Chart star Joel Corry: 'I’m pretty isolated. I have one good friend'

After years of slogging through DJ sets, bodybuilding and reality TV, the London producer had one of 2020's biggest and best pop hits. But his brutal work ethic is a gift and a curse'

Amid the draining gloom of pandemic life, Joel Corry has been a soothing constant: if you have turned on the radio at any time in the past year, there is a huge chance that one of the British pop-house producer's three big singles will have been playing. Sorry, Lonely and Head & Heart (the latter a six-week chart topper) have collectively earned more than a billion streams and made Corry into one of the UK's biggest new pop stars, a Calvin Harris type who has guest vocalists out front while he prods equipment and points gunfingers skyward. Sorry got a boost from being used on Love Island in 2018, and his music is rather like the Love Island of pop: buoyant, cheesy, suffused with romantic drama and sparkling sunlight. But when talking to him in his hotel room, clouds gather.

Corry could actually be a Love Island contestant: he has the good looks and earnest kindly nature of a 90s boyband heartthrob, as well as the abdominals, which look not so much chiselled as 3D-printed following a successful earlier career as a bodybuilder. In fact, he has reality TV pedigree as a rare southern interloper amid the cast of MTV's lairy Geordie Shore; he was the boyfriend of the show's charismatic bad-influencer Sophie Kasaei, with whom he had a six-year relationship until 2017.