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'I felt like I just started my career again': British Elvis revivalist finds his voice in China_我的网站

冰与火之歌

一 | 据外媒报道，1月15日，亚马逊创始人杰夫·贝索斯离婚，小说家麦肯齐·贝索斯被公之于众。

Elliot James Reay sings on stage at a Chinese live show. Photo: Courtesy of UMG
Elliot James Reay could have copied every other Western act and sung a Taylor Swift cover. Instead, he took 1950s rock'n'roll to a live TV show where autotune is switched off and discovered a version of fame that Britain has forgotten.
Elliot James Reay was traveling in the US, trying to finish a song, when his manager called. There was an invitation to join Singer 2026, a prime-time live music show in China. Reay didn't hesitate. He had traveled the world before he was a full-time musician, but had run out of money before reaching China. "I went everywhere but China," he said while sitting for an interview with the Global Times, sitting in the office of his label in Beijing, from which the Palace Museum can be seen not far away.
Reay is, in the West, a very 2020s kind of artist. He began posting short covers on short video platform TikTok in 2019; during the UK Covid lockdown, he chose to focus on growing his fan base. He now has millions of followers across platforms, and his debut single notched 10 million views before it was even released. In the British industry, this is both a leg-up and a trap. "You can have all the followers," he says, "but they don't guarantee people will buy tickets."
In China, that equation flipped.
Elliot James Reay sings on stage at a Chinese live show. Photo: Courtesy of UMG

Elliot James Reay sings on stage Photo: Courtesy of UMG
Nervous again
The Chinese show, Singer 2026 is broadcast completely live, with no pitch correction. For Reay, who had played enough small gigs to feel comfortable in his own skin, it was a shock. "I haven't felt nerves in a long time," he says. "But I've never been in a competition before. To have my singing judged against other people made me really nervous."
He watched Week One's performances from the wings and saw why. "The standard was terrifying," he says.
But the format, he admits, is something the UK no longer has: a televised singing contest that treats vocal ability as a public event, not a pre-packaged product. "It made me feel like I just started my career again."
Reay's lane is retro. Not as pastiche, but as lineage. He wears the silhouette of Elvis Presley, sings in the grain of 1950s pop, and writes songs that sound like they were cut from a Sun Records demo. He could have sanded it down for Chinese audiences, but he didn't.
"Someone has to start the wave before you can see it," he says. Among the songs he performed were "Unchained Melody" and his original track "I Think They Call This Love," which he co-wrote with his girlfriend. He points out that the Beatles still sit next to Taylor Swift on the radio, and that pop started in the 50s. "It's the foundations of pop," he says.
Learning to feel the words
In the final, Reay performed a bilingual version of the Chinese song "Hou Hui Wu Qi" (The End of the World). It was his first time singing in another language. He spent five days learning the Chinese lyrics, listening to the original on loop.
"There are sounds in Chinese we just don't have in English," he says. "I couldn't hear the difference at first. I'd say it, and Helen (his translator) would say, 'No.' I thought I was saying the same thing." Eventually, he stopped trying to hear it and started trying to feel it. "It became more about how it felt to say it. How I place my tongue in my mouth," he says.
He didn't understand the meaning until day three. "Helen gave me a card with the Chinese characters and the English translation. It's very poetic," he says. The performance received a strong reaction, with it being called an attempt at "cultural fusion."
He had saved his own original, "I Think They Call This Love," co-written with his girlfriend, for the same final. He had held the song back deliberately. "I knew that any week was my last week," he says, "but I knew that if I made it to the grand final that I had to do it then." He had no idea it would become the last song of the entire show.
When he finished, he walked straight off stage, took his girlfriend's hand, and the two of them left together, a moment that trended on Chinese social media that night.
The song is about the exact point they realized they were in love; it was also the first track of his career he fully believed in and pushed into the world. Having her there to watch it live, after weeks of her only seeing performances on a phone in a hotel room, "tied the whole thing in a bow at the end."
A touring musician, not a TikToker
Reay is open about the tension between his origin story and his ambition. "I don't want to be a TikTok celebrity," he says. "I'm a musician. I want to tour."
The platform gave him an audience, but it also boxed him in. He remembers friends who wrote incredible songs during lockdown, while he chose to build a fan base. Now, he says, some of those friends have had to stop writing and make TikTok videos instead.
China, he says, gave him permission to be both an online creator and a live performer. Universal Music, his label, didn't push him to chase trends. "They never said, 'Do this, do that,'" he says. "They supported what I wanted to sing, and then they made it the best version they could."
Before Reay, a string of international artists had already found warm receptions and career-shifting opportunities in China. Kazakhstani singer Dimash Kudaibergen, Malaysian star Shila Amzah, US country artist Mickey Guyton, British vocalist Jessie J, and French singer-songwriter Joyce Jonathan all won large Chinese audiences through high-profile television appearances and live performances, each using the platform to open a new chapter in their careers.
He's already planning a return. He wants to bring a tour. He wants to buy the traditional instruments he saw on set and take them home to England. "I'm going to learn how to play them," he says, "and maybe put them into my music."
The advice he'd give other Western artists looking East is to stay loyal to yourself. "Be yourself," he says. "It's very easy to want to change yourself to fit into a market, but at the end of the day, if you stay true to yourself, you'll be happy."
"In the UK, I felt like I needed to do other things to make other people happy," he says.
"If I hadn't stopped doing that, I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't have done the show. My whole journey would be different," he says.
。在与杰夫·贝佐斯结婚25年期间，麦肯锡一直是亚马逊电子商务的忠实大使。正是亚马逊使她和她丈夫成为了世界上最富有的夫妇。麦肯齐·贝索斯是亚马逊出生传说中不可或缺的一部分。时间可以追溯到1994年。麦肯齐开车去西雅图，是她丈夫贝索斯坐在副驾驶座上。当时，他们共同制定了创业公司的商业计划。亚马逊的第一位会计师麦肯齐（McKenzie）参与了亚马逊从一家小型网上书店到如今的电子商务巨头的成长，现在亚马逊已经成为美国历史上第二家价值超过1万亿美元的公司。图片：贝佐斯夫妇是一位48岁的小说家，参加了由《名利场》主办的2018年奥斯卡晚会。但25年来，亚马逊几乎完全定义了她的公众形象。最近关于她和丈夫即将离婚的消息可能很快会改变这一点。

