This interview originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.

What can you tell me about your forthcoming “Lord of the Mince” tour? It does conjure up certain mental images…

It’s a one man show – and it’s me at fifty, looking back at what I might have achieved. The second half is a secret. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s very surprising, and rather alarming for the audience. So we have ushers standing by with flasks of brandy, just in case it’s too much for people.

Given the title of the show, and your recent involvement with Strictly Coming Dancing, will there be any dancing involved?

Ooh no, there’s not really any dancing. I talk about Strictly Come Dancing, and I shake my maracas about – but you can’t really do ballroom dancing on your own. I will talk about it, because I did the tour earlier this year. I give people the dirt, really. Rather than a step-by-step account of how to do the quickstep, I thought people would rather hear the gossip and the filth.

This will be your first tour in five years, so why the long gap?

I didn’t think I’d tour any more. I enjoyed the last tour, but it occupies your whole life, you know? I thought: oh, I’ll do a bit of television and a bit of radio, and I’ve been busy writing some books. But then I did a one-off gig somewhere, about six months ago. I enjoyed it so much that I thought: actually, this is why you started doing comedy in the first place, and it’s much more satisfying than anything else. And after a year or two of being holed up writing in a study, I fancied going out and showing my face.

You turned fifty in May. How did you celebrate?

I had a big garden party. I had all my friends and family here, which was fabulous. And I acquired a new puppy. That was my present to myself. He is allegedly a Jack Russell, according to Paul O’ Grady – I got him from the Paul O’Grady Show. But he’s no more Jack Russell than you are. He’s showing distinct signs of being a Staffie. So I guess I’ll just have to become a drug dealer.

Has your act has changed much over the years, or is it still basically a steady stream of good, honest smut and innuendo?

Oh, I will never grow out of smut and innuendo. I can satisfy the mature side of my mind by writing books. On stage, it’s a bit more stately now, I think. And the audiences are different, so it’s a bit more gentle, and a bit more reflective. But still filthy.

Are you still actively trying to shock your audience? Do you want to hear gasps of horror, at any point?

Yes, that is quite satisfying – but it’s harder and harder to shock people now. I was quite nasty to people when I started out, so I think that’s moved on a bit. But I quite like people laughing with me, rather than at me.

Is there a fundamental part of your brain that is constantly scanning for smut, or is that a faculty which you can switch off for days at a time?

Well, it’s really to do with playing with the English language. Once you start, it’s like exercising a certain muscle. You get better at it, and I can spot innuendos a mile off now. I don’t always acknowledge them, because it can get tedious for people. But I certainly amuse myself, all the time, with anything phallic that I might see or hear.

When you first started out, there were far fewer openly gay public performers around. Was there a time where you felt you were being cast as a kind of role model? Did you get anguished letters from isolated gay fans, saying that you’d helped them feel that they weren’t alone?

I did get a bit of that, and I never really felt comfortable. I never had any aspirations to be a role model, and I think that the whole concept is a bit dubious, really. I never felt at all reassured by seeing anyone else that was gay when I was growing up. It all sounded a bit worthy, all of that. It’s like being a “trailblazer” – people say that sometimes, and there was no thought of that in my mind. I wasn’t doing anything for the benefit of the so-called gay community. I was just doing my own thing.

So you were never particularly pressed into political service?

No, not really. I used to go on Gay Pride marches and things, but I’d rather stick pins in my eyes now.

Now that gay identity has become so much more normalised, do you think that something has been lost along the way: that rather nice feeling of being part of an underground subculture?

I think that’s a case of rose-coloured spectacles. I don’t think it was that great. Although I had a college lecturer who was in his Seventies, and he used to talk about how fabulous it was in the Forties, picking up guardsmen in St James’s Park and all of that. That’s all gone. That sounded quite… exciting.

You’re now living in a kind of pastoral paradise in rural Kent, with your chickens… or rather with what’s left of your chickens, as I heard there was a bit of a set-to with a fox.

Yes, the fox got three of them [Jordan, Jodie and Margaret], and I’ve got four left. But that’s just country life. And one of my hens had brooded – she was sitting on three eggs which were due to hatch tomorrow – but I got up this morning and the eggs had gone. I think a rat had come in and started eating my eggs. So if it’s not one thing it’s another, frankly.

Does a bonding experience take place with your chickens, or are they purely functional?

I don’t mind if they don’t bother laying an egg. It’s entirely optional. It’s a case of city boy moving to the country and thinking: oh, how rustic to have chickens running around. Which it is!

---

Oh, and there was this little nugget from the out-takes...

I noticed when I was researching you that you are exactly two days older than my partner. He turned fifty on May 27th. So I suppose from an astrological point of view, you must have almost identical personalities.

Oh, you poor thing – he must be awful to live with.

Labels: celebs, comedy, eveningpost, interviews

A few weeks before his recent court case, a cheerful and upbeat Boy George spoke to me about his return to the gigging circuit, his most recent single, and his forthcoming headline slot on the next Here and Now tour.

Insofar as any Boy George interview can be called "standard" (as before, he was articulate, witty, waspish, and utterly charming), it was all fairly standard stuff – but in the light of subsequent events, some of George’s observations do feel especially poignant.

What follows are the edited highlights of our conversation, which took place in early November.

---

You’ve just finished a fairly massive tour of the UK – your second in twelve months. Are you enjoying your return to the live stage?

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve done it. At the moment, it’s really enjoyable. A lot of people seem to be going out more to gigs. I know I am, and I think there’s been a bit more of an interest in it. My audience is really across the board, from 80-year old women to kids, and it’s great to go out and really get to see them. I love that.

It must have been great to sing your latest single [the Barack Obama-sampling Yes We Can] during the build-up to the US presidential election.

It’s funny, but when I talked about Barack Obama on stage, people were really weird. Like, quite hostile. I don’t know whether it’s because people aren’t into politics, or because my fans are secretly Tories…! (Laughs)

Maybe they assumed it was a straightforward “Vote for Obama” campaigning song, which would have been a bit weird. But when you look at the verses, it’s saying something quite different. There’s one line which goes “Please forgive me for these crimes against myself” - and then there’s a real sting in the next line, when you sing “And I’ll forgive your lack of faith”.

It was interesting doing that on tour, because the hostile audience made it a bit more defiant. So I was actually really enjoying singing it. But when [Obama] was elected, we saw a kind of great goodwill. And when I first heard him talk a long time ago, that’s what I saw: optimism, and a fresh look at things, which is what I think people want.

It’s a total sea change. It reminds me of 1997, when Tony Blair stormed into power and everyone seemed incredibly optimistic.

But I think he’s even more eloquent than Tony Blair. And he’s got much more charisma. The only thing that comes across as a little bit nauseating is all that stuff about America being the greatest country in the world. It’s not, you know. They throw people out of ambulances who can’t afford them! (Laughs)

Have you ever been approached for any political endorsements?

Well, I’m not really the sort of person they would ask! (Laughs) Maybe in the future, but I’ve had so much negative press that I’d probably be the last person that they’d ask!

You’ve spent a lot of time in the USA, but you seem to be concentrating back on this country now. Has the love affair with America soured?

I think Great Britain is the best place to live. I love it here. I could never live anywhere else. America is a place you should visit, but it’s not somewhere you’d live.

You’ll be headlining the next Here and Now tour in May. Is this another sign of your increased confidence in touring?

Well, we kind of started this whole thing, because about 12 years ago Culture Club did a tour with the Human League and Howard Jones. So it’s something that we’ve done already. It’s kind of an easy gig, because everyone’s doing their hits, and everyone’s just on for a certain amount of time. So it’s not like doing a normal tour. It’s fun, you know?

How well do you know the other acts on the bill?

I know Kim Wilde pretty well, and I know Hazel O’Connor because she was a Hare Krishna. A lot of them are people that I’ve bumped into, if you know what I mean. But what’s nice about these kinds of tours is that you get to work with these people when you’re older and more settled. When you’re nineteen or twenty, you think everything’s a competition. But we all make assumptions, and when you meet people they’re nothing like you think they’re going to be.

Looking back on that first flush of 1980s pop, do you think that Band Aid and Live Aid killed the party off, or was it in its death throes already?

I think it came to a natural end. Although now you can see that people are trying to recreate it. Like the Tings Tings: that record [That’s Not My Name] is basically Money by the Flying Lizards [a Top Five hit from 1979]. Somebody should do a little cut-up of those two, because it’s the same record. You can literally sing the same thing. “That’s what I want!” “That’s not my name!”

What I find perplexing is that we seem to be in the throes of yet another Sixties revival. Amy Winehouse came and did her stuff, and then we had the Duffys of this world, and now we’ve got Girls Aloud and the Sugababes doing Sixties pastiches.

I think the only one who gets away with it is Amy, because she lives it. I’ve recently been listening a lot to Frank, her first album. She really uses her voice on that album, and it’s amazing. I remember buying it and liking it, but now I really love it.

Of all those people, she stands out. No offence to any of those bands, but you know they’re just trying to have hits. What’s trendy, what’s the flavour – let’s do that. With Amy, it just feels very natural. You don’t think she’s doing a pastiche. There’s a marked difference.

You’ve got a DJ-ing date coming up in Dubai, and I’m curious to know more about the place.

I love Dubai; I go there a lot.

Is it not all just a bit sanitised?

It’s very different there; you can’t do lots of the things that you can do here. You can’t kiss men in public. The last time I was there, somebody said that you’re not allowed to be gay. I said, it’s a bit late for that! (Laughs) You can’t drink in the DJ box, and so on. But people love music, and there’s a really great audience there.

So there are club kids there, who will connect with it all? It’s not just the children of the rich?

There was a big club that was shut down, where I used to play. I looked up at the balcony, and there were all these Arabs, dressed in all their gear! But that’s the great thing about dance music; it’s kind of universal. Because a lot of it is instrumental, the language barrier is not important. I first went to Dubai ten years ago, and I thought: oh, what’s it going to be like? And it was great, and every time I’ve been there I’ve always had good shows.

Just don’t ask the cocktail waiter for a Sex On The Beach. That’s off the menu.

Or a Slow Screw! (Laughs)

I sense that there’s been a real upswing this year for you. It feels like you’re in a particularly happy place right now.

I definitely am, and that’s a choice. It’s not that anything happened; it’s more my thinking. I’ve kind of accepted that I do what I do, and I love what I do, and I’ve spent a lot of time making things into a drama that didn’t need to be a drama.

And so I’ve reached the point where I realised I had choices: you can either make things great, or make them hard work. I try to do less of that now. I did a lot of that in the past, and I think it’s really unhealthy and disruptive.

---

On December 5th 2008, George O’Dowd was found guilty of falsely imprisoning Audun Carlsen. Sentencing will take place on Jan 16th, and imprisonment has not been ruled out.

In a statement on his official website, Boy George says: “I am feeling surprisingly objective and sane. No matter the outcome, I will get through it and move on with the wisdom I have gained from the experience. This past year has been magical in so many ways and I intend to keep it that way.”

The 2009 Here and Now tour comes to Nottingham's Trent FM Arena on Saturday May 16th. Kim Wilde, Howard Jones, Kid Creole & The Coconuts, Altered Images, Hazel O’Connor and Brother Beyond will all be performing. At the time of going to press, Boy George was still scheduled as the headline act.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

"Do you notice anything different about me?" asked Liza Minnelli after her third number, sucking in her cheeks and pouting for comic effect. Having recently shed 44 pounds in weight (apparently thanks to a diet program that she had seen advertised on television), the 62-year old diva looked in amazing shape: trim, toned, in radiant good health, and (as we were to discover during the second half) sporting a pair of legs that would have graced a woman half her age.

But it wasn't only Liza's outward appearance which confounded expectations. Not quite knowing what to expect from someone with such a chequered history and such an erratic track record, many of us had come prepared to make allowances for whatever eccentricities might be in store. As it turned out, we had no need to worry at all.

From the first number (a splendid rendition of Teach Me Tonight) to the final encore (a spellbinding I'll Be Seeing You, performed a cappella), Liza was in full control of her voice, her performance and her audience. Every note was hit; every mark was struck; every nuance was attended to.

This was no booze-addled, pill-popping, delusional spent force, hamming it up and trading on past glories. Instead, what we witnessed was a bravura performance from a consummate artiste, miraculously restored to the height of her powers.

As was explained during a recent interview, Liza's preferred interpretive technique is to inhabit a different character for each song: a "method acting breakdown", as she called it. During the first half in particular, we saw this technique in full effect.

For George Gershwin's The Man I Love, Minnelli's lovelorn yearning was underpinned by a self-mocking wryness, as was only appropriate for a woman four times divorced. Taking an opposite stance, I'm Living Alone And I Like It was sung in the character of a feisty old lady dressed from head to toe in maroon, whom the singer had once met on a New York street corner. For My Own Best Friend (from the musical Chicago), Minnelli transformed into Roxie Hart: on trial for murder, and converting her fear into defiance. And for Cabaret, she once again assumed her Oscar-winning role as Sally Bowles in the film of the same name: laughing in the face of misfortune, with a survivor's resolve to continue living life to the full.

The bulk of the show's second half was given over to an extended tribute to Liza's late godmother Kay Thompson: a key figure in the history of Hollywood, who had given vocal coaching to the likes of Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, and Liza's own mother Judy Garland. Given that Thompson is a considerably lesser known figure in this country, this was a section that could easily have flopped. Instead, the lively, full-throttle recreation of her celebrated nightclub act, accompanied by a quartet of song-and-dance boys (The Williams Brothers), swept us up with its sheer energy, successfully evoking the spirit of a lost golden age.

As the two and a half hour show progressed, the standing ovations grew ever more frequent: starting with Maybe This Time in the first half, and climaxing with Minnelli's signature tune New York, New York in the second half. (By this stage, the cheers were erupting even as the song progressed.) Liza rode these waves of adulation in the manner of someone whose stardom is written in their very DNA.

Let there be no doubt about it: this was a truly exceptional show, which will be remembered for years to come by all who witnessed it.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

This article originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.


It all began so well. Following a string of cancellations, many at the last minute, which had dragged on for several weeks, I was finally on the phone to New York, and scarcely able to believe my good fortune. Better still, my interviewee sounded bright and cheerful. (“Hey Mike, how are ya! I’m so happy to be on the phone with you now!”) Nothing could go wrong now, could it?

Venturing a mild ice-breaking witticism, I remarked that whenever Liza’s office gave me a new date, an old song of hers had always run through my mind: “Maybe this time, I’ll be lucky.” For a split second, she laughed. Or, to put it more accurately: after a somewhat dismissive “No, no, no”, she emitted a semi-strangulated gurgle that could loosely be interpreted as laughter.

Recklessly, I took this as encouragement. Oh, we were going to get along famously!

It had already been a full week for Liza. “I’ve been rehearsing, and we’ve been working on some pre-records for the sound on stage, and all the stuff. It’s been busy.”

Reflecting on my own nervousness prior to the interview, I wondered whether Liza ever feels under pressure herself, particularly when people expect her to act in a certain way around them.

“Oh yes, I think everyone always expects me to be fancy, and I’m not. I’m straight ahead, and I’m a hard worker.”

But does that ever cause her pressure? “No – I love it, or I wouldn’t be doing it.”

