It's always been a biggie to play up there says Leo Sayer ahead of Blackpool show

Leo Sayer brings his latest show ‘Still Feel Like Dancing? to the Blackpool Grand Theatre on Wednesday, July 9.

Before his arrival in the seaside town, Leo shared his excitement, his memories of Lancashire and a sneak peak of what to expect in the following exclusive interview.

How are you feeling about performing in Blackpool?

“Yes, fantastic, really good. Look, I mean I was born on a South Coast, a seaside town, Shoreham-by-Sea and of course, Brighton and Worthing -well, in the old days- they both had beautiful piers. I mean, there's still the palace pier with all the fun fair and everything like that in Brighton and Worthing Pier looks a bit sad these days but … you can do all the penny machines and Punch and Judy is still there in the summer and things like that. So, yeah, I come from that background, where the seaside was always linked with fun fairs and things like that.

“I played the Opera House quite a few times in Blackpool so when they first said I was playing in Blackpool I was hoping it was the Opera House, but no, it's still going to be great, it's a lovely theatre, apparently. So no I love being up there and I think we've got a couple of nights, so I'm going to be walking around and having some fun. I love the seaside there, it's great.”

So you've not performed at the Grand before?

“No, never done the Grand. I don't think so. I've done the Opera House, and of course, there's that big old pub as well there…. God, what's it called? It's a famous pub, and it's like huge there. We did a PA show, so I'd be singing to backing tracks and it was when we had ‘Thunder in my heart: the remix’ out, and it was at number one [2006]… I remember the audience was mad.”

Was it Yates's?

“There you go! It was the Yates's Wine Lodge… god, there were about 5000 people in there. I don't know if we broke the fire regulations but they're hanging from the rafters and it was fabulous, it was really good.

“But I used to love going and playing the Opera House, because that theatre I always associated with the great comics, you know, Morecambe and Wise, and Tony Hancock. Chaplin even played there! A lot of people appeared there so you get those traditions and you're looking in the dressing room, there’s these photos of all these famous people -Harold Lloyd too- and you're going, ‘what a great honor to be here’.

“My old manager, Adam Faith, used to play the Opera House in the old days. They'd have big shows, you know, where he'd do about three songs, and then Gene Pitney would do two songs, and then the Everly Brothers, and then Roy Orbison. They’d do these kind of package tours, and that was always the go there, you know and here we are! Look, we're hitting it in the summer months so it should be a lot of people in town. It's going to be exciting.”

What are you expecting from the Blackpool audience?

“Oh, look, they all know the songs. I mean, last year, we played Liverpool Philharmonic and… [Bridgewater Hall] in Manchester so we always get a good crowd that part of the world, you know, all the way to Preston and Southport. So it's always been a biggie to play up there and they love the music.”

Have you got anything you particularly want to see in Blackpool?

“I'm too old for the rides now, so I don't think I'll be up on the Big Dipper but, but I'll see the pier and look at the tower. That's what it was as well -there was the Tower Theatre in the old days as well, right underneath the tower, or right beside it, was a big theatre there…and that was fantastic.”

What can people expect from your show?

“Well last year we did a big tour and this is the extension of that. So that was called ‘Still Feel Like Dancing’ and there were a lot of places we wanted to play but I had to rush back to Australia because I had venues on. We're playing Ireland on this one so we're going Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Wexford, and we couldn't do it last year because the theatre that we play in Dublin had Hamilton on and they refused to take down the set so the promoter over in Ireland said, ‘why don't we leave it till next year?’ and that's really how this tour has come together, because it's an extension of all the places that we didn't get a chance to play, like Blackpool.

“Next year there's going to be an even bigger tour. I can't stay away! I'm traveling back all the time. It's really nice because when you leave your country and go to another country, you wonder if they will remember you, but they seem to so it's good.”

And the songs- you play a lot of your greatest hits…

“Yeah, everything's in there, everything you could imagine, from, ‘Have You Ever Been In Love’ to ‘Moonlight’ into ‘One Man Band’ to ‘Long Tall Glasses’, ‘Thunder In My Heart’, ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’, ‘When I Need You’. Oh, God, everything's in there and some of the album tracks that people really love, like Orchard Road and things like that, because they're such favorites… We're even going to bring back the song I wrote for Cliff Richard ‘Dreaming’ on this tour. So yeah, it's about a two hour show altogether.”

Which song gets the biggest reaction from the audience?

“Oh always ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’ or ‘When I Need You’. ‘When I Need You’ they love to sing along and ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’, we do like an extended version of that, where we do a groove at the end, a bit of a Chic kind of thing, and we get everybody dancing. With Sly Stone just dying recently, we tribute him at the end of it, because it's all ‘dance to the music’, and ‘I want to take you higher’. I love Sly so it's great to add that into it.

“But everybody gets up. I mean, they're usually seated audiences, sometimes the ushers get a little bit surprised or upset, but they can't keep them back, they just rush the stage, and that's it. So it's fun, but there's also some slow, more dramatic, more moodier songs, much more theatrical songs in there. So having that audience sit down is the balance.”

Is there a song that means the most to you when you perform it live?

“I always say ‘Giving It All Away’, which was the song I wrote for Roger Daltrey, and he had a hit with IT back in 1973 when I was first starting out. His version was released just before my first album came out, so everybody was asking him ‘who's the guy who wrote the song?’ and Roger -Sir Roger, now, as he's just been knighted- was fantastic, he told everybody about me. We were friends anyway but I mean, what a great intro to the business, when you've got this lead singer of The Who telling everybody ‘wait until you see this great singer, this great writer’ so that song always reminds me of the journey, because it's going right back to the start, the first time that my songs reached an audience. And it still means something to me, because it's a very determined song, and the lyrics are all about, you know, ‘I know better now’ and ‘I'm not going to be ripped off’ and ‘I'm not going to do this’ so I always enjoy singing it.”

