Alfie Page 4

  Chapter Five

  FINDING MY VOICE

  As a young kid, before I went to bed, Mum used to read from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as bedtime stories. If you’re not aware of that grisly tome, it’s 500 years old and tells incredibly graphic stories of British Protestants who sacrificed their lives for their faith. Some of them were crushed with blocks of stones. Some were hung, drawn, quartered. Eyes prodded out, fingernails removed and chopped up into tiny little pieces. Strapped to a rock until the tide came in. Frightening stories. And then I’d have to go to sleep. And I’d have nightmares, and for ages we couldn’t understand why, until finally Mum said, ‘Maybe I should stop reading the Book of Martyrs to you.’ Ya think? I don’t think she’d read it to my brothers and sisters. But she thought they were good lessons for me to learn, because these people had given their lives for something important.

  We were a strong Catholic family, I had a pretty religious upbringing. We used to say the Rosary at night before we went to bed, and then we’d do a novena, a set prayer with a reading to a certain saint. In a way it was a real time to meditate, to connect with each other and be together. And I love my faith, I would never turn against it because it’s helped me through so much of my life. But, man was I afraid of our parish priest, Father Cochrane. He was a force to contend with. His sermons could be pretty damn hard. ‘If you believe in Heaven you have to believe in Hell, and that’s where you’ll go if you don’t do this.’ Proper fire and brimstone sermons, terrifying. He was at church for years and years and it was always, ‘Canon Cochrane rules with a rod of iron, and you will go to Hell if you don’t do this.’ It was horrible. He made me wet myself one day when I was serving on the altar, because I was that scared of him. He was cruel, he was aggressive, and he didn’t give a damn about shouting at you, putting you in your place. I was terrified of him, a lot of us were. I eventually stood up to him, years later. Just after my dad died, I was 25, it was only me and him in the church, and when I walked across the altar he accused me of not treating it with respect. In the moment I was shell-shocked, but afterwards in the church coffee shop I went up to him and said, ‘Do not accuse me of not having respect for that altar. I’ve served on that altar for many years, for you and other priests, and I’ve never lost respect. Do not accuse me of that.’ He said, ‘Sorry, sorry.’ I’d had enough of that sort of thing from him as a kid, I wasn’t going to take it as an adult.

  There was pressure to do the church thing, and the prayers. Mum could make us feel guilty on a Friday night, we’d have to go and serve Mass at church, half an hour. And I’d serve on a Sunday. And then Sunday afternoon when you’ve been to Mass and you’ve had dinner and you’re just chilling out watching telly, Mum would walk in and say, ‘Right, I’m off to benediction. Does anybody want to come with me?’ You couldn’t say no. You could try. She’d say, ‘I think you should go. I’m going,’ and if you didn’t she’d give you the guilt trip. But Mum was having a hard time I think, she’d had 20 years of pushing prams, pregnant year in year out. So my sister Anne became a mother to us all. She got some stick from our elder brothers, Joseph and John, because they thought she was a fuddy-duddy. ‘Matron’s here.’ But someone had to do it, and she was the one. She was only in her mid-20s. She’s a beauty our Annie, she’s a saint, she’s a stronghold. She’s the gentlest soul on Earth, she puts up with a lot. And I love her to pieces, she’s my godmother, and she’s like my second mum. She also introduced me to Guinness, when I was 11, gave me a quarter pint topped up with lemonade at her wedding. Good girl.

  Catholic guilt is something you always have. It still hits me now, it’s ingrained. That thing of there always being something bigger than you, watching over you, and you have to always be conscious of doing the right thing. Church taught me a lot of that. I remember just after finishing my Les Misérables run at the end of 2011, I went to church to give thanks for what I’d achieved in the show. I was feeling pretty emotional because it was the morning after my last night, and that show meant a lot to me and took a lot out of me. But I just wanted to go there to give thanks for getting me through those five months. And it was nice, it just felt like I connected. I was really grateful, because I felt like I got through that stint with a lot of faith, with support. That was the first time I’d been to church in a while. I just don’t feel that you have to. I think you can be as spiritual or as close to God by being with your kids, or just by being on a mountainside or on a beach. And I like the ritual of the Mass, it’s special. I went to a beautiful one last Christmas on Soho Square, St Patrick’s. It was lovely to go in there and hear the choir. It can be so meditative and peaceful. You can’t beat a good church choir, especially the Gregorian ones. Beautiful music.

