Thom Rylance, the frontman of indie band The Lottery Winners, has experienced panic attacks since childhood. But he’d never had one on stage… until last month. “I’ve got this other, outgoing version of me that does the shows, and he just turns up every time,” the singer explains. “I don’t really know him, and I think he’s brilliant and quite handsome, but when we played Bournemouth, he just didn’t come.”
The panic manifested as “a tremendous sense of overwhelming dread,” he says, accompanied by sudden shortness of breath and a racing heartbeat. He isn’t sure how, but he survived the gig without anyone noticing. YouTube footage shows him goading people into singing Reef’s “Put Your Hands Up” and taking selfies with fans during the encore. In his head, though, it was a disaster.
“I came off stage and I was really apologetic. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I was awful. I couldn’t speak.’ And everyone was like, ‘What you talking about? It was absolutely fine.'”
The reaction wasn’t entirely unexpected. At the age of 35, Rylance has become adept at masking his anxiety. It’s a topic he addresses frequently (and movingly) on the band’s new album, KOKO, whose title is an acronym for “Keep on keeping on.” The singer learned the phrase from his grandmother, who used it to comfort him when he was excluded from school. “I didn’t want to be bad or naughty, but there was something in me [that meant] I couldn’t sit through the lessons,” he recalls. “I was expelled and taken away from all my friends, and it made me really sad – but my gran used to say, ‘Keep on keeping on, Thom,’ and it stuck with me.”
‘Where was my support?’
The singer was belatedly diagnosed with ADHD two years ago, and the sense of relief hit him like a tidal wave. “It was like a release of guilt,” he says. “Like, nothing I’ve ever done has ever been my fault! But it also came with a mourning period, where I was looking back and going, ‘Where was my support? I didn’t have to be a sad child.’ I literally remember a teacher saying, ‘If you don’t do well in your GCSEs then your life is over.’ That sent me spiralling because I was like, ‘I don’t want to be a junkie,’ you know?”
Rylance is speaking from Paris, where The Lottery Winners are wrapping up their latest tour. The band, completed by Robert Lally, Katie Lloyd, and Joe Singleton, have been working tirelessly since they formed in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 2008 – but success has been a slow grind. They signed their first record contract with Sire Records in 2016 after boss Seymour Stein (the man responsible for discovering Madonna) called them “the best band since The Smiths.” But when he left the label the following year, the group went with him, delaying their debut album by years. It finally arrived on British indie label Morning Sky in 2020, a week before the country went into lockdown, making promotion impossible. Even so, the band’s buoyant indie pop songs and engaging online presence (Rylance is one of the funniest and likeable musicians on social media) helped them build a dedicated fanbase. By 2023, that support was enough to send their third album, Anxiety Replacement Therapy, to number one, beating releases by The National and Jessie Ware.
For Rylance, who spent his childhood “feeling like an alien,” it was a huge deal. “It’s literally a trophy with a number one on it,” he laughs. “What bigger symbol of affirmation is there than that?”