The response of each night’s audience has always been of central importance. What about those nights when she has to work harder than usual, in order to get the level of response that she is looking for?

“I never think of it as work. To me it’s a series of little movies that I’m making. Because in one character I’ve got, the character has blonde hair, and she wears pink, and she does this or that, and so I have a whole breakdown in each song. It’s like a method acting breakdown in songs. So therefore they don’t get bored, because I don’t wanna go and see somebody singing a song who’s bored. Do you?”

Uh-oh, she’s beginning to sound a little prickly. I might be going in too hard, too soon. Well, let’s stick to the script anyway. How does Liza resolve the conflict between wanting to introduce new material that might take her in a fresh direction, and the expectations of an audience who want to hear the old signature songs?

“Sing everything!”

A quick laugh, and an awkward pause. The briskness of the reply and the depth of the silence spoke volumes. Feeling like I had just asked the most moronically obvious question in the history of showbiz reporting, I made a grab for the lifeline marked “new material”. Will there be any new material on the forthcoming UK tour, I wondered?

“Yes, I have this stuff on my godmother, Kay Thompson.”

Indeed, the second half of each show will be given over to a 45 minute tribute to Thompson, who is perhaps best known over here for her portrayal of New York fashion editor Maggie Prescott (“Think Pink!”) in the classic 1957 movie Funny Face.

“She was a real behind the scenes person, but she was the musical force behind MGM. In her thirties, she ran the music department of MGM. It’s amazing, you know? And then of course she wrote Eloise at the Plaza.”

As I later discovered, this was one of a series of four best-selling children’s books that Thompson wrote during the 1950s, describing the adventures of a lively little girl called Eloise, who lived in The Plaza Hotel in New York City. As Thompson’s equally lively young goddaughter, Liza provided the inspiration for this much loved character.

Much loved in the USA, that is. Not wishing to display my ignorance – that “of course” made it sound like another clanger waiting to happen – I let Liza continue without interruption.

“Kay brought vocal singing into a whole other realm. You had to hear it to believe it. And she did this night club act. I saw it; I was two. I was sitting on my mom’s lap, across from my father, and I’ll never forget seeing those feet and arms flying around; it was wonderful.”

A film project based on Kay Thompson’s life has been under discussion for quite some time – it even gets a couple of mentions on Liza’s official website – but Liza was not about to be drawn on the exact nature of her involvement.

“I don’t know. I stay out of everything until somebody calls me. I find it’s easier.”

After another awkward pause, I found myself remarking – out loud, mind you – that my interviewee wasn’t exactly giving much away. Goodness, where did that little show of boldness come from?

It had an interesting effect. Suddenly, Liza was insisting that I come to the Nottingham show – even spelling out the name of her personal assistant, so that I might come backstage and see her in person.

This is the sort of pleasantry that sometimes takes place right at the end of an interview, when things have gone particularly well. It doesn’t usually take place within the first five minutes, when things aren’t going so great.

With the benefit of hindsight, various interpretations can be made. Either this was a gracious, generous gesture, intended to extend the hand of friendship towards a flustered, floundering interviewer – or else it was a last ditch gambit to get the dithering, star-struck chump onside, by any means possible. It could have been a gentle, tactful way of drawing our sorry conversation to a premature end – or it could have been the signal from a bored, testy, un-cooperative diva that this inconsequential minion’s time was well and truly up. Had Liza been strong-armed into the call against her will? Indeed, did all those endless cancellations and re-schedules tell their own story?

Bearing in mind the unmitigated fiasco that followed, it is tempting to lean towards the latter conclusion. For from this point on, Liza more or less shut down on me entirely. Virtually every question was stone-walled. Answers were mostly terse and uninformative. Those deadly pauses grew more frequent.



Still, on I ploughed. An edge of panic crept in: drying my mouth, constricting my larynx, and sending my voice squeaking up an octave. It was, in a very real sense, a ball-busting experience.

So, here’s Liza explaining how she came to guest on “Mama”, a track by the massively popular emo-rockers My Chemical Romance.

“Well, they called me.” (Pause.) “It was real simple.”

Yes, but I guess a lot of people must come calling, so what was it about them that appealed?

“I like their music.” (Pause.) “I have the first album.”

It’s quite emotional, dramatic stuff, isn’t it, for rock music? (Oh, I wasn’t giving up without a struggle.)

“Very much so. I mean, I think it’s very forceful.”

And here’s Liza talking about her recent appearance on the televised 80th birthday tribute for Bruce Forsyth: “I’m so glad that came about.” (Seriously folks, these are the highlights.)

Liza’s sister Lorna Luft recently played here – in the very same venue, in fact – performing her tribute to their mother Judy Garland. (A bravura performance, and Lorna was a charming, delightful interviewee.) But what did Liza think of the show that her sister had worked so hard on, and toured for so long?

“I never saw the whole show, but I know she was pleased with it.”

OK, back to the tour. If in doubt, let them get back to plugging the product. A fail-safe strategy. So, Liza, have you had to train hard? I believe you have a very punishing training schedule.

“Yeah, but all dancers do.” (Long pause)

And this is your first tour of the UK outside London in a long time, is that right?

“Yes, I’m so looking forward to it.”

What the hell, let’s finish on a tough one. (No, of course I wasn’t going to ask about the short-lived, ill-starred marriage to David Gest. Someone from The Guardian tried that one, and felt the full force of Liza’s wrath. Besides, I was there to talk about her work, not her private life.)

Liza, the top-priced tickets for your Nottingham show are the most expensive that we’ve ever seen here, by some distance. Can you reassure the people of Nottingham that they will be getting value for money?

“Oh, my goodness! I don’t know anything about the prices for the tickets, but they’ll certainly get the best show that I can do. I always do that. And I’m looking forward to it!”


There are many ways to tell a story. You can wield the hatchet (what a diva!), you can enter the confessional booth (what a screw-up!), or you can try to offer a thoughtful, even-handed analysis of what went wrong. (She’s Pisces and I’m Aquarius; it was never meant to be.)

But at least on one thing, we can all be clear: the legendary, redoubtable, slightly crazy but undeniably magnificent Liza Minnelli is looking forward to meeting us.

And so are we, Liza. So are we.

Photos taken by Boss Tweed and lilpup, and reproduced under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews

Witnessing first-hand the squeals of female delight which greeted his every move, I suddenly realised that John Barrowman might be something unique: an openly gay heartthrob, whose unequivocal frankness merely adds to his appeal. If that sounds like a contradiction, then it’s certainly not one which bothered either the artist or his adoring audience, whose tangible rapport was wonderful to behold.

Drawing on his long experience in musical theatre, Barrowman delivered a highly accomplished performance, mixing pop standards and favourite show tunes with sparky quips and occasionally tear-jerking personal stories, all with the total self-assurance of a seasoned professional.

Although a gifted musical interpreter, Barrowman was canny enough to realise that, in his new incarnation as a Saturday night prime time TV regular, he would have to up the cheese factor: Barry Manilow numbers, Latino rump-shakers, I Am What I Am histrionics, the works.

Occasionally, he overstepped the mark: an over-familiar Amarillo was an end-of-the-pier gesture too far. But for the most part, the balance between showmanship and song craft was ably struck.

Highlights for the music lovers included fine renditions of Nina Simone’s Feelin’ Good and I Won’t Send Roses (from Mack and Mabel). Highlights for the fans included special appearances from Captain Jack’s greatcoat and the Elvis outfit from Dancing On Ice.

Who cared if the outfits got the bigger cheers? Certainly not the ebullient Barrowman, whose infectiously gleeful determination to make the absolute most of his “moment in the sun” may be his biggest asset of all.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect comedians to be funny all the time. Perhaps, when you’re halfway through a marathon tour of the UK, the pressures of constant travel will conspire to rob you of whatever sense of humour you once had. Perhaps, when you’re nearing the end of a long-running comedy partnership, the desire to market yourself as an appealing proposition cannot help but dwindle. Perhaps, when your final series for the BBC (a “greatest hits” clippings job, with a few minutes of new material thrown in each week) has suffered poor reviews and lousy viewing figures, the desire to rule a line and move on can only make you testy and impatient.

Maybe it’s just because you were sitting on a train to Brighton, with the phone line cutting out every few minutes, feeling self-conscious about being interviewed in public, and understandably nervous about that night’s show.

Or maybe, just maybe, when your interviewer has admired your work for the thick end of a quarter of a century, and has been looking forward to communicating that admiration in person, disappointment is the only, and inevitable, outcome.

Whatever the reasons might be, the fact remains that my much anticipated chat with Jennifer Saunders turned out to be the dullest interview that I have conducted with anyone since Shayne “Mister Personality” Ward, just over a year ago. Granted, Jennifer was never less than courteous and professional – but as our conversation progressed, her answers remained resolutely terse, warily defensive, largely disinterested and utterly humourless.

(Oh, OK. I think she laughed twice. Three times, tops.)

The French and Saunders Still Alive tour, which comes to Nottingham next Thursday, has been billed as a final chance to see the pair perform together, as a comedy duo. “We’ll probably work together again, but I don’t think we’ll be doing the double act as such, unless there’s the odd Comic Relief moment.”

So, no chance of ending up like the ever-valedictory Cher, then? “No, I don’t think so. The tour is the tour, and then that’s the end of it.”

We have been here before, though. Absolutely Fabulous came to an apparent conclusion after the third series, before being resurrected for a couple of “last ever” specials a year later. Five years after that, it returned for two more series, followed by a few more specials, eventually spluttering to an end in 2005. So we might be forgiven for harbouring a few suspicions.

“Um, yeah. But that was… I never, I never wrote that off as a… I’ve never said it was finishing. You know, it’s just: when you get time, and people want it, then you do a bit more.”

If you say so, Jennifer. But what has brought about the decision to call it a day as French and Saunders?

“I think that the days of doing a sketch show have passed. There’s lots of new young acts coming up, and we’d rather quit while we’re still enjoying it – and people still want to see it – rather than letting it drift on.”

A lot of the duo’s material over the years has parodied whatever happens to be popular at the time, be it from television, music or film. There might therefore be a certain sense of relief, at not continually having to “keep up” with everything. (Dawn as Adele and Jennifer as Duffy, maybe? It’s an admittedly tantalising proposition.)

“I think it’s more about what’s a common experience these days. Much less is a common experience. I think it’s harder to play anybody, because fewer people see them. The ratings on TV shows now are tiny, compared to what they used to be. Nobody watches the same stuff. Different age groups don’t watch the same stuff.”

As for any future plans to work with her comedy partner, Jennifer is keeping an open mind. “We’ll be doing another Jam and Jerusalem, so that will be the next thing. But I’m sure that we’ll look at ideas on things we can work on together. We have a production company together, so we’re always seeing each other and talking through ideas. As ever, you never think too far ahead.”

Shooting for the third series of Jam and Jerusalem commences this spring. This is excellent news for those who have enjoyed Saunders’ shift of focus, away from the hot-house world of “media”, and towards the altogether gentler world of village life.

“We have a lovely time. Everyone really enjoys working on it, and it’s a nice fun project. It’s nice working with people that you respect so much, and writing for them.”

Although the show is clearly tightly scripted, it’s tempting to wonder whether any of the lines come from the fine ensemble cast themselves, during the filming process.

“A certain amount, but we shoot it so fast. It’s on a very quick turnover. But if a problem comes up in a scene, then we’ll sit down and change it over the lunch hour.”

Does this shift of emphasis – from the urban to the rural – mirrors changes in Jennifer’s own life?

“I think so, in a way. But there’s so much media now. When I first did Ab Fab, there wasn’t the same celebrity culture. There was only Hello! magazine. Nowadays, everyone who falls out of a cab without their pants on is a Patsy and Edina, in a way. It’s very commonplace. So where I thought there was a gap, it was in something that was basically about nice people. The only thing that it challenges is other people’s cynicism, really.”

But then there is also Saunders’ latest comic creation: Vivienne Vyle, the demonic doyenne of the daytime TV chat show, and a deliberate satire on the likes of Jeremy Kyle. (From Vyle to Kyle: the reference is hardly a subtle one.) Has Kyle offered any response to being so expertly skewered?

“No, none. Absolutely no response.” A steely silence, maybe? “I’m sure he’s blissfully unaware.”

As for the many other public figures that have been targeted by French and Saunders over the years, it seems that none have ever kicked up a fuss. “I don’t think anybody has, really. If we do it on the show, then we tend to invite them along anyway.”

One of the duo’s most memorable parodies was Dawn French’s take on Catherine Zeta-Jones, some of which is reprised on video during the tour. This apparently heavy reliance on video footage has come in for criticism in some of the reviews – but before I could give Jennifer the chance to answer the charge, I was hastily, anxiously silenced. “Don’t tell me, please. Honestly, don’t tell me anything. I’m not reading them, so please don’t tell me.”

Time for one final question, then. Once the tour is over, and the double act put to rest, it must be tempting to think: right, I’ve reached a certain stage in my life (Saunders turns fifty in July), I’ve been at the top of my game for twenty-five years, my daughters will soon be leaving home, and so maybe I don’t need to work so hard any more. Wouldn’t it be nice just to stay down in Devon, keeping chickens, and maybe opening the occasional village fete?

“Well, if we were that rich, then yes – but we only work for the BBC! I think you’ve read too many of those lists! But I don’t think I’d be tempted, anyway. I enjoy my job, and I think it’s a really good, fun job. We’re very lucky, and as long as we can do it, then we’ll keep on doing it.”

This article is the cover story in today's EG colour supplement, inside the Nottingham Evening Post.

(Photo taken on February 5, 2007 by Bryan Ledgard)

Labels: celebs, comedy, eveningpost, interviews

For Lorna Luft, a show business veteran of over thirty-five years' standing, Songs My Mother Taught Me - a two hour tribute to her mother Judy Garland - represents both a reconciliation and a celebration. Having spent years trying to outrun the shadow cast by Garland's legendary status, Luft has reached a point in her life where she can publicly express her gratitude, and salute her late mother's remarkable genius.

Backed by a ten piece orchestra, with British husband Colin Freeman directing the music, Lorna took us on a journey of fond remembrance. The show started with Garland serenading her young daughter on the screen, before a beaming, effusive Luft took to the stage in a sparkling silver gown.

In less capable hands, performing a live duet with one's dead mother could have could have been a recipe for toe-curling tastelessness. Thanks to Luft's experience and judgement, the risk paid off, the two voices harmonising deftly and tenderly.

The show's accent remained firmly on the positive, as Lorna regaled us with comic anecdotes that revealed Judy as quite the outrageous prankster, rather than the tragic figure of popular imagining (a misconception which apparently drove both mother and daughter "nuts" with exasperation). Tribute was also paid to the "Rat Pack" - a title which Garland bestowed upon them in jest - and in particular to Luft's godfather Frank Sinatra and surrogate uncle Sammy Davis Junior.

The highlight of the second half was a marathon medley which traced Garland's journey from inauspicious beginnings (Born In A Trunk) to her 1961 triumph at Carnegie Hall. Finally, and in preference to appropriating Judy's signature tune Over The Rainbow for herself, Lorna opted to intertwine the archive recording with her own Shining Star, to richly moving effect. It was a fitting climax to a bravura display of classic show business values, lovingly staged and beautifully sung.