二 | 贝佐斯的twitter账号首次出现在杰夫和麦肯齐签署的一份声明中，他在声明中写道：“经过一次充满爱的探索和暂时的分离，我们决定离婚，继续以朋友的身份生活在一起。

三 | ”这对夫妇带着四个孩子写道，“作为父母、朋友、商业和项目合作伙伴，以及面临风险和他们愿意冒险，他们看到了光明的未来。“在过去的几十年里，随着亚马逊的发展，贝索斯夫妇已经联合起来参加了许多备受瞩目的活动，包括由名利场赞助的奥斯卡派对和金球奖。2012年，麦金齐主持了由亚马逊赞助的纽约大都会艺术博物馆慈善舞会。但在大多数情况下，麦肯锡一直致力于保护他的隐私。与媒体关注的焦点相比，她更喜欢关注写作和孩子。麦肯锡很少引起公众的注意，既不宣传他的书，也不维护他丈夫公司的声誉。2013年，她发表了一篇关于亚马逊的严肃的一星评论，批评了亚马逊写的布拉德斯通的《一切商店》，称之为“充满事实错误”和“充满扩展非小说书籍界限的技能”。斯通是一位经验丰富的科学记者。为《纽约时报》撰写书评的尖田美彦（Michiko Kakutani）说，斯通讲述了“一个颠覆性创新的故事，充满权威和激情，以及许多知识渊博的故事。”尽管麦肯锡可能会获得迄今为止最大的离婚协议，但对低调的女性知之甚少。麦肯锡·塔特尔在见到丈夫之前是个雄心勃勃的小说家。她会见了纽约对冲基金D.E.Shaw的计算机科学家Bezos，他已经是该公司的高级副总裁。麦肯齐告诉《时尚》杂志说，她在公司做行政助理，在写小说的时候补贴家人。但很快麦肯锡发现自己被隔壁办公室里那个人的笑声迷住了。麦肯齐在2013年接受查理·罗斯的采访时说，“起初我对他的声音很着迷。”在他们约会后不到三个月，这对夫妇订婚了；不久之后，他们在佛罗里达州西棕榈滩的一个度假胜地结婚。贝佐斯30岁，麦肯齐23岁。1999年，也就是他结婚六年后，贝佐斯告诉《连线》杂志，他曾希望见到一个“足智多谋”的伴侣。与丈夫相比，麦肯锡经常把自己描述成一个书呆子般的内向者。这种吸引力似乎是相互的。在2017年的一次峰会上，贝佐斯说，他的妻子有句名言：“我宁愿生个九指小孩，也不愿意生个傻子。

四 | ”麦肯齐的文学抱负由来已久。

五 | 根据作者在亚马逊上的采访和传记（她害羞地在亚马逊上写道她“和丈夫和四个孩子住在西雅图”），她在六岁时开始认真写作，那时她完成了一本142页的书《蠕虫》。后来，手稿被洪水冲毁，这导致麦肯锡现在仔细地备份了他写的每一个字。在普林斯顿大学学习期间，麦肯锡在诺贝尔奖获得者和小说家托尼·莫里森的指导下学习了创造性写作。莫里森聘请她为1992年小说《爵士乐》的研究助理，并将她介绍给阿曼达·乌尔本，阿曼达·乌尔本是她的高级文学经纪人。在《时尚》杂志上，莫里森称赞麦肯锡是一个罕见的天才，称她为“我在创意写作课上遇到的最好的学生之一”。2005年，麦肯锡的首部小说《路德·奥尔布赖特的考验》受到了莫里森的热烈赞扬，莫里森称之为“一部罕见的作品：一部令人心碎、情感成熟的小说”。1992年，贝索斯从普林斯顿大学毕业6年后，麦肯锡从同一所大学毕业。她接受了行政助理的工作，这使她能够接触到未来的电子商务巨头。贝佐斯夫妇于1993年结婚，1994年搬到西雅图，当时亚马逊成立。

六 | 亚马逊成立后不久，麦肯锡的身份就融入了她丈夫的公司。她想在出版业留下自己的印记，而她的丈夫则拼命地想颠覆它。从一开始，亚马逊大使就知道贝索斯想利用互联网颠覆传统的零售业。他很快把亚马逊打造成一家成功的网上书店，并开始多元化销售音乐唱片、视频、药品和其他消费品。在1999年接受《连线》采访时，他告诉了奇普拜耳关于他的愿景。贝佐斯预测，到2020年，“你现在购买的大量商店，如主食、纸制品、清洁用品，将以电子方式订购。一些实体店可以生存下来，但它们必须能够提供娱乐价值或即时便利。当亚马逊成立时，麦肯齐和她的丈夫住在东亚特兰大和西亚特兰大郊区的一所租房子里。