The Stage

Scene stealer - Tommy Steele

Published Monday 7 November 2005 at 11:45 by Nick Smurthwaite

Musician, artist, pop icon, actor, West End and Broadway star - Tommy Steele has played all these roles in his career and is still going strong. It’s time the media recognised his contribution, argues Nick Smurthwaite

It doesn’t make any sense to feel sorry for Tommy Steele. As a performer and artist he has done everything, been everywhere, met everyone and made pots of money in the process.

And yet, half a century of excellence and achievement in showbusiness - he has made more appearances at the London Palladium (1,767 to date) than any other artist - does seem to have slipped by largely unmarked by the broadcasting media. Where were the TV tributes and radio retrospectives marking his 50th anniversary as a performer in 2004?

Is it because Britain’s first teenage pop idol sold out to wholesome family entertainment too soon, is it perhaps that he has remained resolutely unfashionable down the decades, or is it simply that we British are deeply suspicious of American-style show-offs?

Steele himself is the first to admit the last charge. “It is probably a failing in my character,” he says candidly, “but I have always had this need to impress somebody, to be entertaining.”

Now in his 70th year, Tommy Steele is back onstage at the London Palladium, playing the title role in the musical Scrooge and proving once again that he is more than capable of taking on a role that challenges him dramatically as well as musically. That familiar goofy grin - as infectious today as it was when he started out - will definitely be kept under wraps until Ebenezer sees the error of his ways.

We meet in the exclusive Thames-side apartment block where his eighth floor flat commands spectacular views across the river to Westminster. It is only a mile or so from Mason Street, off the Old Kent Road, where Tom Hicks grew up. Wartime evacuation and ill health dogged his childhood and at 15 he joined the Merchant Navy, working on Cunard liners, first as a pantry boy and later as a fitness trainer.

What did he learn in the four and half years he spent at sea? “Everything I know,” he says. “Self-preservation, the need to trust your fellow man, loyalty, tolerance, cultural differences.”

He also learnt how to play the guitar from a black plate cleaner from Bermuda. “We called him Cookie and he taught me the basic chords to play 12-bar blues. Then I bought my own guitar in Haiti and practiced for the next two years.”

Seeing Buddy Holly onstage in Norfolk, Virginia, was a Road to Damascus moment. “I knew then I could do what he was doing. I could already play the guitar and I loved performing. I heard Blue Suede Shoes in New York in the summer of 1956. Five days later I played it in a coffee bar in London and some bloke came up to me afterwards and asked me if I wanted to go into showbusiness.”

Decca offered him a record deal on condition that he could find something worth recording. So his mates Mike Pratt and Lionel Bart, with whom he had formed a skiffle group, came up with Rock With the Caveman, which the newly renamed Tommy Steele recorded on September 24, 1956. By the end of that year, Steele had a No 1 hit with his second record, Singing the Blues - scarcely Howlin’ Wolf but catchy and distinctive enough to build a career on.

To say Steele’s rise to stardom was meteoric would be an understatement. He went from anonymous 19-year-old sailor to pop star within a matter of weeks. Didn’t all that overnight fame and fortune go to his head?

“When you’re 19 and starting out, all you want to do is play your music and get it right. You’re not aware that around you this great animal called celebrity is starting to take shape. I was lucky. Because I was the first, nobody knew I was a walking gold mine.

“John Kennedy, the press photographer who discovered me in the Soho coffee bar, said he didn’t know anything about showbusiness, so he contacted a fella called Larry Parnes, who owned some shops. Larry said we’d better get an agent, so he brought in Ian Bevan, the kindest and wisest man you could wish to meet. We were like a fortress. The piranhas couldn’t touch us.”

What deflected him so quickly from the pop trajectory was his agent’s decision to put him in a panto in Liverpool in 1957.

“I had to dance, sing and do comedy routines and all of a sudden I was in a musical and I loved it. This was my dream come true, what I’d been aspiring to all my childhood, watching the greats like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire onscreen.”

The great impresario Harold Fielding, who knew talent when he saw it, cast Steele as Buttons in a glitzy production of Cinderella at the London Coliseum. In less than two years the boy from Bermondsey had gone from one-hit wonder to the darling of the West End.

“Noel Coward, Rex Harrison, Laurence Olivier, they all came backstage and told me I had it, whatever it was. Apparently I was the new prince.”

Before the Beatles had even cut their first single, Steele had turned his back on pop/rock and accepted an offer from the Old Vic to play Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, a decision even he thinks was odd in retrospect.

