This interview with Mahmood is published in issue 22-23 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 4 June 2024 and you can listen to it from tomorrow as a podcast on all the main platforms.
Other people’s beds are uncomfortable and you always sleep badly. «I spent three days in Rome and I found the worst mattress of all: you lay down on it and found a hole in the middle. I have never been able to rest.”
Alexander Mahmoud, known to all as Mahmood, a bit like what happened in middle school, he arrives on the set of this report very late apologizing for having woken up at two in the afternoon. One imagines him wandering at night, from party to party and from bed to bed, as the title of his latest album clearly suggests, In other people’s beds, precisely. Instead you find yourself a very grown up teenager, a boy from the suburbs who has become an artist, writer and producer in the center of the city and of attention, who continues to stay up late at night but who has well stopped doing crazy things. We meet him while he is “smoothie”, in his words, between one concert and another, between Italian dates and international stages. He himself has a jet-lagged, almost sleepy look. But it’s a fiction: Alessandro is always attentive, vigilant at all times. He knows what he wants and controls every detail of what he says, wears, does and sings.
I’ll start with a banal but polite question: how are you?
«Good, but I feel like I’m in a blender. There are many things that keep me active, alert, awake. In fact I sleep very little.”
We noticed it. Look, in interviews you talk a lot about your mother, sometimes about your father, very little about his childhood. What kind of child was he?
«Imaginative and solitary. I had occupied the closet at home and created a city with a name, Podilandiafruit of the crasis between Pokémon And Digimon. I was an only child and I liked being alone.”
Was he good at school?
«Lately I found some diaries and I found myself rereading some notes from the teachers who said: “Alessandro is good and polite, but sometimes he is distracted and gets lost in the clouds”. Already as a child my head would go crazy and I would totally dissociate myself to lose myself in fantasies of my own.”
In many interviews he said, in his own words, that he was “a chubby kid who wasn’t cool at all”…
«Look, when I think about that little boy, now I actually see him as someone who didn’t care what other people thought. Maybe that little boy was freer and more confident than who I am today. I remember a pair of brown, almost gold-colored velvet trousers that I wore against my mother’s advice. I liked them, so everyone had to like them.”
