‘I’ve still got my voice, my hair is still growing. I can’t complain’. Leo Sayer feels like dancing all over again at York Barbican

THE rearranged show must go on for Leo Sayer at York Barbican tonight.

Delayed by the pandemic, it now forms part of a 2022 tour to mark the Shoreham-by-Sea-born singer and songwriter’s 50th anniversary in pop. “I was supposed to be playing in 2020, but then had to hold off the tour for Covid, but all the shows have been rearranged, and if anything, it’s better doing it now,” says Leo, who moved to Australia more than 20 years ago.

Back on home soil, Sayer and his band will perform a Seventies and Eighties’ hit-filled set sure to feature Thunder In My Heart, Moonlighting, One Man Band, I Can’t Stop Loving You, More Than I Can Say, Have You Ever Been In Love, When I Need You, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and, yes, debut smashThe Show Must Go On.

At 74, “I’ve still got my voice, my hair is still growing. I can’t complain. It’s been lovely coming back. I did a show at the start of the year in Sydney Harbour…one show and then I got Covid,” says Leo, whose home is in a beautiful village high up, between Sydney and Canberra.

“It’s the equivalent of the Caingorms. I love the space, the freedom. I moved there in 2001, and I’ve no regrets at all, but it’s lovely coming back [for the tour].”

Fifty years, Leo, fifty years. Can you believe it?! “It’s like time compresses in an incredible way. You forget the years passing. I’ve got three stents in my heart, a partial kneecap replacement and Crohn’s disease, but with the right medication you can deal with it and I can feel fantastic,” he says.

“I’m still ambitious, I’m still the same guy who started out 50 years ago, still trying to prove myself by finding avenues that mark me out. I’ve always been a great believer in individuality.”

Leo had to break into a dog-eat-dog Seventies’ pop world. “We all hated each other. It was like a war,” he says, the laughter in his voice giving away that he might just be exaggerating. “It was such a competitive industry. If you look back, you can remember all the songs in the Top 40. That music really counted.”

Managed by pop star and actor Adam Faith, Leo struck up a partnership with songwriter and producer David Courtney, co-writing such songs as Long Tall Glasses and Giving It All Away (a 1973 top five hit for The Who’s Roger Daltrey).

“Adam Faith was very dynamic as a pop star, who did the Budgie TV series and a movie with David Essex [Stardust], and wanted to get me a record deal with Warner Music in America. He managed to get Joe from Warner down to Brighton, where David was based, and took them to a fish and chip shop,” recalls Leo.

“Just around the corner, a little guy called Leo Sayer was playing, and on the way back, I was told I had a deal with Warner.”

Sayer’s love of individuality was reflected in his decision to paint his face in the Pierrot clown mode for his early performances. “I loved Les Enfants du Paradis – Children Of Paradise – a movie made at the end of the Second World War by Marcel Carné,” says Leo, recalling the classic French drama that charts the ill-fated love of a mime artist and a sometime actress in 1840s’ Paris.

“I loved how he [the mime artist, played by Jean-Louis Barrault] could describe himself in gestures, rather than speech.”

Sitting with Roger Daltrey, “on the wall were all these big Pierrot pictures, and he said, ‘how do you see yourself’, and I said, ‘like that’, like Jean-Louis Barrault,” says Leo.

He duly borrowed a costume from a street performer called Julian. “He was 6ft tall, I’m 5 ft 4! It became my signature look, and it was extraordinary when we first did it, getting in a famous make-up lady from Australia,” he says.

“They wouldn’t let me look at the mirror as a black bathing cap was put on and the make-up applied, the dark eyes and the dots on the cheeks, and then suddenly I could look at the mirror, and from that moment I knew I’d found my look to be released to the world and really be transformed into Leo Sayer [he was born Gerard Hugh Sayer].

“After shows, I could rush around the block, stand outside in my T-shirts and jeans, and I’d hear people saying, ‘Hey, that guy Leo was amazing’. I got to find out at first hand what they thought!”

Later, Leo would shed that skin. “That was terribly scary. It was me that decided to stop it, which shocked people, but I only ever wanted to do it for a year. I’d seen Gilbert O’Sullivan being stuck for ages with that image of the little lad in the shorts and cap,” he says.

