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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 1 2004 11.45 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday February 1 2004
You are walking along a south London residential street. Surging towards you, through an open window, come the complex syncopations of the score to a musical, something by Stephen Sondheim say, or Kander and Ebb. You look up at the window and see a large sweaty man clearly determined to keep his new year's resolution to get fit, by working out on his Nordic cross-tracker, and you think ... I know exactly what you think. I'm sure it's what most of the people on my street who don't know me think. It's probably what a few of the people who do know me think. It's certainly what my wife-to-be wondered about when she first met me and got her hands on my record collection.
But it's not that at all. Really. The truth is this: I am a straight man who likes musicals. Actually it's worse than that. I am a straight man who likes working out to musicals, which is about as gay as it's possible for a straight man to be, without owning a pair of lace-up leather pants. I've tried to resist, honestly. I've tried working out to my wife's Led Zeppelin CDs, but the irresistible urge to headbang just made my neck ache. I moved on to something frothy by Kylie, but thoughts of her fearsomely toned buttocks discouraged me from the futile pursuit of my own Body Beautiful. Finally I began listening to Robbie Williams, until I realised that was the same as working out to a musical and I might as well go for the real thing. What can I tell you? I just can't get into my stride unless there's a good overture playing.
It's all Angela Lansbury's fault; these things often are. In the early Seventies she appeared in London's West End in a legendary production of Gypsy , the musical with the single greatest overture ever written (stop glazing over; this is important). I remember, aged five or six, sitting there in the darkness and being absolutely transfixed, even when Bonnie Langford came on. We bought the cast recording and, back at home, I listened to it endlessly. Soon I was on the hard stuff: Saturday afternoon screenings on BBC2 of Judy Garland musicals, those great black and white Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, masterpieces by Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, the whole shebang.
At 12, when most people were discovering pop, I was queuing for tickets to see Ain't Misbehavin', the story of Fats Waller, or taping my parents' collection of obscure Broadway hits that hadn't made it to London. As a result, in my music collection, when I went to university, was the cast recording of Mack and Mabel (what do you mean you've never heard of it?) and it was this that my wife-to-be found when she started riffling through my tapes. Her willingness to jump in the sack with me after that was, I think, a profound victory of hope over expectation.
Don't get me wrong. I did listen to 'normal' music too. I bought London Calling by The Clash and everything by Joy Division. I listened to The Cure and Bauhaus and even bought Penis Envy by those seminal pop-anarchists Crass (though mostly because it presented me with the opportunity of walking into record shops and asking female assistants whether they had Penis Envy. Look, I was 14.)
But when, in my thirties, I decided the time had come to battle my too, too solid flesh by purchasing an instrument of sports torture, it soon became clear that none of these would provide a suitable soundtrack. The thing is, I need a narrative to keep me going through the rigours of a work-out, and the three-minute pop wonder has simply never done it for me. I would always find I was just getting into my stride, when suddenly it would end and the emotional involvement would be for nought. No, I need a story arch. I need drama. I need a swelling brass section, gross frottage on the strings and, wherever possible, boys to meet girls and then attempt to wash each other out of their hair, or sing about tomorrow or yesterday or clowns being brought on and taken off again. It also happens that I like being married, preferably to a woman, and I deny that these things are incompatible. I would finish with a few lines from 'I Am What I Am', the show-stopping song from that great musical La Cage aux folles, but you might get the wrong idea.
