At the start of the year, it was wet and miserable in Doncaster. Lucky old YUNGBLUD, though, hot-footed it to Australia and India for the winter to play his first gigs in months after a health blip, enjoy “feeling sexy”, and get papped on a yacht with ‘Little Dom’ out…
The YUNGBLUD obsessives are crowding at the barrier: jostling, screaming and reaching for the man himself, who’s standing mere feet away from them, looking every inch the rock star.
The energy between fans and their hero is palpable – the stuff that great gigs are made of. Except this isn’t even a gig. This is all happening at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport, where the man born Dominic Richard Harrison has just flown in for his first shows on Australian soil in three years.
It’s great to be back, not least because at the end of 2025, a year in which he’d played 60-odd shows, Dom had to cancel his remaining tour dates in response to doctor’s advice, having “run myself into the ground”. It wasn’t an easy decision, but like any difficult one Dom has to make, his fans were at the forefront of his thinking.
“I’m lucky that I’ve built this from a community rather than me having a hit record that blew up,” he explains, in fine fettle now. “I treat my fanbase like I would my family. If I had to increase ticket prices for [YUNGBLUD’s festival] Bludfest, I would talk to the fanbase about why I’m doing that – I wouldn’t hide behind my promoter or my manager and pretend it’s out of my control.
“At the end of last year, I had blood tests done and they had a look at my voice. My voice was fine, if a bit swollen [in the vocal cords], but I was really low in iron. So I took some time off because I’ve got a UK arena tour, American shows and festivals, and I’ve got to make the next album. If I get a nodule on my vocal cords then I’m going to need to take six months off, which everyone understood.”
Dom’s excitement to be here is also because he has a special affection for Australians, a people he considers “satire as fuck” and more “up for a laugh” than most.
“You can take the piss out of your Australian mate and he’s not going to get offended. In England and America at the minute, if you take the piss out of someone you might be fucking looking at the end of your career.”
Anyone expecting the 28-year-old to draw exclusively young followers is in for a surprise as well. A large number of this welcoming committee down under is made up of women a decade or two older than Dom. Some, quite literally, grab this opportunity with both hands, pulling him in close and whispering things into his ear that are spicy enough for him to later reflect he “didn’t know whether to be turned on or cry”.
This phenomenon, what some have dubbed ‘Mumbluds’, hasn’t escaped the attention of the local press, with one particular headline promising to explain how ‘rock’s Gen Z star’ has become ‘the darling of Gen X’, begging the question: what the hell happened when YUNGBLUD was last here in Oz? When did he become kibble for cougars?
“I haven’t got a fucking clue,” suggests Dom, his hands held up in the classic ‘not guilty, your honour’ pose. “Maybe it’s the fucking leather chaps.”
Leaving the horsing around for a second, he reckons it might be down to “a lot of cross-generational love for the last album [2025’s Idols].
“It’s about absorbing your influences, taking what you’ve learned from them and becoming something else,” he continues. “Take Mick Jagger: he took a little bit from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and a little bit from James Brown, to become the Mick Jagger we all know.
“That was very much the point of Idols, to take everything I’d learned to be who I am. So a little bit of [INXS frontman Michael] Hutchence, a little bit of Bowie, a little bit of Freddie Mercury and Jagger, a little bit of Johnny Rotten, and a little bit of Ozzy is in the mix when I go onstage. I think an older generation of fans, predominantly female, are going, ‘It feels like there’s something familiar here that I can’t quite put my finger on.’”
While this talk of a certain je ne sais quoi is all well and good, Dom doesn’t exactly leave much to the imagination when he goes out a few hours later and gets photographed completely Billy-bollocks on a yacht.
Despite thinking he’d shaken off the paparazzi mob on his tail by going far out on the water in Sydney Harbour, one particularly resourceful snapper managed to get himself a rubber dingy and a long lens, taking some pictures that ended up on a notorious tabloid gossip site.
“My girlfriend told me to be good, then rings me saying, ‘Your cock’s on TMZ,’” admits Dom with a bite of the lip. “As someone who’s been off the road for six weeks and riddled with ADHD, when the first opportunity to kick back presented itself, I did. Thankfully, my girlfriend found it funny – I found it hilarious!”
It’s not something you’d have been able to do in the dead of winter back in your native Doncaster, though, presumably?
“Nah, it’s too cold,” laughs Dom. “I’d look too small and shrivelled up. I like the Australian sunshine – it’s a bit more flattering.”
Thankfully, Dom is back to doing what he’s actually famous for a few days later, showcasing his heady mix of influences in front of 12,000 fans at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena (quite a jump in scale from his first show in the city at the Oxford Art Factory back in 2018). During My Only Angel, his collaboration with Aerosmith, his hips gyrate with the playful potency of both Mick Jagger and snake-hipped ’Smith frontman Steven Tyler, while the screams his flesh-baring display elicit are certainly reminiscent of the magnetism exhibited by the late, great Michael Hutchence, a legendary Aussie rocker and heartthrob who did a great deal to continue the popularity of wearing of leather trousers.