Photo taken, despite a fair deal of "BUT OH NO I COULDN'T POSSIBLY!" protestation from myself (after all, you know how I hate to push myself forward), by Sarah R, at the CD signing which followed the show.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

Considering her mother is Judy Garland and her half-sister is Liza Minnelli, I could be forgiven for expecting gushing over-exuberance and plenty of "fabulous, darling!" - but no. Instead, Lorna Luft turned out to be sensible, grounded, business-like, with no illusions - and equally, with no bitterness at being somewhat eclipsed by the showbiz legends within her family. Now read on...


(Photo of Lorna Luft taken at the Hollywood Bowl by npdxbear, September 23rd 2007.)

Tell us about your current tour, Songs My Mother Taught Me. I gather that this tells the story of your mother Judy Garland’s life in words and music?

Yes, it’s a two hour show of me telling you about my legacy. It uses screens; it has multimedia; there are stories; it’s how I grew up. It’s honest, which is why I think the audiences have been spectacular. They’ve laughed, they’ve cried; I wish I had the Kleenex concession! At Chichester, there were three standing ovations. I’m incredibly grateful. Someone said to me that “we were taken over the emotional runway of your life”.

Does the show deal with your own relationship with your mother?

Of course; that’s what it is. There’s a long medley at the end, which talks about how she grew up. But this is mainly about how I grew up.

Do we see and hear your mother on the screen? Are there duets?

Yes, there are. So it’s very personal, very funny… and I have a fantastic 11-piece orchestra.

Are all of the songs taken from your mother’s repertoire?

Yes, these are all her songs. It took me a very long time to do this – but then I don’t believe that you really get to know your mother or father until you’re in your forties. I don’t think you know them in your twenties or your thirties. In your forties, you’ve probably had children, and you’re at an age where you can look into your heritage, and really find out more and understand more about yourself. I’m 55 now, so it took me a long time.

I think there comes a time, especially if there was a difficult relationship, when you can see your parents through an adult’s eyes, and you’re prepared to give them a break. You stop being angry, and blaming them for things which you thought they hadn’t done right. You can see where the weaknesses may have come from.

I think you have more of an understanding, and I think in your forties you learn the most important lesson, and that is to forgive. You don’t need to forget; but you learn to forgive.

It’s one of the most empowering things you can do, as well. It sets you free.

Absolutely.

What personal qualities do you think you have inherited from your mother?

I know I’ve inherited her sense of humour. I’ve also inherited her work ethic. I show up on time; I hit the marks; I do the show at 110%. And that’s what she did. When she was on a stage, when she was on a movie set, when she was working: you saw 110%. And that’s something that’s lacking in today’s young artists. They have the opportunity sometimes to lip-synch, and a lot of artists today have the opportunity to get away with a lot of stuff that I find to be pretty shocking. I wouldn’t dare – dare! – subject an audience to it.

I’ve noticed that with some of the arena shows that I’ve seen. It can be surprising how many corners people will cut, and how much time they will spend off-stage.

Well, I was so pleased, because I just met this lovely, lovely girl, Melanie C. She invited me to the last Spice Girls concert at the O2. So I went, and I met all of the girls, and all of their families, and all of their kids – it was really lovely backstage. And I have to say that they gave 110%, and they were singing live, and it was so wonderful. It was absolutely great.

So there was a real warmth between them as individuals?

Yeah, and they did a whole tribute to their mothers. Melanie C even wrote me an e-mail the next day, saying “I thought you might like the show!” (Laughs)

That’s cool. So in what ways would you say you were most different from your mother?

I have a very good sense of reality. I really don’t like sycophants around me.

Was that a problem for her, do you think?

Oh yes. And I don’t like the people who come into my dressing room and start with all of the over-the-top praise. I shy away from that.

Maybe they think you have a more fragile ego than you actually do? They may think it’s required, in order to put you in a good place.

When my husband – who is also my musical director – comes in, he gives me notes. I appreciate that, because it means that I can improve. I don’t respect somebody who comes in and says that it was “the amazing thing I’ve ever seen”. That’s what’s different: I have a reality check. My manager was here earlier, and we had to go over some things. He knows: just cut to the chase. Just give me the bottom line of what’s going on, reality-wise. Then I can handle it. I’m not saying you have to be brutal or mean, but if you start to sugar-coat something then I’m going to see right through it.

I would imagine that the question that you’ve been asked most often in interviews over the years is whether you feel in the shadow of your mother. It must get tedious sometimes – but by doing this particular show, are you perhaps coming to terms with your position, as it relates to her legacy?

I would say that I was coming to terms with my legacy and celebrating it. It took me a long time to embrace it, to be grateful, and to say thank you, because I ran away from it for so long.

Until this morning, I had no idea that you went off and sang with Blondie…

Yeah! I died my hair purple, and sang rock and roll, and did all sorts of stuff. I sang on Dreaming, and I did a bunch of stuff on Eat to the Beat.

Dreaming is my favourite single of all time. In some ways, it captures everything about what it is to be a teenager.

She’s a lovely girl, Debbie Harry. She’s just a really really lovely, talented girl.

So you went kind of rock and roll for a while there?

Oh, I did everything. Everything that I could do to find my footing. The shadow was always there, and I kept trying to outrun it. But you’re not going to outrun your shadow. You’ve got to sit yourself down and say: I have to deal with this.

There has also been a renewed interest in your mother’s work, thanks to Rufus Wainwright’s exact re-creation of her 1961 Carnegie Hall show. Towards the end of his show, you guested on a couple of songs. Did you appear on every show of the tour?

We did New York, London, Paris, and L.A. together. Rufus is a very talented artist, and a very nice man. He and I talked at length, when he first wanted to do this, about what this all meant to him. He told me that it came from his heart, because of the despair and the depths of devastation that he felt after 9/11. He felt that he had really seen the horrors of what people could do to one another – and he put my mom’s Carnegie Hall album on, and it gave him hope.

Are there particular songs which stand out, which you think he does particularly well?

I think it’s more the feeling of the show. Vocally he’s not as strong, because he has his own vocal style and he’s not used to singing this kind of material. But the heart behind it is what stands out.

I think that’s true. I’ve heard the Carnegie Hall show that’s on the CD, and I’ve watched the London show that’s on the DVD, and he seems that much more polished by the time that we get to the London show. It’s a more controlled performance, but the emotion of the New York performance is also great to witness. I think that the song which really stands out for me is when he does Noel Coward’s If Love Were All. I think he was born to sing that. The whole show seems to lift at that point.

It’s also that he’s taking my mother’s name into pop culture. I think it’s really important that it goes on. The week after he did the Carnegie Hall show, my mother’s Carnegie Hall album spiked through the roof. There’s a whole new generation that maybe only knew her as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and didn’t know the performer – so they’ve now gone out and learned to appreciate the incredible live performer that she was.

What’s coming up for you after this tour finishes? What other projects have you got on the horizon?

I might go back to Los Angeles in mid-February. Around the 18th, I’m doing a concert with my friend Michael Feinstein in Palm Springs. After the concert, I’ll drive back to Los Angeles and get on a plane to Sydney. I’m going to Australia for about two weeks, on a promotional tour for the CD of Songs My Mother Taught Me. Then I come back, take a couple of weeks off, and then go back to Australia for two months, on tour.

Just missing their summer, unfortunately…

Listen: there’s a writers’ strike in Los Angeles, and there are so many people who are out of work. I am so grateful to be working. The other night, somebody looked at me and said “Ma’am, thank God you can sing!” (Laughs)

That’s really starting to bite now, is it? People are having difficulty getting the work?

What people don’t understand is that L.A. is a one-industry town. My friend Carol Thatcher took me to tea with her mom the other day, and Mrs. Thatcher and I were talking about the strike. I said that there was a trickle-down effect. When the writers walked out, the BBC and Sky news would say that “the writers are on strike”, but nobody ever understood that this has now cost L.A. over 300 million dollars. The make-up artists, the wardrobe people, and every single person that works on a television show now don’t have jobs.

Do the writers have a just cause?

Yeah! It’s all about downloading. You can download these television shows, and the writers aren’t getting paid! We knew that this strike was going to happen; we knew that the writers were not fooling around. They have said, over and over: we’re prepared to walk out for a year.

There has to come a point where someone’s got to start negotiating…

That’s what Mrs. Thatcher said! I said, Mrs Thatcher, nobody’s even talking to one another, and she said, oh, they can’t act like children!

But she was known as one of the toughest negotiators of all. It’s interesting that she was saying that’s what had to happen.

That’s what she said. And I said: you’re absolutely right. Carol Thatcher came to my show in Chichester. She’s a very smart, very bright, very well-read woman. And she said: well, this is just ridiculous.

You know, the trickle-down effect has even gotten to my daughter. My daughter, who’s seventeen, called me up before Christmas and said: Mom, I got a job in this big florists’ shop in Los Angeles, and I’m gonna make money for Christmas. She called me up two weeks later and said: Mom, I don’t have a job. I said: what happened? She said: all the Christmas parties were cancelled because of the strike.

Really? Wow, I hadn’t realised…

Think about it! All of the caterers, all of the limo drivers, and all of them – they don’t have jobs!

And is this damaging the cause for the writers? Are people beginning to turn against them, as their livelihoods are threatened?

I don’t know, but basically the producers have got to sit down with the writers. George Clooney said on television that they should lock them in a room, and not let them out until they come to an agreement. I’m with George Clooney! Lock ‘em in a room! Twelve Angry Men, I don’t care! Lock ‘em in a room!

Absolutely! I want Season Four of Desperate Housewives! It’s gone on too long!

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

miketd: My inner thirteen-year old Gong fan is all of a-quiver, as I've bagged a last minute chat with Steve Hillage later today. Cosmic!
12:20 PM February 01, 2008 from web

miketd: Flipping heck, I've been blogrolled by Alison Moyet. (Oh come on, you LOVE it that I constantly name-drop. I do it for YOU, you know.)
01:28 PM February 01, 2008 from web

pal#1: @miketd: What a coincidence, only the other day Annie Lennox and I were discussing the impact of RSS/Atom feeds on traditional web stats.
02:17 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#2: @miketd - I know! I got fanmail from 1980s TV presenter D****** D****** just the other day, asking advice on tip top blogging! Bless'em!
02:46 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#3: @miketd. Never mind them. As I was telling Posh last night, they're just jealous.
10:03 AM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#4: No Nelson, I will NOT promote your book 'Long Walk to Freedom' on my blog!!! Some people...!
03:03 PM February 01, 2008 from web

pal#2: @pal#3 - Yeah, David and the boys (Romeo etc) were saying you told her that over brunch. I said you were just trying to make her feel better.
03:09 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to pal#3

pal#1: @pal#2: You must have caught that cold from Brooklyn, he was really stuffed up the other day. Britney reckons Preston's got it too.
04:29 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to pal#2

Labels: celebs, community, twitter

Well, this was fun! Speaking to me from the less than glamorous surroundings of a conference room in the Regents Park Novotel, Boy George was every bit as sharp, engaging, witty and opinionated as I'd hoped. Mercifully, he was also genial and eager to please, with a ready (and even slighly nervous) laugh and the Bitch Factor set to a gentle simmer. Apart from his habit of launching into the answers before I'd even finished asking the questions (cheeky mare, does he KNOW who I AM?), he was an utter delight to interview.

A slightly cleaned up version of this piece is the cover story in today's EG. Here, as per usual, is the extended blog remix.


Your forthcoming UK tour is the first in a very long while, isn’t it?

Yes, the Culture Club reunion tour [in 1998] was the last time. I’ve done shows here and there, but things really started again last year, with a few London shows. They were really just to get the feeling again, as I feel this is a good time to go out and play.

Is the show mostly going to be old material, or will it be a mixture of old and new?

It’s not a nostalgia show. It’s not like the Here and Now tour: it’s more like there and now. (Laughs) But I always include my hits in my shows – always. I’ve never, ever toured without doing at least some of those songs, because they’re important. When I go and see someone like David Bowie, I always want to hear things I know. I know what it’s like to be in the audience. So it’s not going to be a self-indulgent, tortuous show. It’s going to be a good show.

Are you going to be faithful to the originals, or do you like mucking around with them?

We’re doing a slightly different version of Church of the Poison Mind, which is a bit more heavy metal. It’s not that different to the original; the bass is just a bit more rattly. We do play around with some of the songs, but we always stick to the melody. It won’t be that weird!

I like the title of the tour: Songs That Make You Dance And Cry. A lot of my favourite music makes me dance and cry – hopefully at the same time.

I just think that I work in those two fields. Either I’m being quite melancholy, with things like Generations of Love, or quite joyous, with things like Bow Down Mister.


Going back to the Culture Club days: a lot of the lyrics from that period dealt with your relationship with Jon Moss, but how aware was Jon at the time that the songs were about him? Karma Chameleon is quite a bitchy song, for instance.

Oh, he knew! (Laughs) I used to talk to him about it all the time. He was very aware. Some of those songs were also quite avant-garde and ambiguous, although they got more direct later on. A lot of people have asked me “What’s a karma chameleon?”, but obviously I’ve explained it over the years, so people know more about it now. But there were lots of songs that were very loving as well!

Well, I didn’t get the significance of “you come and go” for about fifteen years; we can be a bit slow. (Laughter) So how did you feel when Culture Club attempted to plan a second reunion tour with a different singer?

I was kind of annoyed, actually. I thought it was really cheeky. If I’d have done the same thing, they’d have sued me. It just proved to me once again that my motivation was entirely different to theirs. Because my thing is not about career; it’s about creating things that I care about.

At the moment, we seem to be stuck in the middle of an Eighties revival that won’t go away, and Eighties music has influenced an awful lot of 21st century pop.

One of the interesting things about the Eighties is that at the time, no one liked it. Everyone hated the Eighties! We were universally slagged, in every way. We were just vacuous people with big hairdos, destroying the ozone layer. There was nothing worthwhile about any of us: we were called Thatcher’s children. Whereas in actual fact, Culture Club were really a follow-on from punk. I’d been an original punk; that’s where I came from. So it’s interesting that now, people are dealing with this kind of pop revisionism, and saying: oh yeah, it wasn’t so bad. Because things are so formulaic now. A lot of the TV talent shows, that have now saturated the pop scene, used to be seen more as Saturday night “variety” shows.

Well, we’ve always had winners of talent shows making the charts…

Yeah, like Opportunity Knocks – but those people weren’t pop stars. Sometimes they were, but there was a separation. But now you’ve got “variety”, and you’ve got Amy Winehouse, and that’s it! That’s the only hope at the moment! (Laughs)

Amy Winehouse is our only hope?

She’s the person who has totally inspired me to get back on the road. When I hear the music, it makes me feel something. It makes me sad; it makes me emotional. A lot of the music that we’ve been hearing in the last few years has been so bitchy – “I’m gonna steal your boyfriend; don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me” – and it’s not personal. It’s clever, it’s witty, it’s designed for radio – but there’s no feeling in it.

It’s not about human relationships as they really are. It’s a commercialised version.

Exactly. And one of the complicated things about Amy is that on the one hand, she’s got all her problems, and people want to condemn her for that, but on the other hand she’s a f**king genius! (Laughs) What can you do? It puts everyone in a really difficult situation. You can’t write her off, because she’s incredible. At the end of the day, she’s expressing what a lot of us can’t express – and that’s the sign of a great singer. If you hear a song on the radio like Love Is A Losing Game or You Know I’m No Good, and it touches your heart, you know that she’s doing something right.


