record, Smith’s crazy-range vocal laid over piano and muted drum, a miserable affair was picked over. First on a delicate, plaintive single from 2013, Lay Me Down, later on his breakthrough ballad, Stay With Me, which went to No 1 in the UK and No 2 in the US, helping spur the wild sales of last May’s album, In the Lonely Hour. Smith has spent more than a year pouring his heart out. Already “shitting my pants” about the imminent performance, this billboard has a strange note of injunction, like an order left out for him specially. It’s an advert for a music-streaming service and beside Smith’s giant head (plump limps, striking eyebrows, Buzz Lightyear chin) there’s a tagline that reads: POUR YOUR HEART OUT. T he day before the day before: Smith arrives in New York and sees, right away, a billboard that replicates his own face at something like 100:1 scale. And you’re going to be invincible.”Īnd parts of that, he says, prove to be true.
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And you’re going to be performing all the time.
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Smith’s signature quiff languishing, his eyes bloodshot, the sleeves of an anorak pulled down schoolboy-style to the knuckle, he says: “You think you’re going to have loads of money. It’s in the penthouse that we meet the day after Madison Square Garden, to take in the view and the spectacle of his hangover, and to talk about Smith’s past 48 hours in New York, which seem to encapsulate all that is brilliant and ball-achey, all that is exciting and taxing in his sudden new life.
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Meanwhile, instead of compliments, a wealthy New Yorker gave the boy from Cambridgeshire the free use of a Manhattan penthouse whenever he passed through town. “Like butter,” Beyoncé has said of Smith’s splendid tenor and Blige put it no less prettily: his voice “covers you”. Pals made of Mary J Blige, Chaka Khan, Elton John – who recently invited Smith over for tea. More than 5m copies of a debut album sold, record-breaking first-week numbers clocked along the way and Smith the only musician of 2014, all told, to shift more than 1m units on both sides of the Atlantic. America broken (cracked over Smith’s navy-trousered knee). Awards from the off, including four Grammys.
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He is 22, unknown as recently as his 21st birthday, last night’s gig at America’s crown venue coming roughly three to five years ahead of even the most optimistic schedule, the cresting point of a steep, commercially atomic debut year. Did you think I was going to go to bed early?” When his dad stops by to deliver a mild paternal bollocking for the excesses of the night before, Smith says: “Dad! I’d just played Madison Square Garden. “I wouldn’t mind,” the PA keeps saying, calling around last night’s bars, “only it cost £3,000.” In her handbag she has quantities of hangover pills but Smith opts for a more immediate next-day remedy and picks out chicken McNuggets from a box of 50 that his managers are sharing. The pop star’s hotel room is “a state” (says Andrea, his PA) and the thick Burberry jacket that has been keeping him warm on this leg of his US tour is lost somewhere out in frozen New York. W hen they finally peel him out of bed it is almost three in the afternoon and Sam Smith, by his own reckoning, is still drunk.