Lucky Star

Hard work and talent or a destiny written in the stars? A modest Tommy Steele puts his continued success down to simple good fortune, recalling the day he brought rock 'n' roll back to the UK, and the tough years of the Blitz that shaped his love for the East End. He talks to Ed Reed...

Tommy Steele cuts an unmistakable figure as he dashes across the foyer of the palatial Thameside apartment block in London. One of the country's most successful all-round entertainers, his trademark flashing smile, glittering glacial eyes and mop of flowing white hair are instantly recognisable.

Almost 69, when we meet he's just about to return to the London stage in Scrooge, the now hit musical at the Palladium - the venue he first visited as a child. And there still remains something preternaturally youthful about the star. His boyhood is never far away. In fact, the view from his luxury flat is similar to the one he grew up with in Bermondsey.

"You'd go up into the streets sometimes after the all-clear and you'd be lost because the street you used to get to the next one wasn't there any more. It was just rubble."

"I have had that view all my life," he explains settling back in a huge sofa, wearing a natty tracksuit ready for his daily two-hour tennis session. The grey Thames surges beneath wall-to-ceiling windows. "When I was growing up I couldn't see the water because it was all boats. It was absolutely full of ships."

For a true legend, Steele is disarmingly down to earth. With something akin to a creative Midas touch, he's been a Hollywood movie star, composer, conductor, a serious actor, director and novelist. He's even a sculptor and was commissioned to fashion the popular Eleanor Rigby statue in Liverpool. This modern-day Renaissance man ("Stick me in the 16th century and I'm right at home"), was born Thomas Hicks in 1936 and, as Britain's first teen idol, became the template for everyone from Billy Fury to Robbie Williams. To meet him is to come face to face with a living embodiment of the East End. Despite the cheery charm, there's the slightest hint of ice in his eyes, borne out of a tough childhood which included losing three siblings in infancy. Growing up during the Blitz, his mum refused to evacuate her family. "She said if we go, we go together. The streets emptied. I think I was the only kid for about four blocks. I started talking to myself during the Blitz and the blackouts," he recalls.

The family was bombed out of three homes and when the East End was bearing the brunt of the attacks, nights spent in the shelters were the norm. "After a while you became an expert in knowing how close a bomb hit. You almost became an expert in telling where the street was. And you'd go up into the streets sometimes after the all-clear and you'd be lost because the street you used to get to the next one wasn't there any more. It was just rubble. There were pieces of cardboard with writing on with the name of the destroyed street that used to be there."

The incessant bombing night after night produced a unique generation. "Nothing hurts you after that," says Tommy. "The only thing you have got to be worried about is getting ill. A human can't do anything more to you than that." Young Tommy received an early lesson in hard work from his mum, Bet Hicks, who cleaned houses at dawn, toiled in a biscuit factory during the day and served school dinners in her lunch break. He spent three childhood years suffering from porphyria - the nervous condition that affected George III - and spinal meningitis.

Introduced to the works of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson while ill, he read everything he could lay his hands on, he says. Those books opened a world of possibilities for the boy with a thirst for adventure and inspired him to join the navy at 15. "Because I read great books on the sea and was born in the docks and saw the great freighters pull into London I thought 'I'd like to know where that river goes'. That's why I joined the navy."

It was during a stopover in New York that the guitar-playing youngster heard Blue Suede Shoes - a moment he has since described as a "road to Damascus experience". "I heard it on a ship in New York and it came back with me before the usual channels, which took three months." The blue-eyed boy had just brought the sound of rock 'n' roll from America. That launched him onto a path from which he has never looked back. "As my mum said to me, I have got an angel on my shoulder," he says.

That fateful moment when he heard the archetypal rock 'n' roll song propelled him onto the road of global stardom. "It was like one of those pinball machines. You pull it back let it go and watch the pinball as it starts to go round in circles. That's me."

Steele was spotted with his band the Cavemen - formed with Lionel Bart and Mike Pratt. The trio's first single 'Rock With the Caveman' made the top 20 and Tommy officially became the country's first teen star when his next track, Singing the Blues, reached number one in 1957. Like many musicians since, he was greeted on tours by hordes of adoring female fans who loved his pioneering style. "At 19 years of age you're singing a song and playing music and just interested if people are listening to you. They didn't know what was happening, because it hadn't happened before. Showbiz wasn't ready for it so when I arrived - this person performing this music - they didn't know how to handle it. The only person who knew how to handle it, was me."

Karma, kismet, serendipity, fate - call it what you like - the subject fascinates Steele and he returns to it again and again. Behind his happy-go-lucky cockney persona is a complex character fascinated by history and tales. "There was a great Norwegian warrior called Rollo who conquered Europe down to Normandy and one of his relatives was a fella called Robert who had sex with a laundry maid who had a child they called William. He became William the Conqueror. Now if Rollo hadn't decided he was sick of Scandinavia and Robert hadn't decided he liked the laundry woman downstairs, what would have happened to England?

"If I hadn't gone on that ship, if I hadn't played the guitar, if I hadn't come to London with Blue Suede Shoes, maybe rock 'n' roll would have come to this country with somebody else. But it was me."

"If I hadn't gone on that ship, if I hadn't played the guitar, if I hadn't come to London with Blue Suede Shoes, maybe rock 'n' roll would have come to this country with somebody else. But it was me."

In less than a year from first being spotted, he was starring in a film of his own life story. Then, in September that year, audiences voted him the World's second-greatest music personality after Elvis Presley. As a pioneer, though, he was able to quickly move out of rock 'n' roll and became a stage star in the swinging 60s. He moved seamlessly into acting, appearing in Goldsmith's 18th century comedy She Stoops to Conquer at the Old Vic. In 1963 he starred in Half a Sixpence. The musical was based on HG Well's novel Kipps and written specially for Steele. Two years later, the show moved to Broadway where Steele was nominated for the prestigious Tony award as well as winning the critics award for best musical performance. Then, in 1967 came the zenith of his career when he starred in three major films: Half a Sixpence; Finian's Rainbow alongside Fred Astaire; and the Disney film the Happiest Millionaire.

He has been working non-stop ever since. Initially, when he agreed to take his latest part of Scrooge, he was adamant that would be for a single tour finishing up in Manchester. But then the Palladium rang up to see if he would perform there. "If it had been anywhere else I'd have said no," he reveals. There is a plaque in the theatre to celebrate his 1767 performances there - more than any other artist. But all this success, he claims, hasn't changed the young Tommy one jot. Steele still eats in the same pie and mash shop he went to as a child. Married to Annie, the couple have a daughter, Emma, who works as a yoga and pilates teacher. "There's still Tommy Hicks. I never lose him. He goes by another name but he's still the same. I like the same foods, the same people and love the same areas."

Scrooge, starring Tommy Steele, runs at the London Palladium until January 14th, 2006. To book tickets, call 0870 890 1108.