Olly Murs

Doors 6.30pm

sold out

Show time 7.30pm. Reserved seats all ages.

Olly Murs will embark on a full UK & Ireland headline tour in April/May 2011. The singer, who went straight to number one with his debut single ‘Please Don’t Let Me Go’ earlier this year will play a series of 20 dates, including a show at London’s Hammersmith Apollo.

Hear the one about the Essex soulboy with the Mod moves and the too-tight trousers who wowed Saturday night telly in late 2009?

“I just want people to enjoy my music,” says Olly Murs. “I know the record industry can be very cut-throat and you’re over quickly. But I think what I’ve found is a bit of a summer sound. And a feelgood factor, really. That’s all I want. People to enjoy the music, have fun.”

You know, the quicksharp, telesales worker-turned-recruitment consultant who won a place on The X Factor at the third attempt (previous singing experience: some karaoke in his local boozer. Reason for learning the guitar: “getting birds’ phone numbers”)?

“My music is who I am – quite easygoing. I’m just here to have a good time. I don’t really take myself too seriously.”

Yeah, him, the Simon Cowell protégé who lost out in the final?

“I met some stars on The X Factor, but the ones I’ve seen from afar, sometimes they seem to take themselves way too seriously. It is actually about enjoying yourself. I’m just who I am. I want to enjoy it as much as I can.”

The punchline? That Olly, the 26-year-old runner-up on X-Factor ‘09, is about to release a self-written single with blaring-out-of-car-stereos hit written all over it. No joke. Get ready to be singing along to Please Don’t Let Me Go all summer long.



Olly Murs has had a mental few months. First off, The X Factor…

Actually, no, first off: life before The X Factor… Murs grew up in Essex. After college he worked in telesales. He’d grown up in a house surrounded by music – on the radio, from his dad’s extensive record collection, in the pub. But football was his first love. “All I ever did was go out with my mates, earn money, play football, that was all I did every week. I was living with my parents. Still live with them now. Typical male! I’d love to sit here and say I’ve been going years through performing arts school and stuff like that, but actually I don’t like to say it – it’s just not me.”

Then he did his cruciate ligament playing football and had to stop. Bored in the local pub one night, he jumped on the karaoke machine. Soon Olly Murs was a local hero, packing them in with his impressions of Presley and Sinatra, singing Motown and soul and funk covers. He and a mate formed a band: The Small Town Blaggers They’d do weddings, parties, anything. They played around Essex every weekend, a few hundred quid in their pocket.

He auditioned for The X Factor. Failed. Auditioned again. Failed. Fed up with his dayjob routine and newly single, using the money saved from his weekend gigs he went travelling round Australia. Then he decided to come back to the UK and give the auditions one more go. It was summer 2009 and he sang Stevie Wonder’s Superstition. He was in.

December 2009, he was out, albeit after having made it all the way to the final. After the last TV show in December, “I was doing loadsa PA’s,” Olly chirps in the easygoing geezer-ish banter that made him the discerning viewers’ choice on the last series of the talent show, “performing everywhere, travelling up and down the country. Then there was The X Factor tour…”

By the time that tour started in February, Olly already had interest from Epic Records. The label had enjoyed huge success with previous runners-up JLS and they wanted a talented artist they could work with, who could “get involved” in the songwriting process.

For Olly – who, beyond dancing and “being a performer”, loves music that means something quirky and personal to him (why else would he have sung a Jungle Book song at his first, failed audition for The X Factor?) – this was music to his ears.

“Epic could have gone to all these writers and gone: ‘right, Olly’s not gonna be in the session, but we want you all to write a song’. If they’d have done that, we’d have had a collection of 30, 40 tracks. that would have been rubbish. Well, they’d all have been good, but they wouldn’t have had my personality in them.”

In April he began writing with a host of collaborators, from Chris Difford (Squeeze) to Eg White and Trevor Horn. But an early favourite was song Olly wrote with Claude Kelly (Miley Cryus, Kelly Clarkson, Leona Lewis, Jennifer Hudson, Jason Derulo) and Steve Robson (Rascall Flatts, James Morrison, James Blunt, Take That). It was called Please Don’t Let Me Go, and it was a winning mix of Madness and Lily Allen, an “uplifting, reggae-feel” hit-in-waiting produced by Future Cut.

Meanwhile, something was nagging at Simon Cowell. Given his myriad other obligations, he’d been determined to only work with the winner of The X Factor. But when it came to it, he couldn’t let go of Olly, the intuitively gifted talent that he’d mentored on the show. He and his label Syco came on in a joint venture with Epic and signed him up.


One year after his successful X Factor audition, Olly Murs is up and running – on his terms, with his look (no stylist required), with his music. Nervous? Cagy? Not quite sure of his musical direction? Not a bit of it. Olly Murs, cool but excited, calm but raring to go, a natural born talent, has faith in his own abilities, and where they can take him.

Hear the one about the talent show alumni who turned into one of the brightest pop stars of 2010? You have now.