During the late Eighties, there was a whole generation of openly gay pop stars as role models, if you like. There was you, Andy Bell, Jimi Somerville, Marc Almond, Neil Tennant…

I don’t think of myself as a gay pop star. There are gay pop stars who are totally obsessed with being gay, but I’ve never been one of those. I love straight people; it takes two of them to make one of us! I’ve never had that kind of separatist attitude about “gay” and “straight”. I love being gay and I support gay culture, but I don’t think of myself as being a solely gay artist.

Well, I think some people would have got a message from some of your songs. There was the Jesus Loves You period for instance, with songs like No Clause 28 and Generations Of Love…

Of course there was that sensibility, but I wouldn’t want to just make music that was only targeted towards gay people.

Well, sure. But it’s interesting that the whole phenomenon of the “gay pop star” has more or less disappeared. I suppose we’ve got Jake Shears and Beth Ditto – but we don’t need it any more, do we?

We live in this kind of culture now which pretends to accept everything. So there’s this kind of pseudo-acceptance of everything that’s different. But the reality is: it’s not true.

You think? Actually, that’s quite jaundiced…! (Laughter)

Today’s gay pop stars are out of the closet, but they don’t express anything about their sexuality. They don’t ever use the word “he” in their songs. They think they don’t need to, because they think everybody loves them, and they think they’re all accepted. You see, they’ve been lulled into this false sense of security! (Laughs) When I write a song about a boy, I’m not thinking about the radio or any of that; I’m thinking about what I feel. You’ll see that in my show.


You emerged as a major club DJ in the Nineties, and there’s another generation who might link you with the whole heyday of handbag house, superclubs, fluffy bras and silver trousers.

(Indignantly) I’m not a handbag house DJ; I’m a house DJ. I’m very purist; I like soulful, funky music. I drop classic songs in clubs, and if people fold their arms then I just think they’re losers. Even with dance music, kids don’t seem to have any sense of history. They don’t seem to understand where it all came from.

Yeah, if something is three years old, then it’s a “club classic”.

Or even two weeks old. If I drop something really old, like CeCe Rogers’ Someday, the crowd’s like, what the f**k’ is this? It does happen!

I would imagine you bristle at being lumped in with the genre of “Celebrity DJ”…

I’m not a celebrity; I’m a star. Celebrities are people who turn up at parties with expensive handbags, and they don’t do anything. You’d never catch a celebrity sweeping the streets of New York. You couldn’t call Naomi Campbell a celebrity, could you?

You could call her many things, before you call her a celebrity. (Laughter) As regards your more recent musical career, it can be difficult to follow what you’re up to. You don’t make it easy for us!

Obviously, the hardcore fans know everything that I’m doing – but the general public don’t. That’s why I’m doing this tour. The whole point is to say: this is what I do. I see this as a way of re-establishing myself as an artist, and reminding people that’s what I am. And also re-establishing my reputation as a human being, which I think has been pretty torn apart over the last few years. I’m not a bitch; I’m very romantic! (Laughs)

You have also chosen to opt out of a lot of the music business games. EMI recently announced that they intend to shed up to 2000 of their staff. Is the record business f**ked?

Yeah, but it has f**ked itself. It hasn’t invested in talent, or in anything that can last. And so, in a way, that’s why it can’t last. You’re constantly hearing that someone is “the new Amy Winehouse” or "the new Joni Mitchell", and so on. Bollocks to that. Whenever there’s a successful artist, they just try and create twenty more of them. It’s just boring. Why do record companies sign them?

EMI are saying that they now want to use focus groups to decide who to sign next.

Well, you know what? It may sound like a really terrible thing to say, but the audience should never dictate the art form.

Absolutely. They would never have signed The Beatles, for instance…

You’d never have had Ziggy Stardust. You’d never have had anything great. It sounds snobby, but it’s true. The bigger the crowd gets, the more people you have to please. It’s like when you’re DJ-ing a massive gig; there’s no way you can make everyone happy. There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like what you do. So if you’re going to have focus groups… well, God help us. It’s just so tragic. What we need is some A&R people with some balls, and some record company executives who love music!

It’s the same with radio. I’m sorry to be nostalgic, but if you go back to the Seventies and the Eighties, we had all those characters like Tony Blackburn, who actually were into music. Now you’ve just got all these trendy little gits with good haircuts and Northern accents, who think they’re really cool. And they know nothing! They’re all being fed by the trendy magazines, and it gets on my nerves.

You’re in danger of being asked to go on that show Grumpy Old Men, if there’s much more of this.

Hahahahaha! I’d go on willingly! What’s the fee?!

Photos taken at the Bush Hall, London, June 9th 2006 by neil365, and reproduced under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(Photo taken by giando, July 3rd 2007.)

Generally speaking, the seasoned showbiz pros tend to be the easiest to interview. No strangers to the rules of the game, they are the ones most likely to give generous, articulate, eminently quotable answers. Deploying their natural charm from the off, they will quickly establish a friendly rapport.

All rules of thumb have their exceptions, and Dionne Warwick has not always given her interrogators the smoothest of rides. Talking on the phone to EG earlier this week, she was certainly never less than courteous – but it was a cool, distanced, rather formal courtesy, which left you in no doubt that telephone interviews are not exactly her idea of fun. It took a concerted charm offensive to soften her guard – but as the interview progressed, her tone grew warmer, her answers more fulsome, and her laughter more frequent.

In recent years, Dionne has become something of a regular visitor to this city, which has been chosen as the first destination on her forthcoming British tour. Clearly, we must be doing something right. “Nottingham has always been very good for me, of course”, she explained. “It’s like most of the UK, which has always been wonderfully receptive.”

On this tour, which goes out under the title My Music and Me, the music will be interspersed with anecdotes from the singer’s 47 years in show business. “You’ll be getting my life story through my music”, she revealed, but she seemed reluctant to be drawn further.

Would this be “from beginning to end”, I enquired, pressing for a little more detail. “From beginning to now”, she corrected, smoothing over the gaffe (and subsequent stuttering apology) with a light peal of laughter.

Naturally, no Dionne Warwick show would be complete without a selection of the Bacharach/David material with which she earned her reputation in the 1960s. Forty years on, these finely crafted classics have been “updated and brought into the 21st century, but primarily you’ll be getting them as they were first recorded. I still enjoy singing them. They’re a big part of me.” The songs were also written specifically for Dionne’s voice, rather than being plucked from a pre-existing pool: an enviable position for any artist to be in.

For many of us, the likes of Walk On By, Anyone Who Had A Heart and Do You Know The Way To San Jose have the power to evoke a kind of lost golden age. Although too much nostalgia can be deceptive at times, Dionne is happy to help us indulge for a while: “It’s always wonderful to remember the good times in your life.” However, when asked to identify her own golden age, the reply was unexpected and somewhat puzzling: “I’ve been truly blessed, but I think I’m still heading towards that golden age.” As to whether she could imagine anyone looking back on the hit music of the 21st century as a golden age: “Not too readily”. The knowing chuckle which followed spoke volumes.

One of Warwick’s greatest qualities as a vocalist is the restrained elegance which she brings to her interpretations. The emotions are clearly expressed, but without resorting to the sort of over-elaborate trills and cadenzas which have infected so many of today’s aspiring divas. Again, a diplomatic reply: “That is their way of approaching things, apparently – and it’s not something that I would practice.”

A new gospel album, Why We Sing, is due out soon. Although many wouldn’t associate Dionne with the gospel tradition, it was in fact the music that she started out with: singing at the local Methodist church from childhood onwards, before forming a vocal quartet (The Gospelaires) at the age of eighteen. Her first big break in the music industry followed a couple of years later.

“I was doing a background session with the Drifters, performing a song [Mexican Divorce] by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard. Burt approached me to do more background work, and demonstration records of songs that he was writing with Hal David. I agreed, and that’s how it all began.” The new three-way partnership soon led to Warwick’s signing as a solo artist, and a debut single (Don’t Make Me Over) that became an instant national hit.

Following such swift success, when did Dionne first realise that her career was secure? “Never. That would have been a little presumptuous, I think! The business is so fickle, and it’s always what the listening ear decides that they want to be listening to. You can’t second-guess people’s thoughts and emotions, and how they happen to feel about a certain sound.”

Another key stage in most artists’ careers comes when the hit-making period is over. Dionne had a longer run than most – indeed, only Aretha Franklin has placed more solo female hits in the Billboard Hot 100 – but how easy did she find it to adjust when the hits began to peter out?

“I happen to be a realist. I approach not only my recording career, but my life generally, as it is. Life has its ups and downs, but it also gave me opportunities to do some of the things that normal people do, as opposed to running around through airports and onto planes. I had an opportunity to start my family, and to realise that there are other priorities that take precedence.”

Although this 67-year old veteran has shown no signs of slowing down, that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t been thinking about it, with some measure of anticipation. “Soon I will be. This is 47 years now, and I’m looking at putting a little bit of a trim on it, very very soon. At this time in my career, it’s time to start thinking about that.”

With these remarks in mind, that earlier comment about a golden age yet to come makes a lot more sense – and perhaps, with imminent retirement looming ever closer, it might also explain that initial frostiness. Why should she have to play the game, when the match is nearly over and won?

That said, there is another key aspect of Warwick’s public life which shows no signs of slowing down. “I’m still supportive of the AIDS issue. Unfortunately it hasn’t gone away, and I made a complete promise that I would stay on board. I likened it to a train ride: we must stay until we get to the very end, and everything is the way it is supposed to be. We have to eradicate it; we really do.”

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

This interview was originally scheduled for the Evening Post, in order to promote the touring show David Gest is Nuts: My Life as a Musical. As the entire tour was subsequently and indefinitely cancelled, the interview never made it into print – so here’s more or less the full transcript, which I’m bringing to you as a Troubled! Diva! Exclusive!

God knows what you’re going to make of this one. I shall present it to you without further comment. Yes, I think that's the best idea...

---

How’s it going there in Nottingham?

I had a bit of a rubbish morning, and I need cheering up. So hopefully you’ll do that for me.

Oh, I’ll make you laugh.

Good stuff! Well, first and foremost, I want to ask you about this forthcoming show which you’re bringing to Nottingham. It sounds like it might be one of the most extraordinary shows this city has ever seen. It’s essentially a comedy musical based on your life, but with a lot more besides. Am I right?

Yeah, it’s a musical with comedy and dancing and singing, and it’s kind of a show that you really want to come to if you’ve had a few drinks, or on ecstasy, a joint, or absolutely out of your mind and like to laugh the night away, or dance the night away, because that’s what you’re going to do. It’s really a ball. You’ve got such a great cast. You’ve got K-Ci and Jojo, Shalamar, Coolio, Candi Staton, Martha Wash of the Weather Girls, Gloria Gaynor, Peabo Bryson, Deniece Williams, Billy Paul and Patrice Rushen.

It’s an incredible line-up. I notice that all the artists are from that soul/funk/r&b tradition. That must be the music that’s closest to your heart, I guess.

Yeah. And then there’s characters like the Little People of Davidland: eight midgets, who travel with me for good luck. Every time I see one, it’s good luck for a day. If I see two, it’s good luck for a week. But eight makes the month work fine. Then I have the Chinese Girls With Herpes…

What on earth are they?

Well, they were my charity when I was in the jungle. Girls with herpes in the mouth and in the vagina. What I do is that I raise money for them, on the side – because there’s 75,000 Chinese girls with herpes, in different places. Some get it from sucking cock, some get it from other things. Some just get it from not having safe sex. So I try to help them, because I love them so much. And then I have the Tess Tickell Dancers. Tess Tickell is one of the great dancers of all time, and she put together a troupe of dancers, which are so exciting. They’re – what’s the word – ambidextrious? They’re like contortionists, but they can actually have sex in fifteen different positions, all at once. They can use every orifice to its fullest extent.

We have never seen the like on a Nottingham stage, I tell you. But there’s so many artists appearing with you, how are you going to fit them all in? Are we going to be there until midnight?

No, it’s a two and a half hour show. And I have the Von Snatch Family Singers. You’ve heard of the Von Trapps, but the Von Snatches sing “Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every byway, till you’re on your knees.”

[after a shocked pause] That’s a significant departure.

Do you follow?

I think I follow, yeah.

Well, you have to be on your knees to use the snatch. Right?

So I’m taking it that this is a show with adult content? This doesn’t sound like a family-friendly experience…

I don’t use any foul words. I use foccacia. I use very good language, and am on my better behaviour. And so the children come, and I tell stories, and there’s no foul language or nudity. It’s uniqueness. You have to see it to believe it.

I’m trying to work out what your role is going to be on the night itself. Even your own best friend Michael Jackson has publicly stated, and I quote, “David can’t sing and can’t dance.” So what can you offer us as a stage performer? How do you fit in?

I’m singing now, and I’m dancing, and I do a double or triple flip with Deniece Williams. We do the Footloose dance for Let’s Hear It For The Boy. With Marsha Wash we do that song, Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now), with little midgets. I go [sings] “EVERYBODY DANCE NOW! OOH, BA, BOOM!” and I get the little midgets, and they bring me good luck, and then I jump in the air and she catches me, and I’m on top, and she’s on the bottom, because it would be a hell of a hard time if it ended up the other way.

Well, she’s a well-proportioned woman. I’m sure she can cope.

Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of family entertainment where you never know what’s coming next.

Is it loosely based on events in your own life? Is it like a life story?

Well, I tell the story of my life, you see clips from the jungle, and you see clips of Michael Jackson and myself, and I tell about my wonderful marriage, ha ha ha!

I wondered whether that was going to come up…

It does. It’s very short. But I tell how Gloria Gaynor and Candi Staton were so good to me when I had this head concussion from Miss Minnelli, and how they came over when I was getting eighty shots, and they gave me the impetus to go on.

I Will Survive, indeed…

Yes – and look what’s happened. I had my own three shows; she didn’t.

She is actually performing in the same venue, two months later.

I know. I’ll warm it up for her! But she doesn’t have my whole cast of characters.

No, I think she’s just… she’s just got herself. And a few musicians. Well, are you going to cover the more painful aspects of your life? It’s more of a celebration, I guess. We’re not going to get: boo-hoo, my unhappy childhood, and all that…

It’s more of a celebration. I talk about it a little bit. I talk about what you can learn from something bad, how something good comes out of it. It’s really a fun time. I talk about my cousins, I talk about the people in my life who have influenced me, and the things that have been so important to me.

A lot of people in this country only really got to know you after your stint in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, and the light entertainment shows which followed on from that. So they’ve seen a lot of you goofing around, and not taking yourself too seriously. Because we haven’t seen the various award shows and TV spectaculars that you’ve produced in the States for decades, people may not realise that you have that professional background. So they may be expecting a bit of a shambles, and maybe they need to understand the background that you have.

Well, they’ll get to see a little bit of the Michael Jackson special, and they’re going to see some things I did with Whitney, and they’ll get to see clips, and they’ll get to see a whole celebration of all of us, singing together and dancing. They’re going to see me doing things they’d never expect. But you know, it’s all done in fun. It’s just good, wholesome entertainment, with a twist to the wild and weird. But then, you know, I’m nuts. So that’s what you’re getting: David Gest Is Nuts.