  There was always music at home. Certainly more than the TV. It brought us together. A lot of music was played around the table, and it kept us in the room, kept us entertained and having a laugh, singing along and chatting, and really, in a way, getting to know each other as a family. That might be a tradition that’s been lost these days. Music really links families, it unites them. It’s a real warm sociable outlet for everybody to share each other’s company and share each other’s emotions.

  We had classic tunes that would always come out, like Karl Denver’s ‘Mexicali Rose’. He had this amazing voice which switched from a wonderful baritonal quality to a high falsetto, wailing country sound. Dad loved music, he loved good singers, and he had pretty eclectic tastes. He wasn’t particularly into opera – he liked Caruso and Richard Tauber and Gigli, but he loved Paul Robeson, Val Doonican, Elvis. A mixture. We used to listen to this Ivan Rebroff record, this German nutcase with a crazy, crazy voice. He had a five octave range. I think all that was where I got my philosophy for music, that there are no boundaries in terms of what you can be into, and indeed what you can sing.

  Dad never stopped singing. He was good, he could flip from being a baritone to a falsetto, because he loved Karl Denver. Dad used to sing ‘Mexicali Rose’ all the time, all the time. He was a big fan of Slim Whitman as well. ‘Indian Love Call’. The one where all the Martians’ heads explode in that movie Mars Attacks!. Mum’s taste in music was not as varied as Dad’s, although they both loved Slim Whitman. She liked a lot of big band music, the Glenn Millers, and the Val Doonican types. She liked a good singer, I think the classical side of my music came from Mum; she liked Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas, that lot.

  We had a proper turntable for the records, and little wooden box radios, and later we had a huge thick industrial metal radio with a tape player. That was shifted around the house. It was a kitchen radio, then somebody would steal it for their bedroom while they were getting ready to go out. I was big on Pink Floyd, still am – nobody in my family was into that sort of thing but I used to hear a lot of it on Radio 1. I’d tape songs from the radio, finger poised on the pause button so you wouldn’t get any of the talking, you’d stop when the DJ came in. I liked Sinatra a lot. Sinatra loved classical singers, he liked opera. And I got into Elvis. My brother Joe was a big Elvis fan, so I grew up listening to a lot of his records. Elvis liked his classical stuff too. Obviously ‘It’s Now or Never’ is ‘O Sole Mio’, same tune, same song. In my live shows at the moment I play a medley of both of them to pay tribute, to blur the lines between styles and genres, we start it off all classical and Neapolitan then midway through we switch to boogie-woogie, it’s a carnival. Elvis did ‘Surrender’ too, an English-language version of ‘Torna a Surriento’. Dean Martin did all those songs, the Neapolitan stuff.

  It’s funny how the influences in your early life really do pave the path for you as an artist. And all the singers we listened to as I was growing up, Slim Whitman, Gigli, Caruso, Frankie Laine, Don Williams, the country music, through Dad – they all had an influence on the way I sing now. I mean Elvis had an incredible baritone quality. And then people like Karl Denver and Slim Whitman, who used to sing way, way high, influenced the tenor side of my voice. You can definitely get a sense of that on the likes of ‘B
ring Him Home’. Without those influences I really don’t think I’d have the same interest in music that I have, and I probably wouldn’t have the same style of singing either.

  I used to sing around the house all the time, but it wasn’t something I considered pursuing professionally, not till my late teens really. My first public performance was an unofficial cameo in a play at a youth club day Anne put on. Alice in Wulstanland. I was two. A local actor, George Kennedy, was playing the executioner, and I shouted out, ‘I’m not scared of you.’ I wasn’t. He said, ‘Come up here and sing us a song then,’ and I got up on stage with him and sang ‘Humpty Dumpty’, a classic jam from my youth. I can just about remember being up there singing that, or at least I think I can. I followed that up two years later with an appearance in my school’s nativity play. I was Joseph, I had a couple of carols to sing and one line on my own, ‘Yes, I said he would be born in a stable,’ which I was really nervous about. Joseph being a carpenter, I had to kneel on a chair and pretend to saw through the back of it, and I got lost in the moment, so focused on what I was doing, the chair was getting closer and closer to the edge of the stage. Finally I went flying off into the first row with the saw in my hand, which must have been a little disconcerting for the audience. Although I guess if you’re the type to get to the front of a gig you’re up for a bit of excitement.

