Today, just shy of his 16th birthday, he’s already restless. “Rap’s my destiny,” he intones in his introduction, with all the gravity a 13-year-old can muster. At age 12, he won K-Pop Star 6’ as half of a performance duo, before going on to compete on reality competition show YG Treasure Box’. If he realises how much he’s accomplished in such a short time, he’s too humble to let it show. And there’s no one more attuned to that reality than teen prodigy, and maknae, Jongseob, who projects an aura of almost unbelievable composition. Likely, it’s symptomatic of the industry, which hustles you out of childhood and into the dazzling, yet gruelling, limelight. That collective, out-of-place maturity is what surprises me most during our interview. It sounds funny, coming from someone who’s barely entering his 20s. “I would have never thought in a million years we’d be able to come all the way to America,” Keeho says, citing the seemingly never-ending pandemic. Or being serenaded with ‘Happy Birthday’ on the streets of a new city. Like riding their first airplane all together. Yet amid all these fruits of their year’s labour, it’s the little things that stand out the most.
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(“I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s freaking Chloe Bailey’,” Keeho exclaims and mock gasps when I express jealousy that they got to meet the R&B-pop vocalist.) Soon they’ll be whisked off to LA to screen their debut film ‘P1H: The Beginning of a New World’ and perform to fans that will pack into free venues like sardines. I meet them midway through their bicoastal trip to the US, still buzzing from the previous night spent rubbing elbows with celebrities.
Only now are they beginning to savour the whirlwind schedule of globe-trotting musicians. Several delays first stalled their debut then they spent a year grounded in South Korea, constricted by strict social distancing guidelines. But the six boys were met with immediate setbacks. This is the common dream that originally drew P1Harmony together: being able to shuffle from country to country, fill up stadiums and play to roaring crowds. He was going to be studying, and all of a sudden, he went on stage and thought, ‘Oh, I have to start performing’.” “Because he was super smart! I feel like I need to say this. “He felt like, ‘Woah, this is changing my life path’,” Keeho narrates, as if he were plucking details from his own memories. Keeho leans in to exaggeratedly enunciate the title of the song Jiung sang, making sure I get it: “An-eun sa-ram yae-gi”. “Even though the students didn’t know me, they were all singing together,” says Jiung, who chimes in sparily, but always (graciously) in English. When I ask what made the others want to pursue becoming idols, Keeho predicts their responses with a clairvoyant confidence: for Theo, the eldest, it was staring out at the legendary K-pop boyband Big Bang from concert stands in Seoul for the newly 20-year-old Jiung, it’s stealing the spotlight at his school talent show. “I could answer all the questions for them,” Keeho laughs. In interviews, he’s their storyteller, interpreting for them and filtering their anecdotes through his signature levity. It comes with the territory of being a leader, and P1Harmony’s only native English speaker.
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For the six young teens and twenty-somethings who debuted amid the raging pandemic – Keeho, Theo, Jiung, Intak, Soul and Jongseob – getting here is the culmination of a tireless journey.Ĭanadian-born leader Keeho is acting as hype man to soft-spoken Soul, whose aspirations to stardom date back a decade, when street performers doing the robot on TV spurred a lifelong love of dance. Coming up in a few weeks’ time is their first anniversary as a group, and despite the grey sky, spirits are high. It’s an overcast day in New York City, and P1Harmony are sprawled out across a hotel room, reflecting on what has brought them halfway across the globe.
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