Rex Orange County – Glastonbury Festival 2019 – broadcast live – June 30, 2019 – BBC Radio 6 Music
Rex Orange County, live at Glastonbury 2019 – recorded and broadcast live by BBC 6 Music on June 30, 2019.
Alexander James O’Connor, known professionally as Rex Orange County, is a British recording artist. He grew up in the village of Grayshott near Haslemere, Surrey. O’Connor has released one mixtape: Bcos U Will Never B Free (2015), and two studio albums: Apricot Princess (2017) and Pony (2019), as well as a live album titled Live at Radio City Music Hall (2020).
Here’s what Marcy Donelson at Tidal has to say:
Blending a way with words and elements of jazz, hip-hop, soul, and bedroom electronica into a sophisticated type of singer/songwriter fare, Rex Orange County is the performance alias of English musician Alex O’Connor. Raised in the village of Grayshott along the border of Hampshire and Surrey, O’Connor studied music at the BRIT School in London as a teenager. Gaining entrance on his main instrument, drums, he also sang and played guitar, and picked up piano and production software skills while working on his first album as a student there. With the “O.C.” derived from O’Connor, he used the Rex Orange County moniker to self-release bcos u will never be free for streaming as a 17-year-old in 2015.
As word of his distinctive style spread, he followed it up with songs like 2016’s “Uno” and early 2017’s “Best Friend” and “Sunflower” before releasing his second self-made LP, Apricot Princess, that April. Among his fans by that time was Tyler, the Creator, who featured Rex Orange County on two tracks from his Flower Boy album, released in July 2017. February 2019 saw the arrival of the bittersweet Valentine’s Day-themed single “New House.” ~ Marcy Donelson
On 4 September 2015, O’Connor self-released his debut album Bcos U Will Never B Free on SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Upon listening to the album, fellow English musician and producer Two Inch Punch made contact with O’Connor, providing him with a management team. The two have continued to collaborate throughout O’Connor’s career in the form of the tracks “UNO”, “Best Friend”, and “Untitled”. The album also caught the attention of American rapper Tyler, the Creator, who sent O’Connor an email describing his enjoyment of the project. This led to him flying O’Connor out the following year to L.A. to collaborate on his then-upcoming album Flower Boy,[10] with O’Connor co-writing and contributing vocals to the songs “Boredom” and “Foreword”. On 17 November 2016, O’Connor released the single “UNO”; a song Clash magazine described by writing, “The buoyant keyboard riff underpins a hypnotic half-spoken vocal, one that veers from topic to topic in a hazy burst of creative mania.”On 25 January 2017, O’Connor released the single “Best Friend” (premiering on Apple Music’s Beats 1 station), followed later in the year by the release of his second album Apricot Princess. O’Connor’s work has been compared to “other artsy, post-genre teen artists”.
O’Connor’s first release following the success of Apricot Princess and Flower Boy was on 11 October 2017 with the single “Loving Is Easy”, created in collaboration with the Dutch artist Benny Sings. On 16 April 2018, O’Connor performed the song in his television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. On 31 May 2018, O’Connor released a cover of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” in collaboration with Randy Newman, the creator of the song. He was also featured in Spotify’s Rise Program. On 9 October 2018, O’Connor was scheduled to appear on the French television program Quotidien, but refused to perform because it featured a sketch by comedian Alison Wheeler parodying the Ku Klux Klan, which he called “tasteless”. On 14 February 2019, O’Connor released the single “New House”. Later that year, on 12 September, O’Connor released “10/10”; the lead single from his third album Pony.[17] Released on 25 October 2019, Pony was O’Connor’s first major-label album release through RCA Records. NPR Music journalist Zoë Jones described O’Connor’s music as “a bright blend of hip-hop, jazz, and bedroom pop.”
On late 2020, O’Connor confirmed his fourth album, “Who Cares?”, will be released in 2021.
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