“I like feeling sexy,” Dom says unabashedly of his onstage attire and flamboyant physicality. “I like being provocative. I like shaking my arse, no matter if people have got a fucking problem with it. Because that’s fun, and that’s why rock music is fun again. I wanted to just bring a bit of fear back and a bit of fun back, and a bit of fucking hate back, and a bit of fucking love back.”
YUNGBLUD’s love for Black Sabbath has continued to be reinforced on these Aussie dates as well, with the inclusion in the setlist of his brilliant rendition of 1972 ballad Changes.
Back in July, YUNGBLUD’s version of the song at the metal legends’ Back To The Beginning show alongside Extreme/Rihanna guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello, keyboardist Adam Wakeman and Sleep Token drummer II became one of the most talked about moments from a day packed with them. A couple of weeks after YUNGBLUD leaves Aus, it wins a GRAMMY in the Best Rock Performance category, of course, though despite grabbing all those headlines, it’s arguably not YUNGBLUD’s best performance of the song – that comes in Brisbane.
The Riverstage is located on the bend of the Brisbane River and is a venue Dom has long dreamed of playing. On the day of YUNGBLUD’s first of two shows in the Queensland city, temperatures are roasting. Despite those conditions cooling down considerably by stagetime, the heat and humidity of the 9,500-capacity venue housed within lush botanical gardens, Dom suggests, is still akin to being “inside a giant mouth”.
Yet, when he begins singing Changes, the heavens open and rain hammers down. As guitarist Adam Warrington channels Sabbs’ six-string legend Tony Iommi, peeling off the song’s solo, a soaking Dom beams. He doesn’t necessarily believe in the divine. He follows the scientific principle that if energy can’t be destroyed, just as it can’t be created, it’s simply transferred.
Unlike scientists, though, Dom thinks this applies to our souls, too – the bits that make us who we are.
“The human body is a fucking little bit of meat that energy or spirit latches on to,” he explains. “But when we die, how can someone’s consciousness and personality just go? I think there’s something whizzing around.”
In short, he believes the downpour, which ended more or less when Changes reached its conclusion, was Ozzy, his late friend and mentor, dropping by.
“I thought, ‘Motherfucker! He’s come to see us for three minutes and then fucked off!’ To me, that performance [at Back To The Beginning] had an impact on the world. It connected me and him, so I believe Ozzy – whose body has left this world but whose spirit, legacy and the love omitted by his fans hasn’t gone away – provided some sort of kinetic energy that made those fucking clouds open for three minutes.”
A few weeks later, Dom enjoys some similarly spiritual experiences when he makes his first visit to India – Mumbai, to be precise – to take part in the country’s first instalment of Lollapalooza, the travelling musical roadshow originated in the 1990s by Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell.
If Dom thought the reception in Sydney was intense, that’s nothing compared to the 3,000 people greeting him as he touches down at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport.
“It’s fucking mad,” he shouts, gobsmacked, struggling to be heard over excitable screams. “I’d had all these ideas about getting up at 7am while I’m here to graft on the vibe, look around and try the food, but that could be tricky now.” He still finds a way to do all that, though.
What Dom encounters is a new way of looking at life. Mumbai is a city in which a significant portion of the population lives in slums, and where huge expansion means that more and more people receive inadequate access to basic services such as sanitation – though this level of need is paired with a markedly different belief system than he’s used to.
“What’s beautiful about India is there’s such a depth and emotion to their culture,” says Dom admiringly. “Us here [in the West], we all just expect water and food and clothes, but in India nothing is expected and everything is cherished.”
A different kind of appreciation is illustrated a couple of nights later, after Dom has enjoyed local cuisine and showed off his cricket skills, when he performs in front of 70,000 fans at Lollapalooza, on a bill also featuring the likes of Linkin Park, Playboi Carti, Bloodywood and Hot Milk. The city’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse is transformed into a giant playground of revelry, with Dom acting as rock’n’roll ringmaster. And while Ozzy doesn’t show up in the form of adverse weather, there are plenty of other memorable moments – particularly when a local lad, Soham, is brought up onstage and handed a guitar to help tear through a grandstanding version of Fleabag, as fireworks illuminate the sky.
“My brother,” says Dom of his temporary bandmate. “He did a fucking amazing job!”
If you’re a YUNGBLUD fan in the UK or Ireland and all this talk of your hero’s colourful live show is leaving you champing at the bit, he’ll be bringing Idols – The World Tour to these shores very soon for 11 sold-out arena shows. It’s a prospect our headliner is thrilled about, not least that he’s evolved so much as a live performer, inspired and emboldened by playing in front of so many new people and experiencing so many different cultures.
“I made a video announcing the next Bludfest and it includes footage of me performing Zombie from last year,” explains Dom. “When I saw it I thought, ‘Fuck me, I look young and I sound young.’ So much has happened in the space of a year, but this will be a homecoming – unleashing a show that’s so international on my own turf. Plus, I’ll be able to have a fucking Yorkshire Tea and a sausage on the morning of the shows, then get offstage and have pie and mash for dinner every night. I cannot fucking wait!”
We’ll get the kettle on.
This interview originally appeared in the spring 2026 print issue. Idols II is out now via Island Records/Locomotion. The UK leg of Idols – The World Tour begins in at the Utilita Arena in Sheffield on April 11.
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