TONY Hadley will be in the swing of things at York Barbican on March 8 on The Big Swing Tour 2024. Tickets go on sale on Friday at ticketmaster.co.uk and via yorkbarbican.co.uk.
The erstwhile Spandau Ballet frontman, 63, will perform vintage songs from the swing era of Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, complemented by stylish reworkings of his solo hits and velvet-voiced Spandau favourites such as 1983’s True and Gold.
Hadley will be accompanied by his Fabulous TH Band and a full brass section as New Romantic reinterprets old romantics. “My love of swing music began when I was very young. The preparation for Sunday lunch was never without the classic sounds of Sinatra, Bennett and many more,” he reminisces.
“Then years later, when we formed our first band at school, which eventually would become Spandau Ballet, I was reminded by my parents that although I loved punk rock, if I was serious about pursuing a career as a professional singer, never to forget the classic jazz vocalists.
“So there I was listening to The Sex Pistols and The Clash alongside Tony Bennett and Jack Jones! I’ve always loved performing live, but this swing tour is totally different from our normal rock shows. I want audiences to come and enjoy a night of amazing songs from an incredible era of music alongside some great songs from my own repertoire.”
Islington-born Hadley last played York Barbican in May 2022 on a tour marking the smooth crooner’s 40th anniversary in the music business.
Meanwhile, Harry Redknapp, footballer, manager, pundit and King of the Jungle on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, is booked to play York Barbican on February 20 2024.
The former Tottenham Hotspur, Southampton, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, West Ham United, Queens Park Rangers and Birmingham City boss, now 76, will tell stories from his football and TV careers, from winning the FA Cup with Pompey in 2008 to his Jungle triumph a decade later.
Redknapp is the second veteran football manager to be confirmed for a York Barbican date in 2024. Neil Warnock, 74, now staying in charge of Huddersfield Town for the 2023-2024 Championship season after saving the Terriers from relegation in May, has moved his June 15 2023 show to May 31 next spring.
Tickets for An Audience With Harry Redknapp and Neil Warnock: Are You With Me? are on sale at yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Wrapping: Unwrapping, more like, as Australian singer-songwriter Julia wears nothing more than snowflakes. Diaphanous would not cover it. Song titles in classic festive red on the back of this prompt re-issue of an album released too close to Christmas to draw media attention last winter, but now making it onto HMV’s Yuletide shelves in York, alongside Sir Cliff, the Bocelli and Estefan families, Aled & Russell, Joss Stone, Alicia Keys and Backstreet Boys (but not Chris Isaaks’s Elvis-lite Everybody Knows It’s Christmas, alas).
Gifts inside: Julia’s 14-track debut Christmas collection, recorded in a week in the Reservoir Studio in Midtown, New York, with producer Thomas Bartlett (piano, keys), Sam Amidon (banjo, guitar, violin), James Gilligan (pedal steel & bass), Leigh Fisher (percussion), Nico Muhly (string arrangements) and Ross Irwin (trumpet, horns).
“This record encapsulates my fondest childhood memories tinged by the reality that so many are forever missing from my life today,” Stone says, as she picks hymns (Come All Ye Faithful, The First Noel, Away In A Manger, Joy To The World), standards (It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, Jingle Bells, Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas) and latterday Christmas gems (Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, Wham’s Last Christmas and Joni Mitchell’s River).
Style: Imagine Kylie singing Dolly Parton’s bluegrass take on Christmas, or Eartha Kitt guesting on Bruce Cockburn’s classic folk-rooted 1993 album, Christmas. Soulful Mariah makes you believe what she wants for Christmas will definitely arrive; doleful Julia, by comparison, probably not. More Boxing Day rueful reflection than Christmas Eve hope.
’Tis the reason to be jolly: Those Carols, especially Away In A Manger in a duet with Amidon, and the arrangements, wherein Irwin’s horns, Amidon’s banjo, Gilligan’s pedal steel and Muhly’s strings add wintry magic and variety.
Scrooge moan: No new songs amid the bleak winter stalwarts. The backing vocals on Last Christmas sounding as uncommitted as dads told by the dame to sing the panto song-sheet.
White Christmas? Oh yes, a beauty, bedded in for winter with Bartlett’s piano and Amidon’s violin.
Blue Christmas? Very blue, like how frozen Julia looks on that snowy cover. “Everything is a celebration, and everything is painful. Everything is love and everything can be lost. Everything is Christmas,” she said, when announcing the album. That is how she sings, as lonesome as the solo choirboy on the first line of Once In Royal David’s City.
Stocking or shocking? The mournful, moving, yet beautiful record to match the downbeat mood at the fag end of 2022, a shocker of a year. What Julia needs for Christmas is Satchmo’s Cool Yule (see below).
Satchmo’s Santa on the sleeve of his “first ever Christmas album”
Louis Armstrong, Louis Wishes You A Cool Yule (Verve) ****
Wrapping: Satchmo in Santa garb, trademark trumpet on his lips, looking heavenwards amid stars and snowflakes. More trumpeting on the reverse beside a Christmas tree, more stars, more snowflakes, and the track listing. Inside, notes by Ricky Riccardi, Armstrong biographer, lecturer and director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
Gifts inside: Armstrong never made a Christmas album, although 1957 delivered the Armstrong As Santa Claus set, while Ella & Louis and Louis & Friends Christmas compilations are readily available. Anyway, 51 years after his death, here are his six Fifties’ Christmas singles for Decca and duets with Ella Fitzgerald (the romantic I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm) and a sultry Velma Middleton (the fruity Baby, It’s Cold Outside, replete with Louis double entendres). Plus his last ever recording, a previously unreleased February 1971 reading of Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit From St Nicholas, aka The Night Before Christmas, newly accompanied by Sullivan Fortner’s jazz piano.