Leo made the transition when he was invited to be the opening act for Rick Wakeman at the Crystal Palace Bowl, South London. “Once I was without the mask, I thought I’d be terrified, but my [now ex-] wife and I put together this Great Gatsby look with the cloth cap, when you had to go from one image to another, as you did with all that glam rock going on, and though it was a baptism of fire, it felt right.”

The hits stacked up, the songwriting continues to this day. “It’s important to still write songs, but over the last couple of albums I’ve been working through a backlog of recordings, like the demos from when I worked with Alan Tarney in 1983. It’s time to put those songs out there,” says Leo. “It’s amazing how those songs from the Seventies and Eighties still sound so current.”

During the pandemic, Leo penned a couple of lockdown songs. “One was about Melbourne, the most locked-down city in the world, My City In Lockdown, which came out on YouTube,” he says. “Then there was How Did We Get Here?, about everyone blaming each other, in the way that disinformation becomes reality.”

Covid-19 reintroduced Leo to wearing masks – albeit of a different kind – all those years later, and although they have now been largely discarded by the public, “I wore a mask on the Tube in London the other day and the negative comments I got really surprised me.” he says.

Leo Sayer plays York Barbican tonight (7/10/2022), 7.30pm. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

REVIEW: Clive, alias Phil Grainger, Music At The Mill, Stillington Mill, near York, July 2

“The second cut is always the deepest when Phil Grainger sings”. Picture: Fair Dinkum Film

BEST buddies since Easingwold schooldays, Alexander Flanagan Wright and Phil Grainger reeled off a series of At The Mill double bills back home in North Yorkshire in the first summer of Covid after their Australian tour was aborted.

New York and Edinburgh Fringe plans were scuppered too, after old York called them home, and more than a year later, they are still here, making magical theatre, song and spoken word.

Oh, and building an outdoor theatre too on Stillington Mill’s disused tennis court, with Alex’s father, Paul, and mother, Maggi, playing a prominent role too in establishing the new and impressively diverse At The Mill enterprise (more of which in a CharlesHutchPress interview with Alex later this week).

Last August’s set finished with Phil announcing that wood had arrived for Alex and Phil to start work on converting that summer’s marquee into an outdoor theatre. “If they build it, we will come,” vowed CharlesHutchPress, and sure enough, this summer finds that theatre in full sail for concerts and theatre shows.

For one night, Phil and Alex teamed up with two friends in Foraged & Forged, a showcase of new material written specially for the occasion. Friday night put polymath Phil in the solo spotlight, in the guise of Clive, and while the pre-show rain enforced a late decision to abandon the plan to do one set from one stage, and a second from another, the format of an acoustic first half and electric second set was retained.

“It’s been a bit of an hour,” he said, putting on his bandana in readiness for adopting Clive mode. “It’s ‘look at how good this would have been. Now is what you’re getting’!”

What we were getting was the solo music project of singer, songwriter, musician, sound engineer, magician, actor, Gobbledigook Theatre director and event promoter Phil Grainger. Why Clive, you ask? Phil is not a name for a singer, he reasons. Er, Phil Collins? “Exactly,” said Easingwold Phil in a typical shard of attractively blunt Yorkshire wit that peppered his performance. “Clive is the name for the thing that’s me doing this.”

Phil Grainger, in Clive mode, performing Under The Sea from the Disney songbook. Picture: Fair Dinkum Film

Clive is his middle name, and his father’s name too, so Clive it is, and tonight the Stillington Mill’s a-Clive with the sound of music. Beautiful, poignant, happy, sad, funny, heart-felt music, sung in one of those surging soul voices where the second cut is always the deepest when Phil, sorry, Clive, lets rip. One of these voices where you ache waiting for those transcendent moments.

Clive would divide his sets, he said, between songs he had been writing for a long time, others that were new, and some so new they were only half written. He would stop them at the point they were half-finished, with no pretence of finesse.

You cannot help but warm to such candour, or indeed to his off-the-cuff sporadic dips into a newly acquired Disney songbook. Or his seemingly rudimentary, yet deeply affecting guitar, that recalls Billy Bragg’s less-is-more playing.

