‘I had no plan. Just total scorched earth’: how Kiran Leonard survived teen success to make songs of full-body joy
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Kiran Leonard presses the tips of his fingers together and looks at me solemnly across the table. “I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job,” he says, “But I’m trying really, really hard not to swear.”A decade ago, he explains, he was interviewed by the Guardian, got too drunk, and “swore all the way through the interview”. When the piece came out, his grandfather was thrilled. “But he couldn’t show any of his friends because I just sounded really aggressive,” he tells me sheepishly. It’s true that, the last time Leonard had a profile in this paper, he sounded a lot like a twentysomething trying hard to shed the preciousness of his former status as a teenage wunderkind. Hailed as a prodigy at age 16, upon the release of baroque, bonkers 2012 debut Bowler Hat Soup, a lot of Leonard’s early press plays up his age in a way that now reads as embarrassingly trite. “I think, unconsciously, I was probably quite defensive about how I was written about,” he says.
This article is an excerpt. To read the full content, visit the original source. The Guardian Culture
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