The Festive Season has got off to a great start this year. After two wonderful pantomimes and a stunning Christmas show, here I am at the fabulous Howard Assembly Room for an evening of song from Madeline Bell and Ian Shaw. The pair have been performing together for many years off and on but obviously still love each other’s company and didn’t stop smiling or laughing all night, and neither did I.
At 82 years old, she is still full of mischief, and her voice sounds remarkably good. I am sure that the repertoire is picked to suit it, but there were powerful passages which demanded she push the boundaries quite a bit. She remains slim and elegant, saying that she likes to get close to the audience so they can see that she hasn’t had any lifts or tucks, but there was one huge difference from her younger self, which was that the famous diastema has gone, replaced by a perfect, row of white gnashers, She said that it had to go because the aging process had meant the gap became far too wide.
Being from Newark, New Jersey, and born in 1942, she grew up with the incredible galaxy of stars who hail from that city. She was in the same choir as Dionne Warwick, went to school with Gloria Gaynor and her mother’s best friend was Sarah Vaughan.
She came to the UK in 1962 to sing in a musical called Black Messiah and on the last night was approached by Norman Newell, who produced records for artists such as Shirley Bassey, who asked her to work as a backing singer, which she did. The planned fourteen month stay in Europe in 1962 is still going on, although she is now resident in Spain.
The number of hit records on which she has sung is huge, from You Can’t Always Get What You Want, by the Rolling Stones, to Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends, which she loved making, as the three girls involved were told to come up with their own arrangement. The problem arose when the overall arranger didn’t credit them meaning no cut of the royalties. This led to her life motto – always read the small print!
Not only did she tell many stories from her past, but answered several questions from the audience, which seemed to be made up of major devotees. The chap sitting next to me had come down from Newcastle for the performance and was going to see her again in Manchester on Friday.
In the 1970s she was in Blue Mink with Roger Cook and the late Herbie Flowers. She said that she all but lived in Yorkshire at that time as it was the centre of the Cabaret Club Circuit. There was the Fiesta in Sheffield, along with its sister venue in Stockton-on-Tees, as well as the big two, Wakefield Theatre Club and Batley Variety Club, both of which got huge stars every week. I lived in Wakefield during the seventies and they were our usual haunts watching people like Roy Orbison, who I must have seen ten times, Jimmy Ruffin, Georgie Fame and Alan Price plus loads more you won’t know! She said she loved Wakefield Theatre Club, as did we because it was a bit more upmarket with table service for food and drinks. They were a bit slow though, so if my wife and I went with a couple of friends, our order was always two bottles of wine as soon as we got in, to make sure we didn’t run dry. She said of Batley Variety Club, which was basically a huge Working Men’s Club, that she always knew that she had arrived there by the overwhelming smell of chicken when she got out of the car at the back door.
One fact she passed on which had me in stitches, was that she said she is the only American she knows who can pronounce the town of Heckmondwike correctly. And she did.
Ian Shaw, her accompanist for the night, was no slouch with the singing either, and his piano playing was excellent, everything from rock to blues, via his speciality, jazz. Whenever Ms Bell mentioned a song in the answer to a question from the audience, or in a reminiscence, Mr Shaw would begin softly playing it as a backing to the tale.
Speaking of music, yes, there were songs as well, they kicked off with The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, which I must admit, had me a bit worried as she had to don her specs and read the words from a cheat sheet, but I needn’t have worried as the rest were done from memory. Another seasonal classic was Santa Claus is Coming To Town. Being dressed in a red glitter suit, she added that he wasn’t coming to hand out presents, but to get his jacket back.
Second half. Santa obviously did get his jacket back.
Alfie, by Bacharach and David triggered a tale about Cilla Black in a bar in Spain, Your Song did the same about Elton John, or Reg as she calls him. She always uses stars’ real names, even her absolute favourite, Dusty Springfield, is Mary to her. ‘I used to watch her like a hawk’, she said, as she was by far the best performer she had worked with. Now I always thought that the incredible Dusty’s trademark coif was a wig, but Ms Bell told of how she would go to Vidal Sassoon with Dusty in the Sixties and, to get the iconic blonde colour, she would need two assistants with hair dryers on cold pointing at her head for a couple of hours to counteract the heat needed for the colouring chemical to work. Most times she was in tears from the pain.
Madeline Bell then went into her favourite Dusty song, Going Back. I particularly enjoyed her performance of Your Song by Elton John, who began his career as a backing singer, so they knew each other from the early days. Your Song is as much acted as sung, which suited Ms Bell’s voice and musical theatre skills a treat.
The pieces were not all famous, in fact, one, called The Blues and Me, has never been released but is from a musical called The Singer, made for the BBC but never broadcast and permission to release the songs, never granted. It was written by Georgie Fame and was brilliant, as was the final work in the set, penned by Madeline Bell herself, and called Keep Me In Your Dreams, an appropriate way to end the night and an instruction I was only too eager to obey.
Madeline Bell is performing on 13th December with RNCM Big Band at Royal Northern College of Music Theatre, Manchester; 17th December at Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, yes, I do have some Dutch readers, or wait until 3rd and 4th March 2005, when she will be at Ronnie Scotts in London. Book direct with venues.
To see what is coming up at Howard Assembly Room please go to https://www.operanorth.co.uk/event-tag/har/
Feature image from Howard Assembly Room. Photographs by Stan Graham
Tyke It To The Limit 