Tommy's no steal!

Busking, says Tommy Steele, is an art which comes naturally to him.

This doesn't mean that he likes to stand on street corners with a bass drum strapped to his back; it's the theatrical variant which interests him.

Busking on stage is the ability to improvise a song or even an entire show right in front of the audience. It's pretty much what he'll be doing in Bradford next Thursday.

But everything, he says, has its moment. And there is a time to busk and a time to rehearse. Which is why, not so long ago, Britain's first rock and roller and the king of the song-and-dance boys recoiled at a well-intentioned offer to return to big-time television.

It was Yorkshire Television doing the offering.

"They wanted me to do seven or maybe 12 shows," he recalls.

"They said, 'It'll be easy. You can get seven opening songs and seven closing songs and do something in the middle'."

Asking an old pro to "do something in the middle" is like telling Picasso to emulsion the bathroom.

"It would have been like a production line," says Tommy. "A complete anathema.

"They said they could only make it pay if they did a series of shows. Well, I can understand the economics, but that's not the way a song and dance man works. You can't just churn 'em out like that."

The trouble for Tommy is that his brand of TV spectacular is just too expensive in today's accountant-driven world of the media.

"I need a big orchestra, singers, dancers, lots of costumes and lots of rehearsal," he says. "It has to be precise and splendid and spectacular.

"But they don't do that kind of show any more. They can't afford to, or say they can't."

Which is why he's content, these days, to confine himself to live appearances such as next Thursday's. The stage is where his heart lies - and it's also where he can let his hair down (at 61 he still has plenty) and improvise as he pleases.

"My one-night stand audience is usually made up of real out-and-out fans," he says, "so they're in the mood to be entertained and surprised, and they don't mind if you try something new and fall on your arse. That's how my act has been built over the years."

His current tour of one-nighters, his first for 20 or so years, follows a string of big, trademark musicals. "All the highlights from those shows go into my act now," he says. "And I've also retained something I improvised last time I was in Bradford. I now give the audience little cards, and they can use them to request songs."

Seat-of-the-pants stuff like that is apt to make him unpopular with his musicians, but Tommy insists: "They love it. It tests 'em. And it's not as if I'm Ken Dodd - I don't have 'em sitting there till two in the morning."

It's now 42 years since he was transformed from Thomas Hicks, guitar-playing merchant seaman, to Tommy Steele, quiffed, hip-swivelling, teenage sensation.

It happened when Hugh Mendl, a talent spotter from Decca Records, saw him singing at the famous Two I's cappuccino bar in London's Soho while on shore leave.

"It was pure happenstance," he remembers. "I was able to sing songs no-one in Britain had heard, because I'd listened to them in the States when I was on the boat.

"Even the guitar was a novelty here in those days. It was used in America all the time but you didn't see them in Britain. It was considered a seaman's instrument. There was only one place in London you could buy strings."

Tommy had previously been turned down by the record producer George Martin, the man who was famously to sign The Beatles six years later. His perceived rebelliousness didn't suit the clipped, Brylcreemed mood of the time.

"I was never a rebel," he says. "It was the songs that were considered rebellious." It seems ludicrous now, but some in the industry did believe that Rock With The Caveman represented a moral assault on society as they knew it. Just look at the lyrics now - they're pretty tame compared with today's, what are they called, yappers? rappers?"

Tommy's roots in showbusiness actually go back further than the coffee bars of post-war Soho. He was just 12 when his dad bought him a record of Danny Kaye singing Knock on Wood.

"I used to practise miming it in front of a mirror until it looked as if I was singing it.

"Then one might we had a knees-up at our house - dad came back from the pub with 12 or 14 friends, mum cut some sandwiches, a couple of crates of beer appeared, and all of a sudden, it was a party - and my dad said to me, 'Go on, son - do your bit'.

"So I put the record on and mimed to Knock on Wood. And I brought the house down. I must have done it four times that night.

"Then I began miming to Martin and Lewis, too - and that's how I started. Going round all the knees-ups."

Nevertheless, he was not, he insists, bitten by the showbusiness bug. Had the man from Decca not walked into the Two I's that day in 1956, he'd quite happily have remained a sailor.

"I was having the time of my life already. I was travelling the world, I had money in my pocket and I was pretty attractive. Who needed showbusiness?

"And what's more, when you're 19, who cares about a future?"

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.