Backstage at last summer’s Glastonbury, as Elton John made his first appearance at the festival and played his last-ever gig in the UK, the singer Jacob Lusk was hard to miss. The American, who is broad and well over 6ft, often performs in a smoking jacket or a silk-lined cape, but on this occasion his suit was a retina-searing Barbie pink, with an orange stripe down the leg. “I wanted to do a traditional English look for Elton,” recalls Lusk. “So I was going to wear a morning suit. But then Elton’s stylist, Jo [Hambro], brought me these fabric swatches and said, ‘We should do orange with a pink stripe.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, girl, I’m not about to look like a pumpkin out here. A jack-o’-lantern! I’m too damn big to be in orange.’ And I said, ‘But... we could do pink!’”
As Lusk waited to go on, he watched Elton from a platform with Paul McCartney, Lizzo and some other famouses he didn’t know. “Oh, there was this racecar driver who’s like really famous? I don’t know if you know the guy…”
Lewis Hamilton? “Lewis Hamilton,” Lusk confirms. “So I walk up to Lewis Hamilton and he says, ‘Hi. I’m so excited for the show.’ And I was just like, ‘Okaaaay...’ And he had a grill in his mouth and I was like, ‘Are you a rapper?’”
Beforehand, there had been wild speculation over who Elton’s guests would be: Dua Lipa, McCartney, Dolly Parton and Britney Spears (seen at Bristol airport, apparently) were all rumoured to be joining him on stage. In the event, Elton saved the opening guest spot for Lusk, the 36-year-old lead singer of the Anglo-American trio Gabriels. Elton has been an admirer of the band since their first EP, Love and Hate in a Different Time, released in late 2020, which he described as “one of the most seminal records I’ve heard in the last 10 years”. At Glastonbury, Elton enlisted Lusk to add his soulful vocals to the 1979 track Are You Ready For Love.
“Oh, I know it was a big deal,” says Lusk now, on a video call from Los Angeles. “I was nervous as hell and the people was mad that I wasn’t Britney Spears: ‘Where’s Britney?’ I’m Britney, bitch!”
Lusk laughs. “And the moment went by this fast,” he goes on, clicking his fingers. “But I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is a very, very, very special moment. This is going to be something that we remember really for ever.’”
Elton’s evaluation that Lusk’s voice is “something else” will have been obvious to the 100,000 crowd at the Pyramid Stage that evening. But it had been starting to become a poorly kept secret anyway: Gabriels were nominated for International Group of the Year at both the 2023 and 2024 Brits. Lusk has a tingling ability to jump octaves when he sings, from sonorous baritone to an ethereal falsetto. When I first heard it, on the radio in the autumn of 2020 on the single Blame, I distinctly remember thinking that it must be an old-timer heritage artist that I had somehow missed before: like Nat King Cole and Nina Simone had a secret love child. I scribbled down the name “Gabriels” to look up later. Even that sounded like it should be a band from the 1950s.
The truth is more prosaic. Gabriels are named after St Gabriel’s Avenue in Sunderland, where Lusk’s band-mate Ryan Hope, a British producer, keyboard player and film-maker, grew up. The third member is Ari Balouzian, a classically trained American-Armenian composer from California. The unlikely threesome met in 2016 when Hope and Balouzian were scouting gospel singers in Los Angeles for a video series they were making for Prada. At the time, Lusk was directing his aunt’s church choir: he stunned the pair by being able to sing all the alto, tenor, baritone, mezzo-soprano and soprano parts they required. Hope and Balouzian hadn’t come to Lusk’s church with the plan to form a band, but they knew they were on to something.
“So Ryan invited me out to his house for a week,” says Lusk, who, it’s fair to say, is the most extrovert of the trio. “He’s a real beefy guy with all these tattoos and he lives in Palm Desert, which is a party area. Coachella happens there. They have this sex party yearly there.
“So this big old white man want me to come to Palm Desert,” Lusk continues, eyes wide. “And I’m like... ‘Stay at your house for a week? A) I’m freaking out. B) I have no desire to be a sex slave for anybody. C) What the fuck is this white dude going to do to me?’ Even though Ari’s technically Armenian, he looks like a white man. So I was like, ‘I’m not going to stay at this house with these white men for no week, uh-huh. They ain’t gonna have me chained up, so they can put foreign objects up my butt.’”
Lusk shakes his head: “Uh-huh, not me.”
Thankfully, he changed his mind, no foreign objects were introduced, and the three men set about getting to know each other. Lusk’s path to this point, in particular, had been a tortuous, eventful one. He was born and raised in Compton, Los Angeles and his father had a keen interest in music. “He had a home studio, which in the 1990s was just unheard of,” says Lusk. “He had thousands of dollars of equipment, and my dumbass should have been in there singing, but I didn’t want to sing: ‘I don’t want to sample nothing. Leave me alone!’ I missed out on that opportunity. I could have been Usher or something.”
Out of nowhere, Lusk’s father died when he was 12. “He didn’t get shot or anything like that,” he says; it was a medical complication that Lusk still doesn’t fully understand. But it left him, he thinks, with something of a morbid fascination. “I understood then that people die,” says Lusk. “This is just life. People die. And so I did an unhealthy thing: I killed off everybody in my life. I was like, ‘Oh, my mother and grandmother, they’re gonna die together, because they’re always together. So just prepare yourself.’”
When we speak, Lusk is grieving for his grandmother, who died in December aged 80. (For Gabriels fans, her photograph was on the cover of the Love and Hate in a Different Time EP.) His response this time has been to bleach his hair blond. “I always wanted to do it,” says Lusk. “And losing someone who’s really, really close to you makes you think, ‘I don’t have time to waste. I don’t have time to fuck about.’”