Well, you have great taste in guest artists, I have to say. There are a lot of my favourite artists appearing.

Oh yeah, who’s your favourite?

Shalamar. I saw them playing in Nottingham twenty-five years ago, and they were fantastic.

I’m singing with them.

Which song are you doing?

[sings] “I can make you feel good…”

Wonderful. And Patrice Rushen is a big favourite of mine.

Isn’t she good? And she doesn’t perform any more. I called her and said: Patrice, get off your tushie, and come on over. She can sing Forget Me Nots for the people, which Donny Osmond said was one of the ten greatest records ever made. He was at my wedding too. Who wasn’t? I had eighty people perform at my wedding.

Oh well, this is small scale by comparison.

But I wasn’t an entertainer then. I was just a mealy old producer.

I’m curious about that change of image. I was watching an interview clip from about four years ago, when you were still married to Liza. During that interview, you came across very differently to the person that we see today. You had a very conservative suit on, and you were quite reserved and softly spoken. Now we’re seeing your extrovert, almost rock and roll side. Has the person on the inside changed, as well as the public image?

Totally. Inside, I’m a twenty-four year old wild person. I hang out in Camden. My best friends are Matt Willis, Alfie Allen – Lily Allen’s brother – and my best friend here is Mathieu Flamini, who’s on the Arsenal team. I’m the mascot for Arsenal this year. I go to all the games. I’m friends with Gallas the captain, and they made me their mascot.

So it’s a real lifestyle change that’s happened.

Yeah, and I will never wear suits and ties again. I don’t do that for anybody. They ask me and I say: I’m sorry, I don’t have it. I wear very David kind of outfits, that kind of make a statement, and jeans, and tennis shoes, and that’s who I am now. I live the life. There’s been four parts to my life. There was the part with the movie stars, when my best friends were Robert Mitchum, and Gene Kelly, and Bette Davis, and Ginger Rogers, and Joseph Cotton, and Anthony Perkins, and Glenn Ford, and…

So it’s like you’re growing up in reverse, really.

Yes. I am a nutcase.

And you’ve also moved from being behind the scenes to being the person on the stage. Was there a frustrated performer inside you all the time?

Never. I don’t know what happened to me in the jungle. It was like someone cast a spell on me. I came out of there, and all of a sudden, I’m just this outgoing person: talking to the fans, talking to people, telling jokes, just having a great time. I don’t know what happened. But I transformed into maybe who I’ve always been and never knew it.

Do you spend most of your time in the UK these days?

I live here in Cambridge, and I just moved into my flat in Hampstead two days ago.

Have you had your first winter in Cambridge yet? It’s bitter. The wind blows straight in off the North Sea and across the fens; you’ll want to invest in a woolly hat.

I think I’d better get one. And also I’d better get something for my balls, so I don’t freeze to death.

Yeah, you’ll need that in Cambridge. I also want to ask you about fame, because you’ve spent most of your life in the company of extremely famous people, while not being famous yourself for most of that time. Most of us rarely come into social contact with a star, and when we do, it can be a nerve-wracking experience. We can become very self-conscious. I wondered what advice you would give to a non-famous person who finds themselves in the presence of a star?

Well, my philosophy is this. We all go to the bathroom the same way; we all pull down our pants. So there’s no difference between you, in my eyes, who writes for the paper, and the guy who is a dish washer at the local diner, to the person who delivers the papers. I’ve never felt, even throughout my entire life, any superior or any better than anybody. We’re all created equal. Just because you may be in the public eye doesn’t mean that makes you any better or any worse than anyone else. I’m a real stickler about that. You know, we’re here to do something good on this planet, and if we can use our fame to do something good and help other people, then we’re that much more of a mensch. You might shine in life, but I never look at it as social status. I’m not impressed with celebrity. I am impressed with writers. Not writers for papers; I’m talking about, like, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If he was in front of me, I probably would go up and say: I’m your biggest fan.

That’s the difficulty for us non-famous people, you see. We wonder if we should say: wow, I’m your biggest fan, and start telling them how wonderful they are, and risk flattering – or do we play it cool, and run the risk of looking like we’re stand-offish or not bothered. These are the sort of thoughts we have. We think we know the famous person, because we’ve seen their public image – but actually, we don’t know them at all.

I love it when somebody comes up and tells me that they love me, or that I make them laugh. To me, that’s a thrill. So I’d rather people say it, than not say something. When you write an article, don’t you love it when somebody says: wow, what a great article that was? It’s better than hearing somebody say nothing! We’re human! If someone tells me: oh, I don’t like it when I get comments from people – bullshit! We all like to know that we’re loved, and that what we’re doing makes people happy. It makes you feel good, and you want to do even better.

Well, that was my last question, David. Thanks very much for that, and I can’t wait to see this show.

Come backstage and say hello!

Thank you.

OK. Tell the people who’s going to be on the show! They don’t know! So they know they can dance the night away and have a party!

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews

Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, Thursday December 27. A marathon show deserved a marathon review, basically. Besides, all of that furious scribbling helped keep me awake...


(Photo of Ken Dodd taken in November 2005 by pixieclaire001)

19:06. Brandishing his trademark tickling sticks, Ken Dodd comes bounding onto the stage, greeting us with a cheery "Ey-up!" This week marks his fiftieth anniversary in show business, we are soon told. This is a little strange, as Dodd's first ever professional engagement was actually in 1954 -- at the old Empire Theatre, where the Royal Concert Hall now stands. But this is no time to sweat the details.

19.13. Ken has long been known for his marathon shows, and he wastes no time in taunting us with the prospect of being stuck in our seats until the small hours. "Don't worry about the buses and taxis -- there's always the milk floats!", he quips, milking our unease for maximum laughs.

19.25. Noting the average age of his audience (which is somewhere well in advance of sixty, despite a sprinkling of younger faces), Ken promises us two intervals: "One for lager, and one for Complan". We should be so lucky...

19:47. The keyboardist has yet to arrive, having been held up on the A50. ("Don't worry, we'll add it on to the end of the show.") The drummer is holding his own, though -- even prompting his boss on a couple of occasions, when the odd word slips his memory. Unable to take his scheduled musical breaks, Dodd is having to busk it a bit, making the show up as he goes along -- and although he's mostly doing OK, the strain is starting to show. Last month, Dodd turned eighty. Is the onset of old age finally starting to get to him?

20:05. Finally the keyboardist arrives, the stage hands setting up the equipment around him. With music on the agenda at last, Dodd leaves the stage, and a group of children perform a selection of Christmas carols.

20:14. After a very short burst of comedy, Dodd departs once more, leaving the same children to perform a singalong "wartime" medley. Without much in the way of audience participation, it all falls rather flat -- and with the appearance of his long-term partner Anne Jones, who performs a seemingly endless series of well-worn chestnuts, the evening sinks further still. So Ken gets a twenty-five minute break, even if we don't? You can feel the restlessness building in the aisles.

20:45. He's back, and things aren't going too well. "It's an educational show. When you get out of here tonight, you'll go: well, that's taught me a lesson." My companion rolls his eyes knowingly.

20:53. "There's a special name for what I'm doing now: struggling." You said it, Ken. His delivery is faltering -- not helped by a troublesome and rather fruity cough -- and the laughs simply aren't coming. He's trying to win us back, but it's an uphill struggle. When's the interval, anyway?

21:10. Ken is swapping banter with a poker-faced French maid of advanced years, who speaks with a local accent. The skit goes well enough, but there are still an awful lot of ad-libbed cracks about how quiet we all are. He even starts to take his frustrations out on the venue, "a Portakabin with a hint of mock-Wimpey".

21:19. Ye Gods, it's the Diddymen! We grin and bear it. Spirit of the Blitz, and all that.

21:32. Ken is threatening to cancel the interval and lock the gents' toilets. Frankly, I wouldn't put it past him. There's madness in those eyes tonight.

21:39. A musical tribute to the old masters of 20th century comedy -- Cooper, Chaplin, Askey, Groucho Marx, Max Wall and all the rest of them -- is marred by fluffed lines and ragged delivery. All around the auditorium, legs are being crossed just that little bit more tightly.

22:00. Nearly three hours in, the long awaited interval arrives. We stumble around the surprisingly uncrowded bar area, un-numbing our backsides and generally feeling a little shell-shocked. The beers might not be shifting, but the coffee stand is doing a brisk trade.

22:20. We're back in our seats, along with around 90% of the audience from the first half. The house lights go down, and on comes... a magic act! My companion and I look at each other aghast. Is this how they reward our loyalty? There is a routine with a disappearing lady, which I can't work out -- and a routine with swords and a cabinet, which I work out in seconds.

22:37. The great man is back -- and this time, he's brought a Thermos flask and sandwiches. "Most of you have been reported missing by now", he cries, before engaging various members of the front two rows in conversation.

22:45. "How many children have you got, missus?" It turns out that the lady in question has eight of them. He wasn't expecting this, and seems to dither for a while -- before coming back quite brilliantly. ("It's a good job you sewed that hole up in your husband's pyjamas. Well, you know what they say: a stitch in time saves nine!") The gag brings the house down. Hey, this is more like it.

22:54. There is something of a mini-exodus, as people rush off to catch their last buses, or get out of the car parks before closing time. Undeterred, Dodd is in the middle of a bizarre operatic routine about haddock. It's fast and wordy, and requires split-second timing. To our delight, the old boy pulls it off without a single hitch, to sustained applause. That interval seems to have done all of us the power of good...

23:10. The material is rather more "adult" in nature by now -- but it's merely risqué, and far from smutty. As the subject matter shifts from love-making to hospitals, so the material gets ever more considered and clever, playing to our intellects rather than going for endless quick-fire gags. We're into late night, after-hours territory, and the belly laughs are rolling around the room. Behind me, one lady has almost completely lost it, roaring hysterically at every other word. Next to me, my companion is dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. Four hours in, and the octogenarian comedy legend is in peak form at last. Perhaps the people who left during the interval had got things the wrong way around -- instead of leaving early, they should have arrived late.

23:25. Dickie Mint, the ever-popular ventriloquist's doll, is sporting a guardsman's uniform tonight. Some of his routine is still fresh in our memories from BBC2's Christmas Eve "Ken Dodd Night" -- but plenty of the gags are new, and no-one really minds. With all the quick-fire word-play between Dodd and his cheeky dummy, the famous "no bad language" rule comes very close to being broken -- but in the end, our blushes are spared.

23:40. In between quips ("You know you're entitled to an attendance allowance for staying here?") Ken is reading out dedications from members of the audience. ("We're one step away from turning into sheltered accommodation!") The banter is flowing freely between the performer and the front two rows. The laughs are still rolling, and strange as it might sound, we feel like we could happily stay here all night. Two hours earlier, we couldn't wait for the interval. Now we don't want to leave.

23:55. Looking and sounding twenty years younger than the man who first stepped onto the stage, Dodd is working his way through some of his old hits -- Love Is Like A Violin, Tears -- and working in the odd Johnny Cash impersonation along the way. A final semi-operatic skit sees him in fine voice, every inch the ageless master of his craft, the last member of the music hall generation still standing. We shall never see his like again.

00:06. Bang on the five hour mark, an unashamedly sentimental Absent Friends brings the night to a close. Suddenly, Ken sounds older and frailer again, as he reluctantly ekes out his final moments on stage, not yet quite ready to step back into the shadows.

00:09. A quick burst of his signature tune Happiness, and it is all over. We feel as if we have just scaled the comedy equivalent of the North Face of the Eiger. He'll probably be back this time next year, just as he has been almost every year since 1954. Good old Ken. For many of his ever-loyal audience, the holday season just wouldn't be the same without him.

(First published on the Nottingham Evening Post's website.)

Labels: celebs, comedy, eveningpost, gigs

(An edited version of this interview appears in today's Nottingham Evening Post. This is the extended remix.)


Thanks for speaking to us at this uncomfortably early hour (8:10 am). Are you a morning person?

It depends. I’m heading to work right now, so I have to be awake! I’m in the middle of filming Torchwood, so we’re driving over to Port Talbot at the moment.

Let’s start by talking about your album Another Side, which comes out on Monday. I’d assumed this was your debut solo recording, but it actually turns out to be your fifth, right?

That’s right. My other recordings have all been geared towards the musical theatre crowd, or towards people who are more into Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein – but this is my debut recording for a more mainstream audience. A lot of people don’t know that for the last sixteen years or so, I’ve been doing shows in the West End and Broadway. When I did How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria and Any Dream Will Do, people would come up to me and say: we didn’t know you could sing, and we’d love to hear you sing some more! So it seemed like perfect timing.

You’ve already gone on record as saying that this isn’t an attempt to become a pop star. But you’re releasing an album of pop covers, and presumably you want it to sell well, so I’m a bit confused by that statement.

It’s an album of music that I love, that I’ve released because people want to hear me sing. I’m in no way wanting to be a pop star. I don’t want to be like a boy band, or Robbie Williams, or Maroon 5. I don’t only want to do concerts and albums. This is a facet of my career that I’m taking a journey with. But listen: if, five or ten weeks down the line, it proves to be hugely successful and the record company says that they need me to be a pop star for a while, then maybe I’d consider it. But it’s not the reason that I’m doing it.

So, no videos shot in glossy locations or any of that stuff?

Well, there is a promotional video for the song All Out Of Love. And I’m a businessman who wants to sell the record, so I will be going to major supermarkets to do signings. But just because I do that, it doesn’t mean that I’m being a pop star. I’d do that with my book! I’d do that with my Doctor Who merchandise! So it’s one and the same thing.

In terms of how you selected material for the album, it feels to me like a collection of your personal favourite songs.

You have got that correct. It probably took about four or five weeks for us to choose them. When Sony first approached me, they gave me a selection of their discs, which I narrowed down to songs that have actual relevance to situations and events within my life thus far. So they are very personal songs. Because there’s not enough space on the album sleeve, the listener can find out more through my website, where I will explain why I chose each one.

You’ve balanced classics – Your Song, Time After Time, Bryan Adams’ Heaven – with some more unfamiliar material. There’s one I really liked, which I’d not heard before, called Being Alive. Where’s that from?

Ha ha ha! See? I’m twisting everybody a little bit, by integrating something from a musical! That’s from a musical by Stephen Sondheim, called Company. I’m so chuffed that you said you liked it, because you might now want to go and see a musical!

Oh God, maybe now I’ll get over my block of Sondheim...

There you go – I’ve done a Sondheim number that you actually liked!

One of your more bold interpretations is Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, which is almost in a Ricky Martin Latin style. Were you nervous at re-interpreting a well known song in such a different way?

Sony said: we want you to do one song that people would never expect you to do. I went away and thought about it, and considered a song by the Foo Fighters – but we thought that wouldn’t quite fit into the scheme of things. This was one of my other choices, because my friend and I were big Police fans in high school. So I brought it forward, and said: look, please trust me on the musicality that I have, and what I know about music. Let me do this in the style of a Mexican mariachi band, with a Latin sound, and we’ll see if it works. So we recorded it, and I let the execs hear it, and they said: we think it’s great, we’re going to put it forward for Strictly Come Dancing!