Clive, his dad, was there, and so was his mum. “I didn’t know they were coming,” said Phil, promptly deciding to change his “emotional set-ender” to his “emotional opening number”. “This song is about my mum. It’s called My Mother,” he said, whereupon mum raised a knowing eyebrow.

Soon we learned she does better Sunday roasts than a Toby Carvery, she effing hates swearing and is no fan of tattoos either. Under Alex’s encouragement, Phil’s lyrics are coming on apace, matching his gift for melody, and built around a winning line in couplets and a desire to take the advice of The Streets’ Mike Skinner to always end with a memorable pay-off.

His hymn of praise to the lure of York’s welcoming arms, whenever he is away, is awaiting both completion and confirmation of its title – “it might be Angel Of The North,” he speculated – but already it is completely moving.

Alex and Phil had vowed never to return to the pieces they wrote in a day to perform to an audience that night, but promises are made to be broken, and so out came Home, the one with 14 houseplants acquired by Phil’s girlfriend Angie for their cottage nest and Alex’s poetic “tatty clattering” as a home is found inside a house. “With you I’m two-up; I was one down on my own,” finished Phil. Mike Skinner would surely approve.

Phil Grainger and Alexander Flanagan Wright last August, when they mounted a week of The Flanagan Collective and Gobbledigook Theatre shows at At The Mill, by the 18th century corn mill. Picture: Charlotte Graham

After a pleasingly erratic stroll through Disney’s Can You Feel The Love Tonight, the acoustic set concluded with two of Phil’s finest, Little Red and Colour Me In: one pulling at the frayed edges of a disintegrating relationship; the other, from Phil and Alex’s show Orpheus, a ballad that would fit perfectly on Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour on BBC 6Music. “I’m drunk on colour and I’m drunk on soul,” Phil sang, and how we drunk it in.

Electricity was thankfully restricted to Phil’s switch of guitar and not lightning for the second half, introduced by storyteller Phil with his recollection of trying to pay the £600 required for the instrument in £2 coins gathered over time ten years ago. Bank the coins, he was told, but eventually the guitar was his.

A decade later, he finally chanced his arm at a guitar solo in Safe Travels, Hurry Back, words by Alex, title and soar-away tune by Phil. The solo? Grainger’s transition into Jimi Hendrix is on hold.

Best title of the night award went to Hallelujah For The Hell Of It, best couplet to: “I’m hard to read like a broadsheet; you’re hard to keep like the off-beat”.

That made it back from Australia in February 2020, as did another Alex and Phil composition, If Destroyed Still True, written late into the night after their last supper before the urgent flight home, this one composed with Aussie friend Jamie on laptop.

“Just to be clear, we’ve never done this one live, since we wrote it in an hour that night,” said Alex, duly doing his Kae Tempest-style spoken words live, interwoven with Phil’s yearning vocal part and Jamie’s infectious recorded instrumental refrain.

One-man band and his bandana: Phil Grainger performing his Clive show. Picture: Fair Dinkum Film

It could have gone wrong at any moment, instead it went beautifully right, and it is in such unpredictable, knife-edge moments that Summer At The Mill is creating its distinctive alchemy.

Do check out the Aussie video at: facebook.com/orpheuseurydicethegods/videos/2254587891515753; the chorus will be your new earworm within minutes.

The Little Mermaid’s Under The Sea survived its Big Phil DIY – Does It Yorkshire – reinvention, and then it was time for Phil to revisit the “wise and gorgeous” recording of Easingwold Players’ stalwart Bronwyn Jennison, who passed away last year.

It had been a highlight of last summer’s Clive show and now, reactivated for the first time since then, Bronwyn’s rendition of Alex’s words had even greater weight after the year we’ve all had. “You carry on, wild child, and I’ll carry on,” said Bronwen through the ether, and Phil and Alex will indeed carry that flame.

Phil’s finale was a humdinger: an audience hum-along to the anything but humdrum Hum, “another song we said we’d never do again, but it’s too special not to!”.

Last August’s review ended with a call to Phil to record an album, and indeed the Half Man Half Bull download has since emerged, but that is a team creation, not the full Phil, and so, Phil, even more than last year, please head into the recording studio. Your mother, for one, would be chuffed.

“I’m so glad I could be here to sing to the benches I made,” he signed off. So we were, so we were.

Review by Charles Hutchinson