Though Lusk sang in church growing up, he never felt he had a special talent: his gospel choir was full of sensational vocalists and musicians; Kendrick Lamar went to the same high school. But, in his early 20s, while working as a spa concierge, Lusk applied to be on American Idol, at that time the most popular show on US television. He was selected for the 2011 season and eventually placed fifth, but was given a torrid ride not so much from the judges (who included Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler) but on social media, then in its infancy.
“It wasn’t all bad, to be very clear,” says Lusk. “It was very different than the reality shows now. I feel really sorry for these kids now. They’re just like cattle. And they treated us like cattle, but we were prize cattle. We were the corn-fed chicken. They didn’t force-feed us with a tube. We got to walk around the pasture a little bit.”
Part of the reason Lusk reflects more positively on the Idol experience is that people, often from the LGBTQ+ community, tell him now that he was an inspiration. “One of our background singers is trans,” says Lusk, “and she was like, ‘Jacob, you don’t understand. You were one of the first queer people we saw on a television show like that.’ And even though I wasn’t out, I was pretty, pretty flaming. I was also classy, I wore suits. I wasn’t a clown, and I could sing well.”
When they met to form Gabriels, Hope and Balouzian had no idea of Lusk’s American Idol history. And that’s not a surprise as there were some wilderness years in between. Lusk sang backing vocals for Diana Ross and Beck, but became disillusioned with the music industry. “I was homeless after Idol,” says Lusk. “I stayed in a Motel Six for a couple months: shout out to my manager, Jimmy Austin, who paid my rent and took care of me for a while. I had some like really low lows, like, looooow lows, like low. Like unemployment, getting food stamps.”
When Gabriels started coming together, Lusk was working for a sports sunglasses brand called Goodr, which he loved. “This is how crazy this job was,” says Lusk. “The CEO was Carl the Flamingo, it’s a whole thing. Google it – it was wild. I was hired as a squirrel and then I was a parrot and then I was given the title The Sheriff. They take shots at work, there’s a shot o’clock. My manager told me, ‘I want you to quit this job and burst into diamonds!’ That’s literally what she told me.”
And when Gabriels started happening that’s exactly what Lusk did. “It’s very rare that people get the first chance I got,” says Lusk, of his American Idol experience. “It’s even more rare that you get another chance. I’m a chubby black boy who likes boys. Like, you don’t get another chance. So when I say I’m giving everything, I’m giving everything. Evv-ryy-thing!”
You may have worked out by now that Lusk doesn’t have much of a filter. That same honesty has found its way into his lyrics for Gabriels who, after a couple of EPs, released the full-length album Angels & Queens in two instalments: a seven-track part one in 2022 and six additional songs last year. Recurring themes are love and heartbreak, faith and grief. Lusk’s vocals – sometimes whispered, other times belted out – are swept along by Balouzian and Hope’s dramatic production, full of horns, percussion and string arrangements, that often soar to ecstatic finales.
“I am all parts of myself in Gabriels,” says Lusk. “It gave me the space to be whatever I wanted to be. I don’t like the word gay, but I’m a non-traditional romantic person, whatever. I’m clearly not straight, I’ll say that. So I got to do that. And I got to be a church boy, too, because I do churchy stuff during the show. And I got just a little R&B in there. I got to be all of me. When you get to show up as who you authentically are, at all times, the music is going to be personal.”
On stage, Lusk assumes a more extreme persona of his hardly reticent self. Fed up with being called “Baby Luther” – a reference to the soul singer Vandross – when he first came on the scene he decided with Gabriels that he would categorically be the one and only Jacob Lusk. Hence the swirling capes and hats that wouldn’t look out of place at Ascot. “I’ve spent thousands of dollars of my own money on costuming and outfits,” he says. When he performs, he leaves it all out there. “I’m a firecracker sometimes, which I was not before. I’m bouncing across the stage and galloping and I was not that before. It’s a little ridiculous.”
Some of that performative flamboyance has been inspired by Harry Styles, whom Gabriels supported on his US tour in 2022. “We’re friends now, but we weren’t friends then,” says Lusk. “So for me that tour was about learning. This man is selling out arenas and doing 15 nights at Madison Square Garden, right? So it was seeing how he works an audience and how his shows are put together.”
Next for Lusk, personally, could be a move to the UK this year: he dreams of Hampstead, but reality and London house prices suggest elsewhere. He’s not currently in a relationship, but thinks life in a new city might suit him. “I’m single as a bird,” he says. “Single, single, really, really single, single single single. But that might change. When Gabriels first came to London in 2021, I remember feeling that I didn’t have all the people looking over my shoulder and the church and everything. I started to realise what was important to me: I want to have a family; I want to get married; I want to have kids. I want to… I want to be happy.”
As for Gabriels, there will be new music at some point, but before that Lusk will add guest vocals to a couple of tracks this year and he hints there might be solo material, too. “You got to understand, Ari and Ryan did not have desires to be in a boy band or be famous,” says Lusk. But this is not an end for the band? “Gabriels will still be there. I’m not leaving Gabriels. No, absolutely.”
Before that, Lusk is set to sing at Elton John’s Oscars party this evening. As patrons go, Lusk knows he has landed on his feet. “It almost feels like a spiritual thing... Elton’s not passing the baton to me,” he says. “It’s more like he has this divine cloak that he wears and he’s given me a piece of the hem of his garment to hold on to. And I know that’s sacrilegious to say, but it feels like that.”
Gabriels’ debut album, “Angels & Queens”, is out now