So this is the song that you’ll be performing on Strictly Come Dancing?

On the [Sunday night] results show, yes. We pumped that song to them, and they went: this is great, this is perfect for our show!

You’ve also done something quite unusual for an openly gay performer, in that a lot of these songs do specifically reference women. Was that something you had to think carefully about?

Not at all, because I still like women! Just because I’m gay, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like women. It doesn’t mean that I want to sleep with them, but some of my closest friends are women. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic doesn’t necessarily relate to someone you’re having sex with. Also, the songs are for the listeners. When they listen to songs like She’s Always A Woman, my vision is of a man and a woman, partnered, married or whatever, sitting next to each other. It could even be a lesbian couple. And they’re listening to that song, and the one turns to the other, and says: that song is you to a tee. I want it to stir emotion within people. But I don’t see my homosexuality as being a guide for me.

You’ve got yourself into an interesting position – and a good position, really – in that you can cover songs that reference genders in that way. I can’t think of a gay performer who has been able to do that before, without people thinking: oh, that’s a bit off. Maybe the Captain Jack character has helped in that respect?

I don’t think it’s because of the Captain Jack character. What you also have to remember is that people have changed over the last five or ten years. People realise that I am an actor, and that my duty is to entertain people. I give an illusion. I’m a gay man, but when I go on stage in the West End, as I have done for the last sixteen years, I will play a romantic leading man. I will fall in love with girls, and I will let the audience believe that. You’re not watching John Barrowman – I’m playing a character. That’s the way you have to look at it, and audiences have moved on from five, ten years ago.

You’re taking the album out on tour next year, and Nottingham will be one of the dates. Will it be primarily a singing gig, or will it be more of “An Evening With”, where you’ll be mixing the singing up with some talking as well?

At the moment, we’re still formulating some of the ideas, so I’ll give you a couple of little inside details of things that we’re currently working on. I’ve done cabaret before, and one of the things that I love about cabaret is that it’s intimate. Now, what I want to create, although it’s on a bigger scale, is some of that intimacy. So I will be telling stories and anecdotes, and certain things will be scripted – but if I diverge from the script, then I diverge. I’ve always found that in the past, audiences enjoy that. They like to go on those little journeys with me. So there will be chat, and there will also be some guest stars. I’d like to have a couple of artists that people may not have heard of before, so that we can introduce some new talent. It stems from the reality shows that I’ve done, which are based on bringing new talent to the forefront.

I like the sound of the unpredictability. It means that people can read reviews of the previous night, without being told everything that’s going to happen on the following night.

Exactly, and that’s bringing the element of where I started in live theatre, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen, on a nightly basis. So, yes, there’ll be a bit of unpredictability about it.

(photo taken at London Pride 2007 by dtank)

You seem to have the most incredibly full schedule at the moment. For instance, you’ve got a BBC1 game show coming up, called The Kids Are All Right. What’s that all about?

It’s a light entertainment show, where adults will compete against kids who are super-intelligent – not just in the academic sense, but in the social sense, and with books, and all sorts of stuff. It will be a group of kids, and that’s why we say that “the kids are all right”. I mean, they’re cool – but they’re always right. So the adults will either be glorified or shamed by these kids. We did a pilot, which worked really well. These kids are very smart; they have attitude, and they sling it around the stage. So it will be good fun.

And then you’ll be coming back as Captain Jack in the New Year…

I’m not in the Doctor Who Christmas special, but I come back in Series Four, which starts filming after Christmas. Series Two of Torchwood also starts airing on BBC2 in January.

There must be a special sort of responsibility in playing Captain Jack, in that you must get collared by fans of both Torchwood and Doctor Who, who expect you to know every last detail of all the plots. Do people delight in trying to catch you out, saying that something happened in Episode Two which was contradicted in Episode Six and so on?

Some of them do, and I’ll be honest with you - my response is to say: you have too much time on your hands, and you need to get a life. I have no problem saying that! They usually laugh back, and say: yeah, you’re right. I am a fan of Doctor Who, and I love what I do – but I don’t go into so much detail. Sometimes when we’re looking at scripts, I’ll say if something contradicts a previous episode – so I do recognise these things. But if someone challenges me on it, I’m like: dude, come on!

I mentioned to a Doctor Who fan that I’d be talking to you and he said: ask him why the Face of Boe looks nothing like him!

[Suddenly very animated] Well, you can go back and say: because the Face of Boe was designed in Series One, before that plot had actually come round to it!

Oh, but that de-mystifies the whole process, if you’re going to say that!

But you’ll probably find that if you go back to the Face of Boe now, they’ll re-configure it a little bit – because the Face of Boe is the oldest living being in the universe, and obviously he’d change. That’s the other answer: people change over time! [Shouting] He’s being too literal!

Quite so. I will pass on your comments! Now, in the midst of all this, you’re also writing your autobiography…?

Funny you should say that: I finished it this week! I’ve been carrying an iPod with me, on a daily basis, and I’ve been telling my story into it. I then send it off to my sister, who has been penning it. The way it has been written is like a musical. I have started at one point, and like a musical story you jump to different parts, every so often. It takes you on that kind of journey. Each chapter is named after a show – and within that show, there’s a song which relates to the chapter. It’s all done so that it’s very musical-based. It will be out around February.



And then the next event coming up is your starring role in Aladdin at the Birmingham Hippodrome…

Yes, it’s my third year in a row doing panto. My first was in Wimbledon, and my second was at the New Theatre in Cardiff, which was the biggest financial success that they’ve had in their entire history. Consequently, they put me into Birmingham, which is the largest in the nation. It’s going to be spectacular: we’ve got Daleks, we’ve got 3D, we have interactive. This production of Aladdin has been written for me. It has almost sold out, and it’s done so well that they’ve already asked me to do next year. People say to me sometimes: why are you doing panto, you don’t really have to. It’s not a question of having to, but I see it as a perfect way to introduce theatre to a young audience. That’s their first experience, and what a great way to have it.

This is an insanely busy schedule, especially for someone as lazy as me to look at. What motivates you to be so busy all the time, and do you have a lazy side?

I do have a lazy side. Funnily enough, I carry a suitcase around with me, that has all my paperwork in it. That’s my lazy side: I very rarely get around to it. My driver has to lug it every single frickin’ day, in and out of the car, and it never gets any lighter. So there is a lazy side to me – but you know what? I enjoy working. I have these golden opportunities that I am given, and I am so not going to pass them up or turn them down, because someone else says: you shouldn’t do that. My attitude is: f**k ‘em, I love what I do. I trained to be a working actor, and I’m being given work – so I’m going to take it. Listen, you’re a long time dead.

Indeed. Well, good luck with the album.

And please let the people of Nottingham know that I’m looking forward to singing for them!

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic, television

A shorter version of this interview originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post. Here's a longer transcript of our conversation, which took place back on Thursday October 4th.


I watched the extraordinarily revealing BBC1 interview that you recently did with Piers Morgan [You Can’t Fire Me, I’m Famous]. Towards the end of the programme, you broke down in tears. We weren’t expecting that to happen.

Neither was I! [Laughter]

How do you feel about that, in retrospect?

Well, I didn’t actually see the interview, so I don’t really know how they edited it.

They kind of showed everything… [Nervous laughter]

Yeah, we did like a two or three hour interview, so I’m not sure exactly what was aired.

The key question was Piers asking whether you would have swapped the life that you’ve had as a successful singer with a more normal life. You said that you’d have chosen the more normal life.

I remember that moment. The way he asked it, and the situation, kinda caught me by surprise. But it’s a difficult life, being in show business, particularly if you want to be in it a long time. You’ve got to pay a high price to stay in it, let alone get in it. It’s very exciting, but let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s a life of extremes. The highs are really, really high – and the lows just don’t feel very good. Weighing all that stuff out, it would have been nice to have a normal life.

I guess you’ve had so many extreme experiences, but the one that you’ve haven’t had is the “normality”.

Well, that’s why, in a way, I live vicariously through my kids. They have such a normal life, and so it’s a nice balance when I can come home and just play the role of dad.

You were talking about the time where your period of initial success came to an end; it became difficult to get work, there was a flop show on Broadway, and so on. Then it occurred to me that you and your family have always appealed to all age groups – except one, and maybe this was the problem. It’s that 18 to 23 year old age group, who like something that’s a bit more edgy, rebellious, provocative. So when your teenage fans reached that age, it’s like they had to go through a stage of rejecting you – and then they could return to you in later life. I wondered, when that was happening to you in the early 1980s, were you aware of that cycle? Did you realise that your fans would eventually come back?

No I didn’t, Mike. [Sighs] There was a time where I thought: is it ever really going to come back? I think at the back of my mind, I realised, you know, somebody out there kinda likes me [laughs], because there were too many people that knew of me; all I had to do was give them an excuse to like me. To re-invent myself, to coin a phrase, not to use too many clichés here – but yeah, re-invent myself, give them an excuse to say, you know, it was OK to like Donny Osmond.

It’s just a natural phenomenon, that takes place with everybody. It took place with me too: in my later teens and early twenties, I went through a period where I absolutely hated “Puppy Love”. Anything that I liked as a young little teenager, I thought: it’s just not cool.

That’s it! It’s the age where “cool” suddenly becomes important, and actually, cool’s not a very important value in life at all.

It’s not!

You’re trying to find an identity, so you’re trying to be cool.

You grow up, and you realise that it’s OK to embrace everything in every stage of your life.

You also talked about losing your fortune – it was badly handled, people were embezzling, and so on – and that must have been humiliating. Can you imagine the sort of life and career that you would have had if you had held on to your fortune, and remained a wealthy man? And would it have been better?

Well, [laughs] that’s a very interesting question, Mike – because I’ve thought about that many, many times over the years, and I don’t know that I would have had the motivation to re-invent myself. I would have been too comfortable.

It really is a mind game; you don’t really know what life would have been like, because you’ve never really lived it. My assumption is that I probably wouldn’t have worked as hard as I have done, in order to remain in the business for 45 years. I would have just rested upon my laurels.

So maybe, after all that extraordinary success, you needed to have that kind of humbling experience, for a while… to experience rejection.

Maybe! [Hearty laughter] Yes, maybe.

I want to ask you about the teen idol days. I’m personally interested, because as a boy myself, I kind of grew up in an Osmonds world, if you like. My sister was in your fan club for three years running, and she still has the certificates to prove it.

Oh, that’s funny…

She says Hi. I was told to say that.

[Slightly awkward lack of response, as Donny presumably waits for me to Get On With The Question Already. Ah well, I did my best.]

Um, so… for hundreds of thousands of girls, who may not even have started to date at that stage, you were in a way their first boyfriend – even if it was just a fantasy boyfriend. Were you aware of that responsibility, and how did you deal with it?

It’s hard to go back and remember exactly what I was going through, because it has been so many years. I do remember the awesome responsibility placed upon my shoulders. I wore two different hats, Mike: one was for when I was in show business, and one for when I went home and played with my electronics, and whatever. When I was out there, I had to be very careful as to what I said and did, because everything ended up in print – and I think that was the pressure that finally got to me.

But, yeah, I recognised the responsibility. When I stepped on stage, with the amount of screaming which took place, it was fun on one side of the coin – but on the other, a huge responsibility.

There was all that adulation in the room – but I guess that there was also a lot of pain in the room. There were all these girls getting so close and yet still so far, and getting really upset about that.

Pain on whose side – theirs or mine?

Pain on their side, I think.

On theirs, yes. But human nature is like that. We want what we can’t have. It’s the supply and demand theory, you know? You keep a little bit of a distance, and you want it more.

Speaking as a boy of eleven, twelve years old: boys weren’t really supposed to like the Osmonds. We were supposed to be getting into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and we were supposed to sneer. Nevertheless, there was a time in your brothers’ career where you showed signs of becoming something of a credible rock band. I’m thinking of The Plan, which was a kind of “concept album” that some of us boys used to listen to on the quiet, without telling anybody; it was a sort of guilty pleasure. It strikes me that you must have been proud of that album; your brothers still perform large chunks of it on stage.

But then you went from that back into showbiz, with the Love Me For A Reason album. You could have gone into being a more credible rock act at that moment, but you stepped away. Why did you change direction?

I don’t know. It’s a good question. I have no idea, but it’s quite interesting to note that here again, I was playing two sides of the coin: I was a teenybopper artist, and I was part of a rock and roll band. You used the phrase “guilty pleasure”. It’s so true, and over the years, I’ve had a lot of conversations about this – with “Crazy Horses” when that came out, and with “Down By The Lazy River” particularly. Our favourite album is The Plan. It was really a progressive rock and roll album, and that was the direction that we were headed in as a band. But my career kind of superseded everything, you know?


Let’s move forward a bit, to the time of your 1988 comeback single “Soldier Of Love”, which reached Number Two in the States. It was a collaboration with Peter Gabriel who had been of the cooler figures from that earlier period. How on earth did that come about?

Oh, it was kind of a fluke. We were doing this charity show together in New York, and we met backstage. Being the kind of guy that he is, Peter started enquiring as to what was going on with my career, because he admired the way I sang. I told him of the frustrations and the challenges of the image – that “cool factor” that we were talking about earlier. He said: well, forget about the cool factor, let’s make the music good, and the cool factor takes care of itself. That’s when he invited me to come over to Bath, and to start cutting music.

“Soldier Of Love” was written and produced by a team called Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers in New York, and became a part of that Gabriel album – and that’s what really turned the whole thing round. But it was more of a perception from the public, and even the industry, that Peter was involved in my career that started the impetus to change.

Coming up to the present day, you’ve had a big success this year with your album Love Songs of the 70s. I was streaming it from your website earlier this morning, and I was pleased to find a couple of my favourites in there: Ace’s “How Long”, and a song that was never a hit in this country, “Will It Go Round In Circles” by Billy Preston. I was wondering: if you were to do an album of love songs from the 2000s, what songs might you pick?

Ah. [Pause; laughter] Interesting question! Er… [Pause]

I have a suggestion.

Yes! Give me, please.

Have you heard a song by Will Young called “Leave Right Now”?

I’ve heard of the title, but I’m not that familiar with the song.

I could completely imagine you doing that one – or maybe one of the songs from Take That’s comeback album, that Gary Barlow wrote.

Of course. Well, Gary Barlow’s a good buddy. He’s been involved with several albums of mine.

You must be seen as something of an “elder statesman” figure by now. Do you get asked for advice by younger generations of teen idols – or wannabe teen idols – and if so, what would you say?

I do. What would I say? Be prepared for a rollercoaster ride – because it’s inevitable, no matter who you are, and particularly if you start out on a teen base. Be prepared for rejection, and be prepared for a lot of work to re-invent yourself. Regardless of what kind of career you’ve got, whether it’s a rock based career or a pop based career or an R&B based career – particularly nowadays, and even more so than in the Seventies – you’re going to experience a surge, and you’re going to experience a real fast drop, and you’re going to be confused. “Why do people love me one second and hate me the next?” It’s just the nature of the business.

And it’s speeded up as well, I think.

Of course – because of the amount of media channels and outlets for promotion that we’ve got right now. The record companies, and all kinds of companies, they’ve blitzed the market as fast as possible, to make as much as they possibly can, because they know that the shelf life is very, very short. So when you get right down to it, Mike, I’m in a very, very enviable position, because my brand has already been established. Whether it’s good or bad in people’s minds, it doesn’t really matter, because you can always re-invent it with something else.