“I felt incredibly nervous and unsure of myself at the read-through,” he recalls. “It was only when one of the actors lit up a Woodbine that I started to feel at home. Being the Old Vic, I had imagined they would all be Oxbridge types.”

By this time he had already starred in three tailor-made films - The Tommy Steele Story, The Duke Wore Jeans and Tommy the Toreador - and the first of many Royal Variety Shows. The next big challenge was a bespoke West End musical, Half a Sixpence, which proved equally popular on both sides of the Atlantic, although he says, when it came to dance, the demands of the American company were far more rigorous than ours.

“It was the first time I’d done serious dancing in a show and my choreographer in New York, Honor White, who was famous for Music Man, really made me work at the barre.

“Gene Kelly came to see me after a matinee and asked me to do a TV special with him. I told him I wasn’t a dancer and he said, ‘Of course you’re a dancer, you are in the best dance show on Broadway’.”

Later, working on the film Finian’s Rainbow, Steele met and worked with his other great idol, Fred Astaire, whose opening gambit was: “You must be the Steele kid. Okay, show me what you got!”

Inevitably, working with the likes of Kelly and Astaire left an indelible mark and Steele had the talent and the tenacity to build on these experiences.

“With all the greats I worked with, they all had the same thing in common - the need to get it right. Not one of them ever turned up at rehearsal with it right. You can only arrive with an idea of what you are going to do, then you are shown by the experts.

“Only when you’ve been shown the path can you start putting in the bricks. In my career, what came with each new challenge was the people who could tell me how to do it.”

Steele has a seemingly insatiable creative drive. There have been novels, paintings, sculptures, TV specials and various musical compositions, including a symphonic poem dedicated to Picasso. You name it, he’s tried it. He says it is not so much a low threshold of boredom that drives him as the childlike need to gain approval. Judging by the 15 years he spent playing competitive squash at the highest level, it is safe to assume that he also likes to win.

But he says he has no problem relaxing, whether it’s watching the History Channel, sitting on a beach or fishing for marlin off Florida Keys.

“I don’t kill them, I put a clip on the fin in order to help track their migratory habits, then put them back in the sea.”

He walks me out to the street, a little stiff around the hips these days, recalling the 30 happy years he spent living in a huge period mansion overlooking Richmond Park.

“The house came with an old gardener, who was furious when I pulled up his asparagus that had been been there for donkey’s years.

“How was I to know? I was a just a yard boy from Bermondsey!”

Tommy Steele - A Summary

1936: Born Bermondsey, London, 17 December.

1947-51: Educated Bacon’s School for Boys, Bermondsey.

1951-55: Assorted jobs with cruise ships in the Merchant Navy.

1956: Discovered by John Kennedy in Soho coffee bar; records Rock With the Caveman; makes stage debut at the Empire, Sunderland; his second single, Singing the Blues makes No.1 in the pop charts.

1957: Makes London debut at the Dominion; makes two films, The Tommy Steele Story and The Duke Wore Jeans; appears in the Royal Variety Performance.

1958-59: Stars as Buttons in Cinderella at the London Coliseum; stars in the film Tommy the Toreador, from which the song Little White Bull goes on to be Top Ten hit.

1960-61: Appears at the Old Vic in She Stoops to Conquer; marries Ann Donoughue.

1963-65: Stars in Half a Sixpence in the West End, then on Broadway.

1966-68: Stars in the films The Happiest Millionaire, Finian’s Rainbow, and Where’s Jack; plays Feste in TV version of Twelfth Night, alongside Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson.

1970-71: Writes and presents Tommy Steele in Search of Charlie Chaplin for TV; makes debut at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas.

1974-76: Plays the title role in the musical Hans Christian Andersen at the London Palladium, then on tour.

1979-80: An Evening With Tommy Steele at the Prince of Wales Theatre becomes longest running West End solo show ever; awarded OBE in the New Year’s Honours.

1983: Publishes his first novel, The Final Run; opens Singin’ In the Rain at the London Palladium; Variety Club celebrates his 25th anniversary in showbusiness.

1990-92: Stars in a musical version of Some Like It Hot on tour and in London.

1993: Conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra in his Rock Suite - An Elderly Person’s Guide to Rock. Publishes his third novel, Four Faces For Ada.

1994-98: Stars in What A Show! On tour and in the West End; awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in Denmark.

2002: Tours the UK in the title role of the musical Scrooge.

2005: Revives Scrooge for a season at the London Palladium.