He started selling CDs of his angelic covers through a DIY website (the Dare To Dream EP, he recounts, cringing at the memory), sending his supportive but baffled mother, Laurelle, to the post office laden with packages. When, aged 13, he uploaded a video of himself singing fellow teen Declan Galbraith’s Tell Me Why (“do the dolphins cry?”) to YouTube, it got 1,000 views – an audience far bigger than he’d sung to as a young chorister touring synagogues. He was an early adopter of social networking. “I used to Google ‘how to be a singer’,” he says, rolling his eyes at his naivety. Sivan’s family had no music industry connections. But in person he exudes eerie calm, well versed in his own story and clear about the way he wants to tell it. On stage, Sivan is capable of suggestiveness and rapture that make you want to run on to the dancefloor. It sounds like an improbable level of focus for a child, but it seems to have paid off. So I saw it as practising to get better.” He was rehearsing for the moment when he could become a pop star himself. “I wanted to sing Hero by Enrique Iglesias – but I didn’t have the guts to ask if I could learn a pop song. He asked for singing lessons, but was taught choral music, which bored him. “Oh God, what if they mess up? What if they forget a lyric? I would imagine what it would be like.” “I used to get nervous for them,” Sivan says, wiping off his face paint after the photoshoot. He would watch videos of Madonna and Michael Jackson, in awe at the way they moved and commanded a crowd. But in 2002, Sivan was a seven-year-old boy living in Perth, western Australia, obsessed with his parents’ tapes of classic concerts.
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