From Essex wedding singer to the face of British pop, it’s been a wild ride for Sam Ryder. He talks about the hard graft behind his meteoric rise
Did Sam Ryder have any idea, when he got ready for his Eurovision performance, that he might be about to reverse the nation’s doldrums, the super-low scores that have dogged us for this entire century? Did he have a clue that he might come second?
“I had inklings,” Ryder says, sitting in Langham’s, a fancy hotel in central London, where he and his girlfriend, Lois Gaskin-Barber, have been holed up since they came back from Turin on Sunday. “It seemed like it was from the universe.” The 32-year-old, with a hat-trick of Jesus-like qualities (long hair, beard, good at carpentry), leans forward to paint the scene: “I was backstage, with clips in my hair, I looked like a little terrier. The atmosphere is like a school play, times a million. Everyone’s getting ready, fixing loose stitches, putting pearls back on with a glue gun, rollers in their hair, flapping.” When he stepped on stage to perform Space Man, an anthemic, Queen-tinged riot of a song, he had just been awarded Eurovision’s Press award for best song of the year. “The UK has never won that. So that gave me a real boost, a lot of adrenaline.”
