'I was always crazy, always wild - people used to call me Damien from The Omen'

He's the unofficial, in-your-face voice of a generation of disaffected youth — but his authenticity has been questioned. Dylan Jones meets Yungblud to dig a little deeper and discovers a genuine star

- Dylan Jones

I thought Yungblud was going to be exhausting. Having watched him in action on one of Louis Theroux’s programmes, I had half expected to meet Rik from The Young Ones or the weird brother from Wedding Crashers. After all, Yungblud is The Robbie Williams of Emo, the middle-class, Bowie-obsessed ex-public schoolboy masquerading as a victim of domestic abuse, the former stage school kid selling his own misery memoir in the form of grandiose Mika-style pop, a pan-sexual ADHD disciple spilling his guts for a generation of disenfranchised goths looking for a gobby, panstick spokesperson in black leather and fluorescent pink socks. Or so his critics might say.

But Yungblud — born Dominic Richard Harrison in 1997 — is none of these things. Well, he is a little, but not as much as his critics want him to be. He talks about his creation Yungblud in the third person, and acknowledges that he’s an alter ego, but the sentiments behind its creation appear to be real. Having grown up in Doncaster with two younger sisters and parents who ran a small chain of records shops (inherited from his grandfather, who was also a musician who occasionally played with Marc Bolan), his upbringing appears to be the thing that has caused him the most pain as well as the thing that’s given him the most sustenance.

His third album, titled Yungblud like his first EP, was released in 2022 and reached No1 in the UK. He's got new stuff coming out soon, stuff that’s more mature, but with a pop sensibility that’s going to make him an even bigger star. He has spoken a lot about suffering abuse as a child; at school and at home. He says it has defined him as a performer, and he has been criticised for exaggerating it. True?

“The cashflow problems in the business put a massive strain on my family. My parents had such a beautiful love, but it was toxic. There was physical abuse everywhere.” He had physical abuse?