Style: Louis’s rumble of a larynx is as much the voice of Christmas as Noddy Holder’s holler, Shane MacGowan’s slur or Bing Crosby’s bonhomie. Warming as mulled wine, rich as fruit cake. Then add that jazz swing, all in “the cause of happiness”, with Benny Carter and Gordon Jenkins’ bands and The Commanders.
’Tis the reason to be jolly: Cool Yule, Winter Wonderland, Christmas In New Orleans (his hymn to his home city), ‘Zat You’, Santa Claus?. Sung in that voice.
Scrooge moan: What A Wonderful World is not a “holiday song” but…on the other hand, what a wonder it is, the message of hope ever resonant.
White Christmas? Yes, the best version ever, no less.
Blue Christmas? Only the temperature on Baby, It’s Cold Outside.
Stocking or shocking? What a wonderful present this would be.
James Pearson: Artistic director of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and musical director The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars…with a pantomime past in York
JAMES Pearson leads The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars on his return to York Theatre Royal tonight.
Artistic director at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, where his trio are the house band, he has worked with Paul McCartney, Dame Cleo Laine, Maria Ewing, Jeff Beck, Petula Clark, Wynton Marsalis, Dave Stewart, Buddy Greco, Richard Rodney Bennett, Ray Davies, Nigel Kennedy, Robbie Williams, Rufus Wainwright, Gregory Porter, Imelda May and…York pantomime dame Berwick Kaler.
“I’d left the Guildhall School of Music & Drama when Mick Foster, who was the York panto’s saxophone player, from Harrogate, and was at college with me, got me the chance to play keyboards for Mother Goose,” says pianist and composer James.
Subsequently he was the musical director for Aladdin in 1997-1998 and Beauty & The Beast the next winter. “I did enjoy Berwick’s ‘Me babbies, me bairns’ and the Wagon Wheel throwing,” he says. “The atmosphere was a riot! A lot of the music was scored, but you always had to have your wits about you because Berwick would go off-piste.
“The reason a lot of jazz musicians do panto is that you have to improvise. Like if someone walks across in a funny manner, it’s highlighted by the drummer doing a flip-flop sound.
“I particularly enjoyed it as I got to spend ten weeks in York each year. I’m from Hertfordshire but I know York well because my sister, Kate, lives in Sheriff Hutton, and went to the University of York, where she met her husband, Daniel. Now they both teach music there. I must have been coming to York on and off for 30 years.”
James began working at Ronnie Scott’s club in 2006, becoming the artistic director the following year. “I’m largely responsible for its output both in and out of the club,” he says.
Tonight, he is at the piano for The Ronnie Scott’s Story, whose two 45-minute sets by The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars combines live jazz, narration and rare archive photos of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis and video footage from the 1960s and ’70s. “Putting the series of pictures and footage together really helps it become an accessible show,” says James.
Set among the dive bars and jazz jook joints of London’s Soho, the show recalls the desperate hand-to-mouth finances of the early years and the frequent police raids.
You will hear how Ronnie Scott’s became neutral ground within rife gang territory and their scrapes with gangsters, not least the Krays, who were rumoured to have taken Ronnie and Pete “for a little drive”.
James Pearson, left, performing with The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars
“The Krays tried to take over the club in 1965 when they were looking to get a London venue before they became The Krays as we came to know them. They went to Earl’s Court instead and then tried to get a foothold in the West End. There was always a strange relationship with gangs with their links with the jazz world.”
Life at Ronnie Scott’s is reimagined through tales of the club’s past visitors, from pop stars, film stars and politicians to comedians and royalty, but above all, the musicians.
“The thing about Ronnie Scott’s is, firstly, its history and legacy. Even though no-one has smoked there for years, it still feels smoky.
“Then there’s the intimacy, where the audience are so close to the stage, three feet from Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder…Lady Gaga…Prince.
“When Stevie Wonder came, he was just in the audience and then got on stage to play with the house band. Sting has done that too. That’s one of the great things about jazz: it’s free style.
“After Lady Gaga’s second London show with Tony Bennett had to be cancelled, because she absolutely loves performing, she asked if there was any way she could play here.
“She parked her gold Rolls Royce outside the club, and because you can’t really do a Lady Gaga gig secretly, the press were there waiting for her.”
Tonight’s show is built around music from the jazz greats who have performed at Ronnie Scott’s over its 60 years and more, complemented by stories of old Soho and miscreant musicians.
Look out, in particular, for Natalie Williams performing the songs of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and saxophone player Alex Garnett, who likes to tell old Ronnie Scott jokes as the boss was famous for his humour.
James is delighted to be performing in York once more. “We loved doing the Ronnie Scott’s shows in the Parliament Street spiegeltent at the Great Yorkshire Fringe,” he says. “It was such a lovely festival and it’s sad it’s gone.”
The Ronnie Scott’s Story, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
The poster for The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars, featuring vocalist Natalie Williams and saxophonist Alex Garnett