  The next thing that happened was something I was practically pushed into doing, yet in its own ramshackle little way it started everything off for me. I was 14, vegetating on the sofa watching telly, just home from school, and my sister Maria was getting ready to go to her amateur operatics evening, a weekly night in an old spiritualist church called Lottie Dawson’s Choir. Lottie Dawson was this nice little old lady who gave singing lessons and put on music shows in the Marine Hall. She did a lot for the kids in Fleetwood, and she was pretty funny. Everybody called her Auntie Lottie. And once a week she’d have a group who’d sing songs from the shows. That evening, Mum said, ‘Why don’t you go with Maria tonight, you’ll enjoy it,’ because I was always singing at home.

  I said, ‘Nah, I don’t really think it’s me, Mum.’

  And she said, ‘Go Alf, it’ll do you good, you can sing, have a go.’

  ‘Alright Mum.’

  She can be quite persuasive, my mother. So I walked down there with Maria, got to the door, peeked in, and that was as far as I got. ‘Forget this, I’m off home.’ I just saw all this prancing around, these guys pretending to be pirates, and I thought, ‘What the hell?’ It just wasn’t me. And then as I was leaving this girl walked in. Lynn Wright. I knew her from town, I fancied her rotten – she was really beautiful. She was sporty, she had this very 1987 haircut, curly but all shaven up at the back, a lot of boys fancied her. And I was 14, my hormones were kicking in, and I thought I’d go back the next week to see if she was there again.

  So the next week I went back, made more of an effort, but not much more. I tried to just hide away in the corner, sat down, but eventually I got dragged over to join in the men’s rendition of Pirates of Penzance. So after watching them all prance around like pirates and scoffing the week before, I ended up having to do it myself, to some extent. I went over to the piano, they gave me the music, and I started singing, and at the end of the song I blasted out the big top note. It came naturally to me, I wasn’t trying to prove a point. My voice had broken by then. I went through a lot with my voice, I had tonsillitis, often had a bad throat. My tonsils are ingrown now, it’s a little weird. I’ve never had them taken out, but when you look down my throat you can’t see them.

  So I belted out that note, and Lottie Dawson was gobsmacked. I remember the expressions on people’s faces, it was something else, and I really got a buzz from it. Most of the lads were chuffed, although there were a couple whose noses were put out of joint, wanted to be the stars of the show and got a bit jealous and all that. You get that all the time really, that doesn’t change. And Lynn Wright was obviously impressed too, because she started talking to me, I got to know her a bit and, mainly because I fancied her, kept going there every week. We did have a little snog a couple of times, outside the school next to our house. She wore thick, thick lipstick – I came home with it all over my face. Teenagers kissing, not a pleasant sight.

  I hadn’t told my schoolmates I was going there, because I’d started drumming in rock bands by this point and I didn’t want anybody to know that I was prancing around in tights and a tunic. And after a few weeks I did my first public performance, Songs from the Shows. We did scenes from Cats and Phantom, and I had to sing one line from Les Misérables, from ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ I was so nervous about singing it, I threw up round the back of the stage before I had to go on, but it was fun. Then we did a scene from Brigadoon and I had to wear a kilt, and because I couldn’t dance I felt I had to make a fool of myself to make it work, to win over the audience. It was a comic song anyway. So I wore a pair of Bermuda shorts under the kilt, Dad’s hobnail work boots, massive hiking socks rolled down to my ankles, a string vest, and this huge Tam o’ Shanter Scottish hat on my head that kept falling over my eyes whenever I danced. I came on halfway through the scene and the audience fell about, they found it hilarious, although Lottie Dawson’s assistant was a bit annoyed – she found it a little disruptive. Regardless, the next show we did, I thought I’d do a similar thing, because it got such a good response and I wanted to get one again. It was an amateur production, I didn’t see why we couldn’t have a laugh, bit of comic relief. But I was about to go on, all these guys in kilts were dancing at the front of the stage, and Lottie Dawson’s assistant said, ‘This is not musical comedy!’

  I said, ‘Is it not? Oh I’m sorry, I thought that was the title of your company, Lottie Dawson’s Musical Comedy Society.’

  Mr Facetious. And she said, ‘This is not pantomime. You take that hat off and go and do it seriously.’

  And I never went on, and they said, ‘Don’t you ever turn up here again!’ So I didn’t.