You have been performing for over 50 years, how does it feel to still be able to command whole crowds of people?

“It's a surprise to me, as much as it is to them, because I don't think any of us, at the time we were doing it - I mean, God, there was a famous interview that Mick Jagger did where they asked him ‘How long do you think you're going to be doing this?’ and he said, ‘well, a couple of months’ because we all thought it would be over. Would you ever have thought the worship that people give Freddie Mercury and David Bowie now, would happen? We were young kids just trying to kind of echo our time and communicate that feeling that we had from music. I mean, look at 1967 The Beatles, we didn't know where it was going, you just kind of made the best music you could and hoped it had an effect. We never realized that we'd last five decades -six decades, in the case of The Beatles- it's incredible. Look at Bob Dylan, that recent movie, it's incredible because it takes you right back to that time, and you see how seeds can be sown, as it were, that can last. So I think that we're going to end up like Beethoven and Mozart, our music will be timeless. There will be people when I'm long dead and gone, kids still picking it up and going ‘oh, listen to this’ and that's very encouraging.”

In those five decades, what's changed in terms of yourself, the music, the fans?

“The whole music business changed because marketing came in and all of a sudden people record companies started to think that instead of accepting the music that the artists would bring to them, they thought, ‘nah, we can construct it ourselves’. They started to say ‘well, we can sell this so you gotta sound like this’ so when Kylie and Jason and a lot of those kinds of acts came along, they were actually… fitting into an already worked out pattern from the record companies. That's not the business I came into, because they’d just say ‘I love that song you've just written, please release it’, they wouldn't tell us what to do.

“And artists like Lady Gaga, who I really think is great, she kind of has to come out with a Boney M sound at first because they're all chasing the genres, the styles, rather than being original. And that's what's changed, if you look back, that's why the artists all the way from Pink Floyd to Nick Drake, you know, the great Paul Simon, the other great songwriters, the music that they made at the time will never be beaten.

“We also didn't have anything to sidetrack us. We didn't have social media, we weren't talking too much to people about ‘what do you think of this?’ We just had to get it together in our own heads and it either worked or it didn't work, you know, because there's plenty of one hit wonders from my time too!”

How have you changed as a performer in that time?

“Well, you learn to compromise a little bit, but never too much!”

Across those fifty years, can you give me a highlight or two?

“I think going to America the first time. I appeared as a white face clown as ‘The Pierre’ in those days and it was like a mask. I didn't used to speak very much and they only had like one very fuzzy picture of me from the album cover, so people didn't know what I looked like. And I went to America, I would do all these shows, and then I'd quickly change out of the white suit, get into jeans and a T-shirt, and then I'd stand outside the venue and say ‘hey, what do you think of that guy?’ So I was able to kind of live two lives as it were, and that was a highlight, because things happen so fast in America. Being a young boy in England, the American artists - Elvis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, PaulSimon, Lennon Cohen- you never thought you'd get to those heights of being accepted, they were gods, you know. So when you go over there and suddenly you find out that they love you as much as they love those guys, it's a wow moment, you feel eight miles high and it has an incredible effect on you. So in America, yeah, it was something special to be recognized there, and to be having people cheering you and selling out shows and being recognized on the street so that was always a highlight, conquering America.”

But if we turn to what is bound to be another career highlight, why should people get tickets to come see you in Blackpool?

“Come down because I think we do things in a very classic way as well. You see a lot of bands now on stage - or artists - and there's a lot of backing tracks and there's effects, and there's sequencing and the drummer's playing to a click in his ear. We don't do any of that. We're really old fashioned, kind of like a Van Morrison show, or like a Bob Dylan show. I mean, I've got a wonderful band, really great guys. You know, one guy from Cheshire, one guy from Yorkshire, one guy from Stroud in Gloucestershire, and another guy from Stoke on Trent and we've been working together for quite a time, and we get on stage and create a chemistry. Even though we’ve got the songs and we’ve got to be faithful to those, we can play around a little bit and have some fun so you're always going to see a different show wherever you go.

“I think I'm quite funny on stage as well so I tell lots of stories, you know. So it can be different every night. As a performer, I love being an entertainer as well, not just a singer so it's entertaining the crowd. You stand on stage and you find there's elements that you can work to. There might be some eejit who's kind of like heckling you, but you use him, you know, you make it work… it all becomes part of the show and it's great. So I go into every show with not too much anticipation, you know, it builds as it goes on. It's great. We do two halves, no support act. It's just me. So we start right from the start, and there's like an intermission in the middle, and then we come back rocking, you know, for the second part. So, it's fun, I love doing it. I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I'll be doing this when I'm 100 I reckon. I'm 77 now, so I'm feeling fit, and it's good.”

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Well I look forward to interviewing you when you're performing on your 100th birthday in Blackpool!

“Oh, man, that would be a good one, won't it? Yeah, maybe we'll play at the top of the tower!

Is there anything else that you would like to bring up?

“I'm so much into the mode of this tour but there are next albums planned and I'm still writing songs. I'm hoping Donald Trump goes away so we can get back to America as well, at the minute it’s difficult. The nice thing for me is I live in Australia and my career is really international so I love that because one of the perks of the job is traveling the world and seeing everything. Then when I go back to Australia, I've got about 20 shows planned, so I'll never stop really, it's a good life!”

Limited tickets for Leo’s show in Blackpool are still available here.