Cole Haden is the queer indie frontman of your dreams
Cole Haden is singing to me. His band Model/Actriz are playing at a Manhattan venue called Night Club 101, and he's on the dance floor, prowling amongst the crowd, and now he's maybe a metre away from me, eyeballing me seductively while singing Doves, a spiky ballad from the band's new album, Pirouette.
I'm simultaneously thrilled and mortified – the louche, flamboyant Haden is wildly charismatic, but this kind of attention makes me squirm. Luckily for me, I'm not his only target. Intense crowd interaction is a staple of a Model/Actriz live set, and he soon moves on to serenade others in the audience. Unlike me, they're clearly delighted to have their moment.
When I meet Haden for coffee in Brooklyn a few days later, he recognises me from the gig. 'Were you there with that man next to you?' he asks. 'No, he was cute though,' I respond. Haden agrees. 'I was hoping you were a couple and that I was breaking you up,' he says impishly. 'I was flirting with you both.'
The characteristically sweaty, raucous gig was a small one-off show ahead of Model/Actriz's biggest tour yet, with at least 32 dates booked across the US and Europe until September. The band formed in Boston in 2016 after drummer Ruben Radlauer and guitarist Jack Wetmore saw Haden, a fellow student at the Berklee College of Music, perform. After watching him 'writhing on the floor in a corset, fake blood dripping down his face,' they immediately asked him to join their band. In 2019, bassist Aaron Shapiro completed the four-piece.
Two years after the triumphant tour of their acclaimed debut Dogsbody, comes Model/Actriz's second album, Pirouette. The music within remains compellingly abrasive: tense, menacing noise rock full of scuzzy, distorted guitars and mercurial percussion, while Haden's voice ranges from a sultry murmur to an operatic soprano to a guttural growl.
Lyrically, Pirouette finds Haden moving away from the myth and metaphor he favoured on Dogsbody and exposing more of his own vulnerabilities. The grungy Diva begins as a boast about Haden's sexual conquests in Europe, but really, he's 'looking for something more/ A home to take you home to.'
There are sweet odes to his sisters (Baton) and grandmother (Acid Rain), while on standout lead single Cinderella, he reminisces about his five-year-old, unrealised desire to have a Cinderella birthday party. 'And when the moment came, and I changed my mind/ I was quiet, alone, and devastated,' he moans (in the song's transgressive music video, he finally gets to act out his dream).
A 90-second spoken-word interlude called Headlights is about a high school crush on a friend of a friend. 'Over time I started hating him, or I started hating myself/ But I hated most how I'd pray each night/ Asking God to make him see me in all the ways I couldn't,' Haden sings.
'The process of finishing Dogsbody felt like a new dawn,' Haden says. 'I had a chip on my shoulder then, and I was really bitter about my love life, and I was angry about a lot of the sadness that I carried with me from childhood.'
'Lady Gaga put out Bad Romance and I started figuring it out – yeah, I'm gay!'
Haden is gentler with himself now, and on Pirouette, he's more able to make peace with the pains of his past. 'I really wanted to speak to my inner child, that was the mission statement,' he says. 'I wish I could have heard my future self speaking to my younger self as a child, and I appreciate the ways our music can help people see themselves, especially people who might feel lonely.'
Haden says he didn't have any deep friendships until he was around 14. 'Before that, I was a very lonely kid and I didn't really know how to help myself,' he says. 'And then Lady Gaga put out Bad Romance and I started figuring it out – yeah, I'm gay!'
Gaga was a formative influence on Haden. 'Like Germanotta, Stefani/ Pull the weight from under me,' he sings on Dogsbody 's Crossing Guard, referencing both Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) and Gwen Stefani. On Pirouette, Haden channels Gaga and fellow divas like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Kylie Minogue, infusing the heavy riffs and anxious beats with a dance-pop spirit that's especially evident in the live shows.
'What I love about [Minogue] so much is that she doesn't really carry a lot of baggage in her music,' he says, naming Aphrodite as his favourite Kylie album and her 1988 gem Turn It Into Love as one of his favourite songs. 'I think she represents what an unabashedly fearless pop song should sound like,' he says.
Legendary performance artist Marina Abramović is another, less obvious influence on Haden's stage presence. In high school, he travelled to New York with a friend to take part in her project, The Embrace. 'I hugged Marina for about two minutes and I cried,' he says. Another of Abramović's projects, The Artist is Present, was composed of prolonged staring contests. 'Marina showed me that eye contact doesn't have to be scary,' he says, as I'm reminded of his intense gaze the other night. 'It's more multitudinous.'
When I tell my friends, big fans of Model/Actriz, that I found the show hectic – in a good way – they tell me it was tame compared to other gigs, where they would go home with bruises from all the moshing and slamming their bodies into other crowd members. For the band, the shows are even more taxing.
'Jack was limping at the end of our last European tour,' says Haden. 'He was banging his guitar into his hip so much there was a bruise all down his leg, and he couldn't walk.' After screaming into the microphone for nights on end, Haden was often left with bleeding vocal cords. 'My throat will bleed again, probably,' he says with a laugh and a shrug.
Outwardly queer frontmen are not the norm amongst noise rock bands. Possibly for this reason, people would often come up to Haden on the Dogsbody tour and ask if he was really gay. 'I was like, 'Am I really standing here right now?'' he says. 'I thought, ok, it needs to be even clearer on this album because I don't want there to be any question about it [his gayness]. I want someone who needs someone like me to listen to, to have no question that I'm there for that.'
