Alex Lloyd reveals secrets of his debut album ahead of 20 year anniversary tour
It’s been 20 years since Alex Lloyd launched his solo career. Now he’s celebrating his debut album with a new tour, and he’s revealed how it was loved by Princess Mary and Prince Frederik.
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Alex Lloyd didn’t know how to tell Prince Frederik and Princess Mary of Denmark the truth about Black The Sun.
The Australian singer and songwriter was introduced to the Danish royal couple ahead of his performance at the Australian Red Cross Gala Ball in their honour in Sydney in 2005.
When the lovers met during the Sydney Olympics five years before, Lloyd’s debut album Black The Sun had already established him as one of the biggest new artists to emerge at the turn of the millennium.
The album had peaked in the top 10, scored him two nominations and a win for Breakthrough Single of the Year for Lucky Star at the 1999 ARIA Awards and Triple J listeners voted it their record of the year.
His melancholic, sweet tones seduced the nation, and the Danish royals. There was always a dark undercurrent in Lloyd’s songwriting and had Prince Frederik and the future Princess Mary checked out the lyrics, they may have felt differently about Black The Sun.
“’Alex, we fell in love to that song’. That’s what the Prince told me,” Lloyd recalls.
“Black The Sun is a proper broken-heart song for me. It’s the full-on ‘I hope you are thinking of me when you are with someone else’s song.’”
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Like most debut albums, the songs on Black The Sun was entirely influenced by the emotional experience of his young life.
His parents’ divorce, his mother passing away when he was 17 and the end of his first serious relationship.
As he prepares to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that record with a national tour next month, the break-up songs have a poignant resonance.
He and his wife Amelia separated in the past year and are focused on co-parenting their three sons Jake, Isaac and Elvis and daughter Belle.
Lloyd admits he has struggled with the “hard adjustment” of life after a break-up but the tour is “giving me a new lease of life in a way”.
“The emotions of Black The Sun, they are relevant for me again. It was tough for a while but I just focus on doing the best thing for the kids,” he said.
Lloyd served an apprenticeship through his teenage years fronting blues rock bands on the Sydney pub scene before he started tinkering with electronic beats in a small home studio in Balmain in Sydney’s inner west.
Heavily influenced by the pioneering records of American singer songwriter Beck, he was determined to meld his blues and rock aesthetics with the hip hop production which was coming out of the US.
“I had just discovered technology and how to sample and incorporate beats into what I was doing,” he says.
“I got lucky, being able to experiment like that. In a way, I think Black The Sun fits in a bit more now than it did then, stylistically.”
The Black The Sun EP released in 1998 and its reception at Triple J got everyone excited at his record label and he was sent to America to finish his debut record with famed British producer Ed Buller who had helmed albums for Pulp and Suede and would also work with Australian chart stars Ben Lee and The Superjesus at that time.
While in Los Angeles working on the record, Lloyd was being courted by a couple of American talent scouts.
He was signed to EMI in Australia and the American arm of the multinational label had passed on releasing his music there. But they wouldn’t let anyone else have it even as influential stations such as KROQ and KCRW were spinning songs from the EP.
It was a frustrating time, butting heads occasionally with his producer over the direction of his debut album and stuck in an American label stalemate. So he did what any Australian rocker would do. He partied.
“A guy from Dreamworks who was interested in my music would be taking me to these Hollywood parties,” he says.
“I met Lisa-Marie Presley, she came up and said hello to me and was being really lovely and sweet … and I didn’t know who she was!
“At the time, at that party, I was having a bit of an anxiety attack, which I didn’t know at the time was an anxiety attack, so I kind of ignored her. I didn’t meant to.
“The Arquette sisters were there, Billy Corgan was dancing … it’s a good story now but at the time I was pretty overwhelmed.”
That sense of being overwhelmed, and his anxiety and depression, became tough to manage in the early years of his success, particularly when Amazing became the biggest song in Australia in 2001 and he was playing in front of thousands of people every night.
He self-medicated a lot and it took him a few years to address his mental health crisis.
“Looking back now, I wish I had been a bit calmer and taken it all a bit more in my stride,” he says.
“I probably drank a bit too much at certain times, self-medicating my anxiety but I didn’t know about it … people didn’t talk about anxiety and depression in the same way they do now so I wasn’t educated about it.
“And having a drink to fix your nerves, that was the culture.”
Preparing for the upcoming anniversary tour, which will also feature members of his original band from the Black The Sun days, prompted him to unearth the original recording files from his basement.
Listening back to his younger self made him proud.
“I had to find an old computer to read them which was a bit of a palaver,” he says, chuckling.
“But I tell you listening back, I was impressed with it. I like that guy, back then, he was kinda cool and I like what he had to say. And I probably enjoy this music more now than I did then.”
Tickets are now on sale for the Black The Sun 20th Anniversary tour via alexlloyd.com
Originally published as Alex Lloyd reveals secrets of his debut album ahead of 20 year anniversary tour
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