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 Cole Porter |
Ex-Strangler clears throat for songbook
AS the lead singer of punk legends The Stranglers, Paul Roberts had run-ins with the Manchester mafia, beat up Greek fascists who tried to kill him on stage, and suffered a “major incident” in Guernsey in which someone’s body parts were misplaced.
This week he swaps the hurly-burly world of rock’n’roll for smoother waters when he brings the sophisticated charms of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin et al to Hampstead’s New End Theatre.
Roberts, a 49-year-old with a gravelly voice and conspicuous tattoos, admitted to me yesterday (Wednesday) that his Great American Songbook show was “a departure” from his usual stomping ground, but declared swing music was his first true love. “I was brought up on the American Songbook, then I ran away with the circus,” he told me minutes before the first-night show.
“We policed ourselves. For me it was like a fight every night. But I always loved those perfect balanced songs. I used to soundcheck to My Sunny Valentine. I think the rest of the band might be of the opinion that there might be a certain amount of cheese in it.”
Roberts, who hails from Chiswick, left The Stranglers in 2006 after 16 years with the band to concentrate on his theatre work and his other band, Soulsec.
The idea of a punk singer delivering the classics might sound like The Sex Pistols’ version of My Way all over again, but Roberts promised me his swing band renditions of the classics would be faithful to the spirit of the original.
He said: “Sinatra said if he didn’t deliver the meaning of every single word of his song then he’d failed, and I agree with that. You’ve got to understand swing to sing it.”
Canada weather rod gets some stick
I THOUGHT at first that I was just damned ignorant when I read the words “Canadian stick” in a newspaper column the other day and wondered what they meant.
To test the depths of my ignorance I asked four colleagues as to the meaning of the words.
I felt much better when they all scratched their heads in shared ignorance.
When I looked the words up I discovered they relate to a fir or birch rod that twists upwards in humidity and downwards in high-humidity, used by some Native Americans.
Another user, apparently, is the columnist Simon Jenkins who in a savage piece in the Guardian mocking weather forecasters referred proudly to his Canadian stick outside his home in Primrose Hill. “It moves,” he wrote, “but only after the weather has already changed, thus telling me what I can see.
“It is cunning and beautiful. I love it.”
Committed campaigner on the end of the line
IT’S strange that although I never actually met Ian Wilder I feel as if I knew the inner man.
I began to get to know him two or three years ago when he started ringing my office and asking for me.
From then on he would ring about once a month championing some West End cause or other with the kind of intense fervour and honesty that, I began to realise, made him stand out as a Westminster
councillor.
His calls would come at anytime from the afternoon to evening, weekdays or weekends, and each time I felt it strange that I was talking to a councillor calling from a sickbed three thousand miles away.
Lately, he became a great defender of the eastern part of Oxford Street, afraid that predatory commercial interests wanted to turn it into a copy of the other part of the street which is dominated by the big chains.
It was only after sometime that he began to tell me that he was ringing from his bed at a cancer specialist hospital in Houston, Texas, where he was being given the very latest in hi-tech medicine that was not available in Britain.
He told me a consultant at a London hospital had only given him a few months to live, and that he had turned to the Houston hospital famous throughout the world for its cutting-edge treatment of cancer.
In the past year he would begin his calls with a description of the latest treatment with a matter-of-fact tone.
Though he clearly differed with some of the policies pursued by his Conservative colleagues on Westminster Council, I soon noticed he had a sense of political honour and would never betray confidences.
The last time he rang, about a month ago, he told me that the doctors had warned him that if their last-resort treatment didn’t work it would not be possible to save him.
I was afraid the treatment failed because the calls came to an end – and last week, with great sadness, I discovered he had passed away.
For some reason we had taken to each other and exchanged the kind of family confidences you only share with someone you have known
intimately for years.
From the first time we met, over the phone as it were, I knew here was a man with special qualities. His death leaves a great vacuum.
Police sell-off: it’s a fair cop
WILL the police stations in Kentish Town and Hampstead be closed down – or won’t they?
For more than a year rumours have swayed one way or the other.
Both the Lib Dems and Tories have been locked in bitter conflict over who will do more to rescue Hampstead station from the wicked Scotland Yard speculators desperate to sell it.
Now I can disclose that a source told me that at last week’s Metropolitan Police Authority’s estate panel plans to sell the two stations off were jettisoned.
When I rang the MPA’s press office I was stonewalled.
Then a minute later another local politician – nothing to do with the MPA – rang me to tell us all about it. That’s politics for you.
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