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Haden's angsty confessions often inspire messages from fans who have experienced or are going through similar turmoil, who then get to thrash out their demons at the live shows. 'When we're playing a gig, it's like we're hosts to a party and I want those people to be able to come there and feel liberated from [their worries] and feel welcome in celebrating who they are,' says Haden.
'Being gay and queer is painful, especially romantically and especially in this climate in America – and everywhere. But I think we have to fight to make the world around us reflect the one we want to see outside of that.'
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COMMENT Even after all this time, it seemed unequivocally magical. If you'd pitched the idea in a Disney boardroom – an American actress with her own working copy of Gloria Steinem's collected speeches and ripped jeans meets handsome, kinda lost British prince, great love ensues, he makes her royal – you would have been laughed out of there. But seven years ago, that's exactly what happened when the world gathered around TV sets and exhaled at the sheer bloody Cinderella-ness of it all. What a crock. When it comes to Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's 2018 wedding, we were all sold what, it is now clear, a sham. On May 19, Meghan Markle walked down the aisle of St George's Chapel in Windsor on then Prince Charles' arm and into the history books. Even now, in 2025, new details are still coming out about what a load of flimflam it all was. 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This weekend Diana, Princess of Wales' biographer Andrew Morton revealed that back in 2016, within a week of Suits star Meghan being outed as Harry's newest squeeze, things were going pear-shaped between them and the wider royal family. Only a week after it was revealed he was dating the actress he 'broke the code' of the royal family, according to Morton. On November 8, 2016 Harry put out an unprecedented, cymbal clash of a statement volubly condemning the 'wave of abuse' Meghan was receiving from the press – only he did it while Charles was in the middle of a high-wire tour of the Middle East, thus blowing coverage of his father's trip out of the water. 'That was something which broke with the code of the royals,' Morton told The Times. 'When a member of the royal family is abroad the focus is on them, not on the domestic royals. For Harry to give that fairly hysterical statement while his father was in the Middle East was seen as self-indulgent.' From there, things hardly improved behind palace gates. As the duke would later scribble in his bestselling burn book slash memoir Spare, Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales took to Meghan with about as much enthusiasm as the late Queen would have to oat milk or manifesting or Candy Crush. Hugs were not reciprocated. (Meghan's attempt at a friendly embrace of William at their first meeting in 2016 'completely freaked him out,' Harry wrote.) Lipgloss was, painfully, not shared. Things really went from nippily chilled between Kate and Meghan to outright GHDs at 50 paces when it came to the issue of the bridesmaids dresses, the infamous incident, even all these years later, still being dissected and interpreted like Dead Sea Scrolls. Versions vary. In 2019 it was reported that Meghan had made Kate cry; then the duchess did Oprah and said that actually it was her who had been left scrabbling for tissues, so to speak. Ready for a new version? Veteran royal biographer Tom Quinn recently released Yes Ma'am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants with a whole new account. A former member of palace staff told him: 'Meghan said a few things she regretted and Kate said a few things she later regretted but it was all in the heat of the moment. Both women were crying their eyes out!' All of this had happened, all the emotions and 'freaking outs' and tears and code-breaking before the first trumpeterer was warming up on May 19, 2018. There is still more about that day that has been called into question. Call it the Clooney Conundrum: Hollywood A-listers, on that day in May, took their seats alongside liver-spotted dukes and old Etonians called Bunter and Chucker, promising the glorious union of the worlds of Hollywood and the Holyroodhouse. However in the years since then, many of the duke and duchess' starry A-list friendships have blinked out. The Clooneys were later revealed to have admitted to a fellow wedding guest they didn't actually know the couple; David and Victoria Beckham were soon on no-speaks with the Sussexes and these days pal about with King Charles; and guest and reception DJ Idris Elba last year joined forces with His Majesty for a King's Trust event. Others like Oscar nominee Mulligan and Mad Max's Hardy have never been seen in the same postcode as the Sussexes since. Zoom out and what the Sussexes' wedding day stood for was promise – so much fat, juicy promise. Of a monarchy revitalised by a passionate cool girl member who was champing at the bit to muck in and work for Crown Inc. But was Meghan ever going to be happy with her royal lot? Would she, I wonder, have ever truly been content plugging away at hosting Association of Commonwealth Universities roundtables and giving speeches at dog's homes and occasionally slipping the palace yoke to guest edit Vogue and to wear black nail polish? Would she ever have been okay with tamping down her entrepreneurial and creative instincts? As far back as 2019, the Sussexes were in talks with billion-dollar US streaming service (the long since shuttered Quibi), the Telegraph has reported. Also, as a royal staff member has told Quinn that 'she expected a billionaire and she got a millionaire'. To join the royal family is to acquiesce to being squeezed inside a prescribed box and being HAPPY to stay there until you get the palace call up to open the Chelsea Flower Show or whatnot. Given what we now know of Meghan, her natural ambition (said with great admiration) and her hunger to put herself out there (even if the results are sometimes watching her make ice cubes) – was she always doomed when it came to her royal future? Look back at those photos of May 19 and they have the same poignancy and heart tugging quality as seeing a shot of the Titanic tied up at the dock at Southampton. On that day, everyone wanted us, the public, to believe something – that it could work out, that the royal family was jazzed to have inveterate hugger Meghan on board; that she was willing to subsume herself in aid of a hoary institution; that George Clooney actually has Harry's mobile number. On Monday, the duchess marked the day by sharing a shot of a pinboard full of sweet photos of Harry and their children, including of the tots as babies, with the head, 'our love story'. At least we can definitively say, seven years on, the Sussexes' love for one another is the realest of real deals.
