Zayn Malik’s anticipated solo debut album will arrive in March, the singer has confirmed in his new interview with The Sunday Times’ Culture Magazine.
In the interview, Malik’s first since he graced FADER back in November, the singer describes that the new record will “let people know what’s really going on”, adding “I don’t want to make it black and white for people. I just want it to be creative, still, and artistic. Know what I mean?”.
Earlier today, Malik also confirmed the album’s lead single Pillowtalk with an imminent release for Friday 29th January. Meanwhile, on an album-front, it’s widely-known that the former boybander has worked with James Ryan Ho (aka Malay, aka producer of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange) on the new project.
You can read the entire transcript of the interview below; meanwhile UK fans will be able to see Zayn tell all when he returns as a soloist to The Graham Norton Show this coming Friday (29th January).
Zayn Malik: Sunday Times Culture transcript
The first glimpse I get of Zayn Malik is of his hair: the tips of his big, badger-streaked hairdo, a glorious crescendo of peroxide and hairspray. We are in a draughty studio in south Los Angeles, with Malik downstairs doing a photoshoot and me upstairs in a glass-cased mezzanine, waiting to meet him. Like millions of teen girls before me, I crane my neck to see something of Zayn, the first member of One Direction to go rogue. But a sea of “creatives” crowd around him, and I have to keep peering, the blonde tips bobbing up and down.
Eventually, bits of face appear, then, finally, I get the full Malik: black jeans, black boots and topless, his chest and arms covered in tattoos. First he strums a guitar (bless), then he smokes something rather joint-like. None of this is shocking for a 21st-century pop star; it’s almost de rigueur. Certainly, none of it stopped Zayn and his fellow band members from becoming the boyband of the decade, catapulted to fame after being put together by Simon Cowell during the 2010 season of The X Factor. What is most surprising is that, as the camera hammers away, Malik cracks a huge smile. When he comes up to talk, I mention this. He nods. “Sometimes it may come across like I’m not enjoying it. I think that’s just my attitude. I’m just laid-back, a bit chilled. But I’m always enjoying myself, I promise.”
Ever since we saw Malik as a shy 17-year-old on ITV, nearly bolting from the X Factor auditions because he didn’t like the dancing, he has never seemed quite like he’s enjoying himself. But that hasn’t been entirely unhelpful: of all the 1D members, it’s Malik who has had the most mystique, the most alluring nonchalance. This is admittedly relative: One Direction were a triumph of marketing rather than songwriting, heading up every bit of merchandise going. Yet Malik always seemed a little different: “the most handsome”, “the most silent”, “the most troubled” and, surest of all, the most talented, blessed with a soulful croon that 1D obviously missed once he quit last March. (The band announced a “two-year hiatus” later in the year.) Malik, of British and Pakistani heritage, was also the band’s only person of colour and its only Muslim. Inevitably, on the ever-rolling conveyor belt of boyband types, he stands out. He likes this, mostly.
Now he has just turned 23, and things have changed. He is happier, freer, he says, able to express himself creatively. Because, as tradition allows, Zayn is going solo; he is blessing us with what he described in a tweet as “#realmusic”. Although one or two details have stayed the same. “I’m not a dancer at all,” he admits in what remains a marked Bradford accent, his As resolutely short and flat. Not even socially? “Yeah, I move a bit. I’ve grown up a bit as well. I’ve learnt a few moves over the years, in the clubs. But I’m not yer dancer, that’s not me.”
X Factor audition
He left One Direction because he was bored, he says, and he didn’t like the product. The band represented two distinct phases for him: getting to grips with the madness of it all, then unlocking himself from the band’s grip. This past year has been a much better one for him after being “worked and worked”, and the new music — written mostly by him — reflects this. It’s good, actually, surprisingly good, a savvy mix of pop and “dirty R&B”, as he puts it, your tween star’s classic bid for emancipation. On his album, due in March, he says he will “let people know what’s really going on”. Then again: “I don’t want to make it black and white for people. I just want it to be creative, still, and artistic. Know what I mean?”If Malik was once the “quiet one” in 1D, he now seems a lot more expansive, within the confines of a classic Yorkshire gruffness; a normal 23-year-old lad, but equipped with a leather and suede jacket, that huge blond quiff and 17.2m followers on Twitter. He is polite, but alternately chatty, giggly, surly and cocky; languid, but full of a certain beady-eyed energy. (“I’m always on my feet, I wanna do summat!”) Mercurial, basically. He is also managing well, considering that his grandmother died only a few days before, after a long illness. (“It’s cool, it’s life.”) It’s his face that’s most expressive, serving up a series of eye rolls, eyebrow raises and smirks that say a lot more than anything he could mutter.
On Cowell, for instance, can you clarify: did he broker your new solo deal? A big, bemused face. “I can’t clarify anything. I don’t know.” But you’re in contact? More face, more smirk, more swivel on his swivelling chair. I don’t get this, I say. “I don’t get it, either. You can say that. I don’t know what happened.” He’s actually kind of enjoying himself.
If pop were a science, Malik would be the most certain of the 1D boys to be a solo star: best face, best voice, best smoky eye to camera. But pop is an art, unpredictable and not entirely fair, and he has competition, notably from Harry Styles, who exerts similar levels of charisma and tabloid fascination. Certainly, the heat is on. Recently, Malik revealed that he wasn’t speaking to his ex-bandmates. Has anything changed since then? “I got an email,” he says. Who from? “I don’t even wanna say names.” He then shrugs, says he’s “not that fussed”. He also says he hopes they’re all friends: “I have no beef.” But he would say that.
You really should all make up, I say, because you need to be on good terms for that inevitable reunion in 2025. He giggles at this: “Who knows?” Come on, Zayn, all bands reunite these days. “I don’t know. If the time was right and that was the thing to do, then I would make that decision when it came around.”
