Issue 104 / October 2019

on worrying whether I’ll be loved, by anyone. I shouldn’t, it’s
2019, isn’t it? But that captures the feeling I had growing up,
unsure if people would understand why I was doing it. I’m a
hopeless romantic. There’s always a dominant feeling of wanting
to be loved. That’s what the EP is about really, just summarising
those feelings and changes in myself. Being comfortable being
myself. Generally not caring so much.”
The more we talk, the more the ease and lack of worry seeps
in. You can sense there’s been a full acceptance of self in terms
of former anxieties. Everything else on the exterior is dealt with
in his musical confession. He’s clear on not wanting to overtly
draw the crossdressing into his music. It bears no explicit relation
to feel or its sonic character. It’s merely another form of release;
a second layer of skin. And with every song he arguably sheds a
new layer of himself as Alex, and adorns another as Strawberry
Guy. As unadorned entities, the wig and clothes choices don’t
arrange the glistening synths and sticky drums that you hear. “A
lot of the music is centred on escape. Escape from feelings. I think
there are a lot of internal things that were going on when I was
growing up. You know, I’d be going into a shop to buy a dress.
It was terrifying,” he explains, touching on how crossdressing
is a medium for comfort, not an overarching theme for him as
an artist. “Being a heterosexual guy who enjoys crossdressing
brings a lot of questions. It’s something that I’ve wanted to write
about, but not something I’m actively looking to make a part of
anything. I’d never want to get on stage in a dress. When I dress
up, it’s a form of escapism. And because it isn’t me, I don’t really
want to take that personality too close to the music.”
Where the inward comfort has in fact found a way into
the music is the efficiency. It seems easier than ever for Alex
to be able to write and compose. Freer in self-restriction and
confidence. “It’s something that I feel I have to do. It’s like a
compulsion, something I have to release from myself,” he says,
with his face lost in thought. “Sometimes I just have to run home
and start writing on the keyboard when I have an idea in my
head.” Even now, as he tells me this, there’s a twitchiness as
though the train of thought is dreaming up ideas to be worked on
in his bedroom studio.
It’s this very bedroom studio plays a huge part in his freedom,
his escape. The imaginary world abundant with an emotive
oxygen. As he says himself, “when you’re in a studio, time is
money,” and there’s undoubtedly added pressure when expected
to be creative on a restricted timescale. Why leave a realm
entirely of your own design? “In my room, I can record whenever
I want. I can just leave a song, come back to it in a month, maybe
two months, even a year.” The floral aspect of his music and its
iconography seeps in again; the timely flowering of the EP and
the growing impression of himself as something that should
now be celebrated internally. Time is of the essence, but not
in shortage. For Strawberry Guy, there’s no knowing when his
music is going to be. It’s growing, changing and feeling, chord by
chord, day by day. !
Words: Elliot Ryder / @elliot_ryder
Photography: Kate Davies / @k.dvi
soundcloud.com/strawberryguy
Strawberry Guy’s debut EP, Taking My Time To Be, is out on 27th
September via Melodic Records.
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