Through the picture window of an executive box, destiny is calling Thom Rylance. “It’s not the Red Lion Pub, is it?” The Lottery Winners’ singer gasps, watching the first trickle of people swarm towards a small acoustic stage in the centre of Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium where, in roughly five hours’ time, his life is due to come full circle.
The first song he ever performed, Rylance explains, was on a school trip to the Low Bank Ground Activity Centre in the Lake District. There, this troubled, confused and unknowingly neurodivergent child sang Robbie Williams’s “Strong” for his classmates. “For the first time, everyone clapped,” he says, “and it really uploaded this thing into my brain, like, ‘That’s how you make people like you. This is what you’re gonna do’.” Now, aged 35, at The Lottery Winners’ first stadium show, Rylance has been personally invited to play an acoustic segment with Robbie during his headline set.
“I’m gonna be stood there,” he says, nodding at the small island stage, “but in my head I’m still that school kid who just wants everyone to clap.” A usually ebullient, friendly and forthright character, drenched in tattoos and resplendent in shaded Lennon glasses, his voice cracks and he pauses to collect himself. When he speaks again, it’s a half-whisper. “Mad.”
Rylance and his Leigh, Manchester, indie-pop bandmates – bassist Katie Lloyd, guitarist Rob Lally and drummer Joe Singleton – are worthy claimants of life’s EuroMillions. Having built an organic following over 15 years of pub gigs, they hit the Top 30 with 2020’s self-titled debut album and haven’t looked down since: in March, this most self-made of bands landed their second UK No 1 with fourth album KOKO. Their first, 2023’s Anxiety Replacement Therapy, was a real problem party. Styled as a self-help tape for life’s loners and strugglers, it dotted positive-thinking therapy interludes between songs, and laid bare Rylance’s crippling issues with anxiety and addiction in buoyant, cathartic bursts of arena rock, Manc rap and infectious alt-pop.
There were uplifting, life-affirming songs about Rylance’s antidepressant medication (“Sertraline”) and a letter of support that he wrote to his younger self (“Letter to Myself”). Highlight “Burning House” sounded like the famous gif dog sitting unperturbed in a flame-smothered kitchen had decided to have a Chumbawamba party. And of all of the record’s upbeat anguishes, one particular line of “Sertraline” stuck out: “My head is full of languages I cannot comprehend”. “It happens every day,” Rylance confesses, bold and open across the executive box table. “When I wake up, it’s the worst time. I’ve just got so many voices and thoughts, it’s like static on a TV.”
ART really was a new start for Rylance. Besides making him the chart-topping rock star of his childhood dreams, it was written as moments of self-realisation, relationship turmoil and “big time spiralling” saw him quit drinking and hit the gym: he’s now four years sober and six stone lighter. And a recent diagnosis of ADHD has altered his perspective on an entire lifetime.
“I didn’t really enjoy growing up,” he says. “I always knew I was different. It was always drilled into me that I was bad… because I couldn’t concentrate in lessons. I couldn’t do that. I was removed from my friends a lot and expelled from schools, and I just felt like a broken person.” To get his diagnosis on paper 30 years later was a weight off his shoulders. “It was a way for me to say, ‘alright, mate, actually, that wasn’t your fault. That whole thing wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t help it’. But at the same time, there was this whole mourning of the childhood that I should have had, that should have been better, because I should have been understood and helped in different ways of learning and different ways of being. So I felt angry. I was a bit pissed off that the grown-ups around me weren’t better when I was a kid.”
Though he’s forever thankful to the teacher who handed him a guitar and put him in the school band before he could play a note, Rylance otherwise speaks remorsefully about his school days; of being isolated from class daily due to his erratic behaviour. “It was like a cell, a little cube that you’d sit in. That’s the worst thing for someone with ADHD, to sit in this white room with nothing but a textbook all day. Every day felt like I was inevitably set up to fail.”
KOKO – an acronym for album motto “keep on keeping on” – was steeped in such childhood traumas. “Alien” concerned his sense of otherness when starting a new primary school after an expulsion: “It was literally on my birthday and I remember not telling anyone. It was the secret birthday that I didn’t tell anyone about.” And “Panic Attack” details the first anxiety episode he experienced in a school corridor aged 14, convinced by teachers that his life was over if he didn’t gain qualifications. His eyes widen as if transported back there. “It just hit me all of a sudden. I couldn’t breathe. I remember looking down at my shoes. I can still see the corridor with the chewing gum, everything, really vivid. I thought: ‘I’m gonna die’.”
With confirmation of his condition has also come empowerment. Rylance has been visiting schools to talk to children with ADHD. “If there’s kids who learn differently or struggle with mainstream education, it’s not the kids that have to change, it’s the environment,” he says. “[I’m] just saying, ‘Go and do the thing you’re really good at. Don’t worry if you’re not good at the other stuff. There’s going to be stuff that you are. Go and do that and you’ll do really well. Look at me. Look at my car’.” And KOKO opened with a neurodivergence song called “Superpower”. “Look,” Rylance says, waving through the window at the thousands of fans now pouring into the stadium. “Robbie’s got it, and look… If you’ve got ADHD and you can find that thing that makes you feel good – for me it’s music – you’re f***ing unstoppable, because you just won’t take no for an answer. You’re a f***ing steam train. That’s what Robbie’s like, and that’s why he’s playing stadiums. And I will one day, 100 per cent.”