  Chapter Six

  BACKSTAGE IN BLACKPOOL

  Around that time I had my first real kiss, just before my success with Lynn Wright. Don’t remember who she was but I do remember that it was like sucking a drainpipe. I thought I was gonna fall in at one point. It wasn’t pleasant. It was like falling down a black hole. Sucked into a void. I was on holiday in Keswick in the Lake District, we used to go there for our summer holiday every year. We did everything as a family. Fleetwood was great in the summer too, we’d have day trips, go blackberry picking, Mum would make blackberry pie or blackberry crumble. We’d have blackberries coming out of our ears. You never wanted to see another blackberry again. We spent a lot of time on the beach and the fells, till eight or nine at night. I know it all sounds a bit Darling Buds of May, but it was really fun. The beach was clean and warm, and the sea was fantastic to swim in. The ice cream van would come down and you’d get sand on your ice cream but you’d still eat it. And that van used to play ‘O Sole Mio’, that might have been my first exposure to Neapolitan music, of sorts. I did that song on my Passione album in 2007, took me back to those summers on the beach. Mum would always do these great big barm cakes, like big flat bread rolls, and she’d halve them and put ham or chicken inside with lettuce, cucumber, juicy tomatoes, and lashings of salad cream which would pour out when you took a bite. I’ve yet to find a better sandwich.

  We went to Keswick a lot, camping, climbing, hiking for miles. We used to go to a place called Castlerigg Manor, a huge youth club with some sort of connection to the church. My brother John’s girlfriend came camping with us once, in high heel shoes. Classy. But they laughed at Anne because she was in fell-walking boots. What? Our Annie was like a Swiss Army Knife. If you were hungry or something broke she’d always have what you’d need in her rucksack. ‘Oh you’ve snapped a shoelace Mum? I think I have some spares here . . .’ So I’ve always been a fan of the great outdoors. I love hiking, I love to camp. It’s one of the reasons Sarah and I moved to Salt Lake a
few years ago, the incredible mountain view. I spent some time riding around there on my Harley last Christmas, just before our son Alfie was born. Can’t beat that. Me and Sarah have trekked in America a lot. We love Moab, in Grand County, especially Canyonlands, where they made 127 Hours, the film about Aron Ralston cutting his arm off. That’s where it actually happened. John Ford and John Wayne made a lot of their films in Moab, including The Searchers. I love John Wayne, I always have, and Moab’s Apache Motel has a John Wayne Suite, which I insisted we stayed in once – it was fractionally larger than the regular rooms and not, to be honest, a suite. You can buy John Wayne toilet roll there, it says it’s just like John Wayne: ‘It’s rough, it’s tough, and it doesn’t take crap off anyone.’ I grew up watching westerns and couldn’t believe it when I went to these places for the first time. It’s all real! I just fell in love with it all. We’ve hiked in Fisher Towers down in the Colorado River, there are these amazing, delicate looking fins of rock, skyscraper high, carved out by water and wind, and the acoustics are incredible. Amphitheatres of rock. At one point I was standing a quarter of a mile from Sarah and she could hear me singing. We even went camping for part of our honeymoon in Zion, an utterly beautiful national park in southern Utah. We started in Capitol Reef, went through Monument Valley, and one night, when all the motels were booked, we found an open space on the side of a road and stopped there for the night. The next morning we realised we were on the edge of Grafton, this ghost town from the 1800s. The church is still there, with a graveyard with wooden crosses saying things like ‘KILLED BY INDIANS’ on the stones.

  We went to Castlerigg Manor with school sometimes, for treks and activities. Things like that made my education just about bearable. When I was 16, a teacher, Mr McAvoy, sponsored me to go on a three-week Outward Bound programme in Eskdale, also in the Lake District. It was good fun, lots of hiking, mountain climbing, canoeing, abseiling, and we had great challenges to do, group expeditions. My solo expedition was a proper fiasco though. We all had to get through the night without shelter and just a lump of cheese, some porridge oats and a teabag to make use of. Unfortunately the instructor who took us out there had only just been employed and didn’t quite get what he was supposed to be doing. He was supposed to drop five of us off, all within a mile, the first person at the beginning of the mile, last person at the end. He dropped everybody off a mile between each other and I was the last, dropped off after hiking five miles since 6.30am. I built my shelter, this sort of tarp thing, on a rock face and went off to catch some fish, failed. So I built a fire, soaked my porridge oats in water I’d filtered from the river and made flatbread, melting the cheese on it, that was lunch. Then I took a nap. I woke up hours later when I heard some voices coming over the ridge, and it was a couple of the other guys, who’d found each other. So the three of us hiked down the valley, and at the bottom, literally a 45-minute walk away, was a youth hostel with a bloody tuck-shop. Nirvana. We laid in, cans of Coke, crisps, sandwiches, and went back to our little camps for the evening.