Mirror, mirror. It’s the question every fairy tale gets wrong. The one the wicked queen asks isn’t really about being the fairest, it’s about being seen as the fairest. Peter Tsatsamis-Cooper has spent the last year writing a mixtape about a version of that question. Tsycophant came out in April, and is a record about wanting to be wanted, by the cooler group at the party, by the boy who doesn’t care, by the friends-of-friends whose approval shouldn’t matter and does.
It’s a Wednesday morning and Tsatsamis, who drops the Cooper on stage, answers the Zoom call from home, a few days after his first two tour dates and a week before he plays Village Underground. For someone who has just finished a mixtape, started a tour, and is mid-press cycle, the 26 year old is suspiciously calm.
Tsatsamis tells me he has the kind of anxious-perfectionist relationship to his work that turns the run-up to a show into a private hostage situation, and his pre-tour fix has been pragmatic, to keep someone, anyone, in the room. “I’ll try and have someone who’s with me, just to distract myself, because otherwise I’m just spiralling by myself.” After the highs of his Glasgow and Manchester shows, now he wants more stages, more blaring rooms with sweaty bodies jumping and many more nights of hearing his own lyrics come back at him from people he’s never met. “It’s the first time I’m actually like, wait, I’m really excited.” he says.
On paper, Tsatsamis’ new mixtape is his most confident. His 2023 EP Our Shame did what it said on the tin: a mostly mournful excavation of the baggage that comes with being a gay kid from a working-class Greek family who has a complicated relationship to his own desire. He says, “I had a lot that I wanted and needed to write about and once I’d written about those things, I thought what am I not hearing in queer music now?”
Tsycophant was meant to be the other half of the picture as the post-shame, fun project where he gets to be hot and silly and in the club. “I’m not ashamed to be gay or consciously ashamed to be gay. I want to highlight the fun parts of it too.” The title comes from a playful place. “Gays are bitchy and we love it. We love the gossip and it doesn’t always come from a horrible place. Sometimes there is this playfulness which kind of surrounds us, and I really wanted to infuse that into the music.”
In reality, the sycophant of the title is him, mostly. “I really wanted to write about my life having moved to East London,” he says, circling how the social scene can feel both liberating and volatile and inspiring all at the same time. What his brain kept coming back to was the people. “When you go on a night out and you’re faced with a group of people that you want to be friends with, it’s very high-school-y sometimes.” he says. “It makes me feel like I have to perform in a certain way. So much of my music always comes back to this idea of self-worth, and seeing myself through someone else’s eyes. I think it’s interesting to be a sycophant.”
The battle between self-love and criticism didn’t appear out of nowhere. Tsatsamis grew up in Buckinghamshire, and when he announced he wanted to be a musician, his parents took him seriously but made sure to ask about a backup plan. “My parents are very outside of any kind of creative industry. Growing up, my whole surroundings had no existence of what the creative industry was, which meant that it was always this fantasy. I went to uni and did history and then was doing music on the side, and the whole time I thought one day it’s just gonna happen. I’m just gonna upload a song and then I’ll get signed.” It didn’t, of course.Â
What did happen, eventually, was a sold-out show at the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. “My parents came down and they were like, oh fuck, it’s sold out and people are singing the lyrics.” The fantasy career had finally produced a room of strangers who knew the words. “They definitely get it now. But it’s still a hard career.”
He chose Sheffield University partly for the course and partly because nobody from his school was going. “I was really lonely in high school in hindsight,” he says, with the slight surprise of someone who has only recently let himself say so. “I didn’t have many people that I felt really comfortable with. I kind of closed myself off towards the end.” It wasn’t exactly the version of gay life television had promised him, the Queer as Folk and Skins version, with the friendship group and the city and the sense that your weekends and your life belonged to you.
“I didn’t really know any better. It was only when I left uni I was like, oh, that’s still not what being gay could be like, and this is what I’ve been missing. Being surrounded by people who you really click with, as opposed to the one person you happen to meet and then you’re like, oh, I wish everyone could be like you.” After moving to London, he took a trip to Barcelona and bumped into a stranger at Primavera Sound, on the walk between Dua Lipa and Charli XCX. “He was like, are you on the pilgrimage to Charli as well?” The stranger turned out to be Instagram mutuals with someone his boyfriend lived with, and by the time he got back to London he’d been absorbed into a friendship group that’s still full of love.”It just happened really seamlessly. It’s funny because that was the very specific point where we’d met this group that then became our best friends.”
The records on repeat for Tsatsamis are by George Michael, Pet Shop Boys and Soft Cell, all writers and producers from a period he wasn’t alive for. “The writing for me feels really expansive and complete,” he says. “I have always gravitated towards these songs which feel like these developed stories, even just technically like having a bridge. A lot of modern music doesn’t always have that.”
It’s the warmth of the production he wants, and the lyricism, and the room to actually go somewhere across three and a half minutes rather than the thirty seconds a song now has to earn its place on a feed. He’s interested in taking that scaffolding and dragging it into a modern production. Tsatsamis is also more willing to let songs mean things he didn’t intend them to. He won’t say which, but there’s a track on Tsycophant that he used to explain on stage until a friend told him she’d heard something completely different in it and that he should stop. In a crowd full of people, it’s the feeling that resonates, not always the specific story. “It’s given me a lot of confidence in writing. I don’t necessarily always have to pinpoint a feeling so specifically. I can just express a feeling or a moment and then people can take it on from there.” As we moved through our conversation, the post-shame framing of Tsycophant didn’t entirely hold and somewhere in the writing he realised the shame hadn’t gone, it had just relocated. The East London queer night is a place of fun and freedom, and also a soft caste system organised around hotness, coolness, and how recently you’ve been mentioned in someone else’s group chat. You can love it and still be exhausted by it. You can want to be there and feel yourself, but still be performing the whole time you are. “There is still loads of shame that I have, which is like deeper layers.”It’s like a struggle to reach there, and I’m visiting that place, but I’m never really getting there.”