At any rate, it was a canny decision to be the first to leave, right? He laughs again. “I guess so, yeah! But I didn’t really think of it like that. By that point, I just knew that I wanted to go. I was fed up. I didn’t wanna do that any more.”
I ask Malik if he looked at the examples of previous boyband members who went solo: Robbie Williams, say, or Justin Timberlake. He pulls another scrunched face when I mention Williams’s music (eurgh!), pointing out that that really wasn’t his era. It’s sobering to realise he was only two when Robbie left Take That. Anyway, he says: “It’s not like I read a book on How to Leave a Boyband and Be Successful.” Well, no. But wouldn’t that be a fun book? “Yeah, it would be a great book. I’ll write it one day, if I do well.”
The R&B Malik has made is both entirely expected and a slight risk: most pop stars make their millions by churning out generic EDM tunes. Malik doesn’t like that, though. He’s not into “raver music”, he frowns, sounding a bit Alan Bennett. Neither was he ever much into One Direction’s jolly, jangling, aseptic guitar-pop, written from the waist up. The solo stuff is somewhat different. On his first single, which is imminent (the details are still a closely guarded secret), he croons about something “so pure, so dirty and raw”. “I think I’m pretty black and white what it’s about,” he says with a little grin. “Everybody has sex, and it’s something people wanna hear about. It’s part of everybody’s life, a very BIG part of life! And you don’t wanna sweep it under the carpet. It has to be talked about.”
Malik’s father, Yaser, played a vigorous diet of R&B and soul as Zayn grew up in the home they shared with his mother, Tricia, and three sisters in Bradford. Throughout our chat, Yaser recurs as an influence; there will apparently even be a track on the album written from his father’s perspective. Yaser is a personal trainer, “pretty built”, emphatic about the need for a good education and generally “pretty cool”, his son says. And there is, of course, the fact that the Maliks are an observant Muslim household. Not everyone might expect them to have R Kelly booming out from the speakers. Was there ever any culture clash? “No, not at all. He doesn’t ever really make the two linked. He’s like, music is music. My dad’s open-minded in that sense. He’s very modern.” And you share his views? “Exactly. Yeah.”
As his solo campaign has progressed, Malik has become eager to resist a certain pigeonholing. And who can blame him? Only a few months ago, The Huffington Post had to apologise to him for captioning a story about Isis with his photo. Does he feel he is perceived as different from his peers? He has no way of knowing, he insists. “For me, I’m just, like, whatevs. I don’t know if it’s extra scrutiny,” he says carefully. “It’s just my scrutiny, and that’s cool.”
He seems “cool” with most things; most conflicts are brushed off with the same determined shrug. He says this attitude is inborn, but it was surely acquired as well. He shows the same steely nonchalance about being a mixed-race kid from Bradford — intriguing if you know that city’s troubled history. Were there many others like you?
“For my generation, I was rare. There weren’t a lot of mixed-race kids. They didn’t really know what I was, if I was white or brown. They were confused. In my sister’s generation — she’s 12 or 13 — it’s a lot more common. But yeah, it was unheard of when I was growing up, so that was pretty weird.” Weird? “Yeah. Just a bit weird.” So you were fine with it? “Yeah, I’m cool, that’s other people’s problems. I never really had an issue with who I was. From a young age, I knew what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go and what I wanted to be. And that’s always been in me. I don’t really care about other people’s thoughts.” He knew what he wanted to do. Does he mean pop? “No. I just knew I wanted to do something that was outside of Bradford. I knew I was gonna go somewhere.”
Malik’s original plan was to study English at university, until he quit halfway through sixth form to join One Direction. Today, he says he’d still like to do it. That sounds lovely, but I say I’m not sure how he could manage it. “You know what, to educate yourself isn’t that hard these days. You can do it at home,” he says brightly. “You can go to lectures — just sit there, which hopefully, at some point, I can do — like, just sit and listen to a lecture.”
He begins to sound quite passionate, saying it would be “something that is only, solely for me, you know what I mean? And when my kids ask me, in the future, and I try to tell them to go to school, they can’t turn around and say to me, ‘F*** off, Dad, you were in a band!’ I can turn around and say, ‘Excuse me, I went back to school and got my degree. So you definitely have to do your schoolwork!’”
You wonder how long it will be before he could sit quietly in a lecture: 15 years, 20? Back at his London home, fans photograph his garden over the wall; they buzz his doorbell at 2, 3, 4 in the morning, hoping he’ll answer. He has just moved out of that house, he says, for that reason. Then there are the other types of scrutiny. Take his tendency to nab celebrity girlfriends: first it was Perrie, from the girlband Little Mix, and now it’s the nascent supermodel Gigi Hadid.You said you wanted a normal life, but you could try harder at being low-key, couldn’t you? He giggles a little at this, and says he was discussing it with someone only a few days ago. First, he says, it’s great to be able to skip the “explanation phase”; somebody who doesn’t know what fame is will find it terrifying, “it will confuse the f*** out of them”. Second, “there’s no real trust issues in a sense — like, ‘Is this person gonna record me while I’m taking a piss?’” (Charming, but sadly feasible.) And there’s also the fact that, well, if you could, you would.
“It’s just life. The situations that I’m in grant me to be around them sort of people, you know what I mean? And luckily, you get to have a conversation with them sort of people. Because…” — his eyes light up — “there’s a lot of fit celebrity birds!” He gives another laugh, but this time it’s a distinct one: the embarrassed laugh of a 23-year-old lad from Bradford, but a 23-year-old who is a pop megastar, who lives on planes, tweets to millions and dates supermodels. Of course he’s finally laughing. What if he got used to it?