Since Robbie’s people got in touch six months ago to request Rylance’s number, the pair have been FaceTiming “three or four times a week, for hours” and Rylance now considers him a mentor “The best thing [Robbie] said to me, I was really nervous about a show… and he went, ‘Yeah, but you know that, like me, you’re not the best singer, you might not be the best songwriter, you’re not the best performer, whatever. Your biggest talent is bravery. You’re s*** scared, but you’ll do it anyway’. And I was like, ‘S***, yeah’. I’ve been so scared at almost everything that we’ve done as a band, but done it anyway. And that’s the thing I’m most proud of. I’m brave.”
Williams joins a lengthy list of close celebrity muckers drawn to Rylance’s sheer personability. Lottery Winners’ albums have featured the likes of Boy George, Shaun Ryder, Nickelback and long-term cohort Frank Turner. They’ve also supported their teenage heroes like Morrissey (“I made him laugh!”) and Noel Gallagher, who presented Rylance with a guitar and still keeps in touch. “Everyone just seems to really like me,” he grins widely. “I’ll be in a charity shop in Wigan and I’ll get a FaceTime from Chad Kroeger out of Nickelback, and think ‘I’ve got a weird life’.”
Onstage, Rylance tightropes the rarely trodden line between unifying therapy rocker (“I am, essentially, Morrissey,” he jokes. “The new one. The better one. I am the better Morrissey. Fax him”) and an exuberant northern comic in search of his cheeky monkey. It’s this side that leaps forth when talking about his celebrity encounters. The video shoot for “Money”, for instance, where he provided crisps, Guinness and a box of Celebrations for “Shaun Ryder’s rider” and was presented, in exchange, two conkers. “It weren’t conker season. I’ve still got Shaun Ryder’s conker.”
I was just in my underpants one morning, got the wrong end of a stick, sent a tweet, and then it was in the NME, and then it spiralled bad
One star Rylance hasn’t won over, though, is Kate Nash who, aghast at the shameless parade of public-school privilege parading across this year’s Brits, he erroneously accused of attending a fee-paying school on Twitter. “That’s ADHD for you, innit?” he says, apologetically. “I was just in my underpants one morning, got the wrong end of a stick, sent a tweet, and then it was in the NME, and then it spiralled bad.” His point, though woefully misdirected (Nash attended the free Brit School, which is a whole other box of advantages), was fundamentally valid.
“I absolutely kicked out in the wrong direction,” he admits, “It shouldn’t have been at Kate Nash. She’s flying the flag, she’s doing the right thing and I’m with her. But it was,” he almost shouts it, “F***ING HARD to get here. Sixteen years, we made no money and we don’t have rich parents, we don’t have trust funds. We had to f***ing graft. Kate was cleaning toilets. I was working on a building site and working at Claire’s Accessories and writing CVs for people and playing in pubs three times a week, and still trying to make this, which seems impossible. But we did it, we’re here, and it was hard and a lot of sacrifice. A lot of people can’t do that. And I think working-class people have got stories to tell.”
He quotes noted social scholar Danny Dyer on a figure that only eight per cent of people in the creative arts came from working-class backgrounds. “That’s f***ing mad. I’m not mad at anybody who’s had a really privileged life. That’s f***ing great. I just think that there should be things for the people that haven’t, to help them as well. It just needs to be more of an even playing field.” He cites Radiohead and Inhaler as privately educated or well-connected bands he loves. “If I was Bono’s son, I’d be in Inhaler doing really well. I’m not mad at him for that. Go for it, lad. I like Inhaler. Lovely guy, great band, great songs, very handsome. Just because Bono’s his dad doesn’t make him instantly good at being in a band. He is that anyway. But I’m not having that it didn’t help … What about the recording engineers and the studio time? And what about just not really needing to go and get a job, and not worrying about, ‘if this doesn’t work, what the f*** am I gonna do?’ Because it doesn’t matter, does it? If it didn’t work for him, then fine, do something else.”
The Lottery Winners are soon to announce their own stadium headline show (“f*** it, you gotta try”), but as he glances out at the swelling crowds below, Thom is struck by pre-gig anxiety and considers the personal and musical struggles that brought him here. “It took a long time for me to love myself, but I do a bit now,” he says. “I think I’m pretty cool. I like being me for the first time ever, and I’m not ashamed of it.” And the kid he wrote “Letter to Myself” for, what would he think of Rylance singing it to a stadium of 60,000? “Every time I [perform] that letter, I go back to being that kid. I’m always going to be that kid. So it’s cool for him.” Something settles. “I think he likes me now.”
The Lottery Winners support Robbie Williams at Emirates Stadium on 6 & 7 June, then across the UK and Europe
Robbie Williams’s Britpop Tour veers from electrified showmanship to plain awful
Turnstile’s Brendan Yates on how his band reimagined hardcore punk
Shirley Manson: ‘Kneecap are being held more accountable than the Israeli government’
‘Whack fol lol le rah!’ Inside the roaring resurgence of Irish trad music
Adam Duritz: ‘Kurt Cobain’s death scared me – it taught me what could happen to me’
Bea and her Business: ‘I would go to record label meetings alone aged 16’