That’s interesting. I guess that as someone who has strong moral and ethical principles, you’re actually operating in a pretty dirty, cut-throat industry. Do you have a ruthless side? Do you have to, in order to survive?

A ruthless side? Most definitely. I think the word I’ll probably use is “calloused”. It’s a business – that’s why they call it show business. They put that word in there for a reason. You’ve got to be careful not to let the business callous you. There are sharks out there, and there are some real challenging decisions that you have to make, that could be compromising to your principles. You have to stick to your principles, and you can’t allow people to walk over the top of you.

I guess you have to be aware of potential traps that might be being set for you, as well.

Yeah, and I’m pretty fortunate in having the career that I’ve had, as the liability has turned into an asset over time, to be honest with you. People know my standards. They know what I will and will not do. So it really is an asset to me.


Talking about the forthcoming tour, is it a question of striking a balance between old and new material? Does the past drag you down, with everyone wanting to hear the same old songs over and over again – or is there a kind of pay-off, with the old songs giving you a platform on which to produce new work as well?

Well, you went from one extreme to another there in the question, because it really has become, here again, an asset. It’s not a liability at all to me any more. It used to be! I didn’t want to do “Puppy Love” in my set. I’d rather have… I don’t know… died rather than do “Puppy Love” again.

I remember a TV show that you were on in the late 1980s, with Jonathan Ross, where he kind of ambushed you. He insisted that you sang “Puppy Love”, and you absolutely, clearly, did not want to. Then he got the whole audience to hold up signs with “Puppy Love” on them, and the band struck up, and you were kind of forced to do it. It was painful to watch, really.

[Solemnly] I remember the show. It was painful to sing! [Laughs] But on this tour, I do several different versions of “Puppy Love”. I even say: hey, I’m pushing fifty, you guys, and I’m still singing “Puppy Love”; what’s wrong with this picture? I say: look, I’ve tried to infuse maturity into it, change it up over the years – and so I do a short little country version of it, a sexy Barry White version of it, a Blackpool-ian lounge lizard version of it – and then I finally say: you know, there’s only one way to sing “Puppy Love”. [Breaks into song] “And they called it…”

[Hold up, Donny Osmond is singing “Puppy Love” to me. I have never had to struggle so hard to maintain professional composure.]

And then we just go right into the real version. It really goes down well…

Fantastic! The concerts that you’re doing now, are they more enjoyable now that the hysteria has died down, and people are actually listening properly?

Yes, it’s fantastic – although a lot of the fans, they love to reminisce, and go back and scream like a thirteen-year old.

I’ve seen your brothers perform a couple of times, and the atmosphere is still quite intense.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how it still happens?

Well, thanks for that, Donny. My final question was going to be: is your favourite colour still purple? But I’ve been to your official website and it’s purple all over…

[Laughter] I don’t wear purple socks any more! Heaven knows why I did that, but hey, it was fun at the time!

Well, I’m looking forward to coming to the show. Your former mentor Andy Williams was on the same stage a couple of months ago, performing his farewell show outside the US. His last show, on his last tour. And my sister will be waiting for you outside the stage door, with her copy of Alone Together, hoping for a signature.

Oh, right. [Hastily closing the conversation] Thanks, Mike.

All the best, Donny.

Take care, goodbye.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

(An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)

The best arena artists are the ones who refuse to cut corners. Aware that there are higher ideals than merely extracting the maximum financial return from the minimum investment, they aim for nothing less than artistic and technical perfection. On the strength of last night’s astonishing show, the extraordinarily driven, focussed and committed Beyoncé Knowles is clearly one such artist.

Fronting an all-female band, and accompanied by some of the sexiest dancers on the planet, Beyoncé tore through over thirty numbers in over two hours, still finding time for six changes of costume. Bookended by her two biggest and best hits, Crazy In Love and Déjà Vu, the set featured a ten-song medley of Destiny’s Child favourites, as well as the recent chart-topper Beautiful Liar (accompanied by video images of Shakira, the song’s co-performer), and Listen (from the soundtrack of Dreamgirls).

In some ways, this was a traditional soul revue, whose dazzling energy and pacing brought to mind the likes of Prince at the height of his powers. In other ways, it was totally contemporary, showcasing an inventive, adventurous style of music which simply couldn’t have existed in any other decade.

Athough belonging to a lineage of soul divas which stretches back over forty years, what sets Beyoncé apart from her predecessors is her utter lack of vulnerability. This is a woman who is fully in control of every aspect of her presentation and personality, at all times. And so, despite seeing real tears roll down her face towards the end of the ballad Flaws And All, you somehow knew that similar tears would be flowing, at precisely the same moment, on every night of her 77-date world tour.

Beautiful, talented, untouchable, mysterious, and with a flawlessness that borders on the downright eerie, Beyoncé is that rare creature: a true icon and a natural star.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

(This article originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.)

EG caught up with Caroline Reid, the Australian creator of trolley-dolly bitch extraordinaire Pam Ann, wandering through the streets of London on her day off. Over the roar of traffic in the background, Caroline chatted happily about her best known comic character, and the various other sidekicks who will also be appearing at the Theatre Royal on Sunday evening.

But first… was the globe-trotting Pam familiar with our very own Nottingham East Midlands Airport (recently voted Best Airport at the “prestigious” Baltic Air Charter Association Awards, as I couldn’t help but boast)? Or maybe, given the dominance of low cost airlines such as easyJet and bmibaby, we’re just a little too “short haul” for her…

“Maybe for Pam – but I wish I was flying to Nottingham, rather than coming up on the motorway. I must put that in the contract for next time. But yeah, I know bmibaby: they’re clinging onto the hope that one day they’ll be scheduled.”

Ouch. That’s no way to talk about the East Midlands’ favourite airline… and possibly the only one that asks if you’d like ice cubes in your white wine, to boot.

“That’s fantastic; I may use that. I’m writing it down now!”

Is Pam held in high esteem by the trolley-dolly community, or do they view her as a scandalous misrepresentation of their profession?

“I think they love her, because they’d actually like to do and say the things that I do on stage, but for real. If I’m on a plane, they’ll run up to me saying “Pam, Pam, Pam! I’ve got a joke for you!” I mean, half of them have written my show, really… so if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t even have a show. If the cabin crew like what I do, then I’m doing a good job.”

So perhaps audience members might occasionally spot one of their own anecdotes popping up in the show? (Bmibaby… ice cubes… white wine… one has to live in hope.)

“Absolutely!”



Although Pam Ann headlines the show, four other characters will also be making an appearance, as Caroline explains.

“I’ve got Valerie from American Airlines: she’s 105, and still flying today. She scares the audience with horror stories of air disasters she’s been in.”

Hoping to lure Caroline into some juicy bitching, I suggested that some battle-scarred travellers might regard American Airlines as a horror story in their own right. Interestingly, she was having none of it.

“Well, they’ve given me a uniform, a proper name badge, and their stamp of approval. They’re big supporters of what I do – and if they’re happy, then I’m happy. I love American Airlines, and I’ll wave their flag any day.”

Suitably chastened, I moved Caroline onto her other characters.

“Mona the BA bitch is basically very old school, waves the flag, horsey. She’s waiting for her pension to come round. Very good at her job, but verging on prison warden.”

“Then I’ve got Sarah from Virgin, a typical dumb blonde. Richard Branson hires very young cabin crew; very S Club 7. You just don’t know whether those girls are going to be able to handle a situation of stress.”

“And then there’s Donna from easyJet, who dreams of flying over water. She loves to go down to Heathrow to look at the real cabin crew, and she hopes and dreams that one day she’ll get onto a real 747.”



As for Pam Ann herself, one of her most memorable engagements was when she crewed a private flight for Sir Elton John and his friends.

“They loved the fact that Pam thinks she’s almost of the Elton ilk. They could be brother and sister, really. So she basically put them all in their places, sat them down, and verbally abused them the whole way to Venice.”

Despite the growing public awareness of environmental issues regarding air travel, Pam is doing precious little to offset her own carbon emissions.

“She’s not green at all. She likes a carbon footprint, especially if it’s wearing a Manolo Blahnik. She’d take out a forest in the Amazon to put in a fashion café.”

Anyone assuming a bond of kinship between Caroline and this year’s Eurovision entrants Scooch, with their “affectionate tribute” to the airline industry, might be in for a rude awakening.

“They’re rubbish! They look crap, they’ve got nothing good to say about themselves, and they’ve ripped everybody else off. I know that Eurovision’s about cheese, but that’s bordering on stupid. I liked those Finnish monster guys who won last year; there was something different about them. But as for these guys: they’re like a charter version of Steps. People have asked if they’ve modelled their uniforms on me – but excuse me, I do not look like that! They look like waitresses from All Bar One! People have been saying that I’ve got to support them, but no! I can’t stand them!”

After completing her marathon 41-date tour, which finishes in mid-June, Caroline will be taking her One World Alliance show to the Edinburgh Festival for the whole of August. In the meantime, you can catch her at the Theatre Royal on Sunday evening.

Labels: celebs, comedy, eveningpost, interviews

This article orginally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.



Once all but consigned to the celebrity dumper, Jason Donovan has been enjoying a remarkable comeback. Indeed, his current All The Hits And More tour sees him headlining at major concert venues for the first time since the old hit-making days. For Jason, the tour will be something of “a reflection on the past, with some self-indulgence in terms of new material.”

“Whether you should call that self-indulgent, I don’t know. Because those songs haven’t necessarily been heard before, I’d be cheating myself if I didn’t get the opportunity to air them. But there’ll be about 70 percent old to 30 percent new.”

If people want to view the show as a nostalgia trip, then Jason is entirely comfortable with that.

“I was listening the other day to a friend’s compilation of Eighties music, and it really put a smile on my face. I’m sure that a lot of the people that will be at the shows would have listened to Rick Astley, and Bros, and the usual suspects from that time. So it will be a bit of a celebration.”

What relationship does Jason have with those old songs? After all, it could feel somewhat strange to be still singing them, if he has evolved into a different person from the pop idol of his youth.

“Of course, and until I actually get out there, I can’t really tell you what that relationship is. However, I am extremely proud of my past. If you look at those Stock Aitken Waterman songs, they had great melodies – and I would argue that you could put some of those melodies onto today’s beats, and get away with it.”

Although often regarded as deeply uncool at the time, it is remarkable how well some of the SAW productions have aged. After all, nothing dates as quickly as the fashionable, and it’s often the so-called “disposable”, “manufactured” pop which stands the test of time best of all.

“It depends on how analytical you want to be, though. I’ve always had a broad musical taste. I can listen, as I did in those days, to a New Order record, and then pick up one of the Donna Summer tracks that Stock Aitken Waterman produced. And I was also a big Cure fan. But if you don’t like a particular scene, you don’t have to buy into it. Nowadays, it’s the Pop Idols and X Factors which get heavily criticised – but every poet’s a thief, and everything has an element of the old. It just depends on how you dress it up to make it look new. So what is “cool”? I don’t know, you tell me.”

That said, there seems to be a clear difference between the Stock Aitken Waterman acts, who were trained for stardom and understood the game, and today’s reality TV contestants, most of whom are put on public display before they are truly ready, in the belief that they are “living their dream” Isn’t there something rather cruel about that?

“Maybe, but then talent will always come through. To a certain degree, I’d even put myself in the same category. My singing abilities early on weren’t fantastic. But I had the additional element of the exposure from Neighbours, and the marriage of those two was quite explosive.”

“These days, I guess it just comes down to phone votes. It’s the networks trying to gain their revenue. It’s not so much from advertising any more, so it’s from phone voting instead. So we keep having to move on to the next star of X Factor, and the next celebrity, and so it’s a very quick moving world. But the Leonas and the Will Youngs are very talented people. Believe me, it takes a lot of guts – and I haven’t done it very often myself – to get up on live television and sing. That’s a tough art.”



Were Jason’s own “pop idol” days a pleasant time, to be looked back on with affection, or was he just under immense pressure?

“At the time, there was a lot of pressure, of course. Any business – as it was, really, to a certain degree – has pressure with it, if it’s going to be successful. It’s not until you look back with hindsight that you think: wow, those really were glory days. I’m very lucky that I stuck it out. Do I regret it? Not in the slightest.”

“It’s given me a good lifestyle, and put my kids through a good education, and so there are those bottom lines – but on a formative level, I’ve also discovered a great love of music, and that transcends into the work I’ve done in the last fifteen years where it hasn’t been as high profile.”

“You’d be very deluded to think that a career could maintain a 1989 level for twenty or thirty years. Some people are more successful at it than others, and you’ve got to learn not to compare yourself to other people in life, otherwise you end up wandering around thinking: God, I’m not good enough for this world.”



As for Jason’s perceived fall from grace in the latter half of the Nineties, maybe the media were handed a story which they couldn’t resist: Clean-cut Boy Goes Bad. There was a certain amount of shock when he dropped the wholesome image, and made no attempt to hide the more hedonistic aspects of his lifestyle. Although this was presented to us as a troubled time, was it perhaps more of a period of liberation?

“You may well be right. The great thing about being interviewed is that I get people analysing my life more than I ever look at it, so there’s an element of comedy from my perspective. But I looked at myself in Joseph, and saw a technicolour dreamcoat, a loincloth and pair of long white socks, and thought: you know what, is this where I want to be? Not quite!”

“So I went out to have a good time. I’d worked hard for seven or eight years, I had money in the bank, and I could afford to do it. I would argue: what person in my position wouldn’t? If you look at our celebrities at the moment, nine out of ten tend to go down that line.”

“In a cultural sense, the happy clean-cut boys of the Eighties got washed away by Nirvana in the early Nineties. So there was a general rebellion against all that. But I came to realise a few years ago that there’s no such thing as “being cool”. You can take as many drugs as you want, but you’re either going to be alive or dead. How you function as an individual is what you’re going to be judged upon, whether you value that judgement or not.”

“It was funny going back into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium, where I did Joseph, and where I took the decision to go into another direction. To see a bunch of kids smile, while you’re flying around in a stupid little plane: that’s what it’s all about.”

Jason Donovan plays the Nottingham Royal Concert Hall on Thursday May 17th.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

An edited version of this review originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.

First things first. The X Factor is a talent show. For the contestants, it’s a chance to make dreams come true – however short-lived those dreams might turn out to be. For the voting audience, it’s a chance to identify with the ordinary people who apply for the show – to follow their journeys, and to stake a claim in their success stories.

As a talent show, The X Factor can only measure potential. Its contestants are forced into a bear pit, which magnifies their hunger for fame – but its very nature dictates that they are never given the chance to develop as individual artists. Instead, a series of well-worn classics from established stars is forced upon them, setting up comparisons which are rarely fulfilled.

In a live setting, the naïve inexperience of these hopefuls is magnified to an almost cruel degree. Some acts, such as the show’s much put-upon underdogs the MacDonald Brothers, stepped up to the mark, and acquitted themselves with competence and dignity. They understood the game. Knowing that these are the biggest stages that they will ever appear on, they seized the moment and had a ball.

For other, lesser talents, the underlying desperation could not be masked. Witnessing Robert earnestly massacring All Night Long and Ashley clumsily grandstanding his way through Easy was, to anyone who cares about music as opposed to mere spectacle, a depressing experience.

Opening the show’s second half, gravel-voiced Ben Mills played shamelessly to the crowd, smothering any chance of making an emotional connection under layers of directionless bombast. Pint-sized swinger Ray Quinn opted for the sentimental angle, belting out My Way in pure Las Vegas style. Only Leona Lewis – the show’s ultimate champion and a truly gifted, soulful vocalist – displayed anything resembling real star quality. The night belonged to her.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gigs, popmusic

My interview with the Irish singer-songwriter Duke Special can be found in the EG supplement of today's Nottingham Evening Post, and also on the paper's website. To my surprise and delight - as I was expecting some fairly savage cuts - the full 1200 word feature has been published exactly as I wrote it. This makes me very happy, as it's my favourite piece of work for the Post to date, by some distance. Even if you're not that interested in the man himself, he has some interesting observations to make on the songwriting process, and on the extent to which personal experience can be spun into fiction without compromising its essential truthfulness.

Meanwhile, a few pages further on in the same supplement, a Q&A session with X Factor finalist Ray "Snappy Fingers" Quinn makes my recent interview with Shayne Ward look positively Socratic by comparison.

(Incidentally, for all you Shayne fans out there: here's Chig's review of his Tuesday night show at Nottingham Arena, as composed on the PC in our study, while the rest of us all sat around and chatted. I couldn't have coped with the distraction, being far too much of an "I need space!" prima donna, but Chig didn't have a problem with it at all. The man is such a professional.)

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And finally, on a completely unrelated note, here are a couple of choice links from the past week's browsing.

1. Adrian Sevitz: Unemployed, Single and Ill. A remarkable piece of home video, made using stop motion photography over the course of several days, with a well-chosen soundtrack.

2. For his regular "Open Thread Thursday" spot, Joe. My. God. asked his predominantly gay male readers: What was your worst sex ever? The many, many answers which follow make for fascinating reading, in all sorts of ways - but be warned, and I cannot stress this too strongly - the content is very, VERY explicit, and absolutely NOT for the squeamish.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, linkage, popmusic

Over at Blogzira, Lucy Pepper - the prodigiously gifted donor of my disco-dancing topless avatar - has publicly requested my help regarding a rather nasty outbreak of Dylan Worship on the part of her Life Partner.Dear Lucy,

Alas, I fear that Dylan-itis is a largely uncurable disease. "Bob-heads", as they like to call themselves (I know) are an uncommonly intractable bunch, and most provocation will only inflame the condition.

(It's a Martyrdom Complex thing. To paraphrase Neil Innes: Bob has suffered for his art, and now it's your turn.)

However, maybe there are ways of reducing the symptoms. So why not try some of these for size?

1. The "Clay Feet" approach.

Does your Life Partner know that His Perpetual Right On-ness has licensed one of his wretched CDs for exclusive distribution by the Great Satan that is Starbucks? Or that he has appeared in an advert for a tatty bra-n-knickers emporium called Victoria's Secret? Tell him, Lucy! Tell him!

2. The "Fighting Fire With Fire" approach.

Load up your music player with some of Bob's, um, less seminal works, crank up the volume, set to repeat, and prepare to cut a deal.

Here are my top tips for maximum damage.

a) Any live recording from the past two or three years, which reveal the great man's vocal range - never that impressive in the first place - to have shrunk to about three notes. Until you have heard the once-passable "Like A Rolling Stone" re-worked as experimental plainsong, you haven't truly suffered.

b) Selected works from his "Born Again Christian" phase of the late 1970s - in particular, the execrable "Man Gave Names To All The Animals", which includes this deathless couplet:3. The "Mike Yarwood" approach.

Buy a cheap mouth organ (don't worry, you won't need lessons), smoke 40 consecutive Marlboro Reds, mix yourself a nifty paint-stripper 'n thumb-tacks mouthwash, and treat him to a Zimmerman-esque rendition of these deliciously appropriate Baby Boomer Busting lyrics, from the pen of The Overnight Editor. Now, that's Social Commentary! A few repetitions, and he'll be jibbering putty in your hands.

We shall overcome!

Yours in solidarity,
Mike xxx

Supplementary material: This week's "In The Dock" debate over at The Art Of Noise, and a live review cum hatchet job of mine own.

Labels: celebs, popmusic

My nice little chat with former X Factor winner Shayne "Big In Asia" Ward is in the EG supplement of today's Nottingham Evening Post - and it can also be found online.

(Complete with some strange punctuation; those triple question marks are supposed to be dot-dot-dots.).

OK, so perhaps Shayne wasn't the most scintillating of conversationalists (although not as script-perfect as his People would wish him to be, as careful reading between the lines will reveal) - but at least I got a decent amount of phone time with him. In contrast, my editor was granted the grand total of forty-six seconds to speak to Beyoncé Knowles - and yet he still managed to spin an entertaining feature out of it. I'm looking, and I'm learning.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Spotted on the side of a van: Fluid Transfer Solutions. It's hoses. They mean hoses. Hoses!

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My Will Oldham interview for the Nottingham Evening Post has been made available online. Considering it was my first ever interview with anyone other than a job candidate, and considering Oldham's reputation as a reluctant and uncommunicative interviewee, and considering that the copy deadline made it impossible to flesh the piece out beyond a simple Q&A format, and considering that Sylvie Simmons from The Guardian beat me into print by a few hours with a clearly superior piece... then I thought I did quite well. Considering.

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Have just read someone in the comments box of a US gay blog sniffily describing heterosexuality as "gender-discordant sex". Or is it merely another Fluid Transfer Solution?

(Just savour that word "discordant". It's almost as if the commenter was forced into being gay for aesthetic reasons... because man-bits and lady-bits, well, they clash, don't they?)

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And for my next two Star Profiles, both scheduled for Wednesday, I shall be chewing the fat with Shayne Ward (from The X Factor), and Joan Baez (from the 1960s). If you have a question that you'd like me to put to Shayne or Joan, then do me a favour and leave it in the comments. (Saves valuable research time. Hooray for "user generated content".)

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K says that for his next venture, he wants to start a vasectomy business.
He's callling it Snip and F*ck.

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, gay, interviews, twitter

From Digital Spy:We've all gone mad, haven't we?

Update/Clarification: It's primarily the infantilisation of the public discourse which bothers me. It seeks to elevate - or rather to reduce - a complex network of relationships to an Ism, and the protagonists to Ists. Racism. Racists. When what I see are three playground bullies and an impossible princess.

Labels: bigbrother, celebs, media, television

It's 1 o'clock in the morning, and I'm on after-hours support, waiting for The Phone Call which lets me know that it's time to check stuff on the mainframe. The Phone Call was supposed to come at around 11 - but I've been told that there are delays, and that I won't be hearing from anyone until at least 1.30. So I might as well bash out a rambling blog post to pass the time and keep me awake.

What can I tell you? Well, yesterday was a nice day out. K and I took a day trip from Derby to London, to attend my aunt and uncle's Golden Wedding luncheon at the Savoy Grill. The train arrived 40 minutes early in London (I know!), which gave us an extra hour to kill - so we swung by the National Portrait Gallery and went to see the David Hockney exhibition, all smartly togged out in our best suits. Does Hockney count as High Art? I don't know; there's something lightweight and decorative about him, and I'm not sure that he particularly Illuminates The Human Condition with any great profundity - but it's pleasantly familiar and diverting stuff, which lifted our spirits. The usual cast: Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, his grey-haired mam looking a tad self-conscious (and latterly a bit doolally), various handsome young men with brooding eyes, that bearded New York art bloke whose expressions give nothing away.

For the luncheon, we found ourselves at the next table to Preston from the Ordinary Boys, who was on Celebrity Big Brother this time last year. You know, the one who married Chantelle, the non-celebrity winner. She wasn't there - but no need to alert Heat magazine for a scoop ("PRESTON AND CHANTELLE: IS IT OVER?") as I think she was doing Celebrity Big Brother's Little Brother at the time, so maybe Preston was just kicking his perfectly formed little heels in town with his man-friend. Yes, that would be it. He's skinny and slight, and hence right up K's alley. K chose his seat well, and got to gawp at Preston all the way through the meal. I was happy for him.

Our golden wedding present to the aunt and uncle was a bottle of 1956 Armagnac, so they could have a taste of the year they were wed. (The anniversary itself was December 29, but they were cross-country ski-ing in Austria at the time, which isn't bad going for two people in their late seventies.) They seemed delighted with it. My cousin was there; she's a Something at the House of Commons, and K was duly invited to take the personalised access-all-areas tour of the Palace of Westminster which was such a highlight of 2006 for me. (Clambering onto the roof for great views and an up-close-and-personal with Big Ben; necking a quick post-adjournment pint in the surprisingly cramped and unadorned Members' Bar with the MPs; standing at the dispatch box in the debating chamber and pretending I was running the country.)

K flies to Florida on Friday for the big annual vets' conference - and so, rather than being stuck on my own at home over the weekend, I have decided to pay my dear friend and erstwhile midweek drinking buddy Reluctant Nomad Alan a visit in Amsterdam. It will only be his second full weekend there, and so everything is up for discovery. Hopefully we'll get to hook up with Caroline Eachman (née Prolific) as well. Introductions are better when they're face to face.

I have just received my first interview assignment from t'local paper. I'm going to be interviewing Will Oldham, aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, in advance of his Rock City gig on the 23rd - which will also be the first date on his first tour of England in twelve years (Scotland and Ireland got him last year). Gulp. Better start genning up, then.

I spent the earlier part of the evening assembling the tracks for next month's instalment of the Which Decade Is Tops For Pops project, which will be entering its fifth year. I had got it into my head that this year's crop was going to be a total shower of shite - but, actually, it's not too shoddy after all. Two of the tracks from February 1987 have been disqualified, as they are 1960s re-issues that were being used on TV adverts, and so I have substituted the songs at #11 and #12. The 1967 selection is pretty decent, the 1977 selection markedly less so (punk/new wave had yet to cross over commercially, and disco was thin on the ground that week), the 1987 selection is more nostalgic than I was expecting, and the 1997 selection is all grown up and credible, thanks to that brief period when Radio One also decided to be all grown up and credible.

It is now 1:40, I am all rambled out (there's only the stuff about our forthcoming Nottingham kitchen refit to tell you, and I don't propose to bore you with the details), and the Big Call has not yet happened. If I wander outside for a crafty fag, it shall surely happen, and so I shall try and induce it via the power of nicotine. So let's do that.

No editing, no revisions, no sprucing up. Totally old school. G'night!

Update: The Big Call has been put back to 2.30. Thank goodness for the 250+ spam comments that some kindly passing Italian has just left me to deal with. Couldn't have happened at a better time!

Labels: art, celebs, family, journal, london

Despite my fondness for getting pleasantly pickled on a fairly regular basis, and my general reputation for being a "good" drunk (articulate and affable to the last, even though I do tend to stray into "too much information" territory), I'm no good at dealing with "bad" drunks. It's the loss of rationality which unsettles me the most; if someone is no longer capable of having a joined-up conversation, then I am at a loss with them.

Unfortunately, I'm also very bad at disguising this unease, which filters through as a kind of cautious distaste, bordering on superiority. More unfortunately still, most "bad" drunks are also adept at picking up on this, and so I am frequently taken to task for my perceived prissiness.

Donny Tourette is (update: was) a contestant on this year's Celebrity Big Brother. He is the lead singer in a not terribly successful rock band called Towers Of London, who bear the minor distinction of polling the lowest EVER score of any of the 1000+ tracks which been reviewed on the Stylus Singles Jukebox. On the show's opening night, Tourette enters the Big Brother house in a state of advanced refreshment, flicking V-signs at the crowd outside as he stumbles his way in.

Initial impression: he's a poor man's Johnny Rotten, a latter-day Gizzard Puke, a rebel without a clue, the latest in a long line of witless dullards who have appropriated the trappings of "outrageous" rock-and-roll behaviour, but without any real fire in their hearts. Whereas Rotten's contempt was impassioned, lethal and withering, Tourette's V-signs are a mere learned pantomime.

Inside the house, his fellow contestants have no difficulty in grasping his schtick, and compartmentalising him accordingly. The token rebel. It's what he does. It's his act. None of the squares are freaked out, even for a second. They're in showbiz too. They've seen it all before.

"He's a pussycat at heart. You can tell."

He is also, clearly, a "bad" drunk. I can already feel myself tensing up.

Eventually, and with a thudding inevitability, Donny ends up in the outside jacuzzi: fully clothed, fag still lit, expensive radio mike still attached (and hence beyond repair). Watching him from the other end of the garden, those same tell-tale signs of unease are beginning to flicker across the faces of his fellow housemates.

Except, that is, for Cleo Rocos: a carefully preserved (we're the same age; I can say these things) television comedy actress, whose main claim to fame was appearing as an over-the-top glamour girl on the Kenny Everett Show in the early 1980s. Cleo, as it swiftly transpires, is quite superb at handling "bad" drunks like Donny. Smiling, supportive, and utterly unruffled, she takes him in hand, leads him away from the others, gets him cleaned up, lends him some dry clothes. Without coming across as even faintly bossy, or critical, or disapproving, she takes full control of the situation. Donny is putty in her hands.

There's a wonderful, telling moment, which resonates with me more than any other. As Cleo hands Donny his change of clothes, a moment of clarity emerges from the foggy depths of his booze-addled soul. It's there in his eyes, as he holds Cleo's gaze for a second or two, with a mixture of surprised realisation and warm, trusting relief. It's a look which says: F**king hell, you're alright, you are. It is not an expression which I am used to seeing in situations like these.

The whole episode is a master class in how to handle a "bad" drunk, and I have learnt something from watching it. Once again, by placing real-life inter-personal relationships under a microscope, and by raising the emotional temperature in order to elicit a series of controlled reactions, Big Brother is - whether by accident or design (and I couldn't really care less) - usefully illuminating the human condition. This is why, for all its peripheral irritations, I never tire of watching it.

Labels: bigbrother, celebs, drinking, media, opinion, television

Of course, when you pledge to answer any question that your readers might throw at you, there is always a danger that some nutter (in this case, basil) will ask you something like this:

so did jimmy saville ever say jingly jangly er uh er uh er uh er uh?

I despair, I really do.

(Incidentally, there's only one "l" in "Savile" actually actually I think you'll find. It's a common enough error. So don't go beating yourself up about it, basil.)

To answer your question: I should have thought it fairly unlikely. Although the catchphrase "Er uh er uh er uh er uh" was often heard to pass his lips, I have no recollection of Savile ever using the phrase "jingly jangly" - which was merely an onomatopoeic description, applied by others, of the legendary disc jockey's ur-bling taste in jewellery.

More interestingly, did you know that Savile has been credited as the first person ever to play records in public using two turntables and a microphone, back in the 1940s? (I gathered this fact from reading one of the best books ever written about popular music: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton.)

(Slightly less interestingly, K and I used to know someone who appeared on Jim'll Fix It in the mid-1980s. Her particular dream-come-true? To sing backing vocals with Paul Young. As dreams-come-true go, it does rather smack of the cut-price. Maybe that's why they had her on the show.)

Labels: celebs, questions