Entertainment In Focus

05 December 2008 04:47 BST

Tony Hadley's golden dreams

Amid all the murmuring about Spandau Ballet reforming Tony Hadley has been doing his own thing. He tells InTheNews what he's been up to, his admiration for Shakira and his golden Olympic dream.

He is destined to be known as Spandau Ballet's lead singer, hear the lyrics to Gold at any wedding reception he happens upon and be forever reminded of the protracted court battle he fought with his former bandmates.

But Tony Hadley has been pursuing his own path of late, recording the album he says he always wanted to make and starring in the West End as sleazy Billy Flynn in Chicago. Not that he's planning on stopping things there though; he's got grand aspirations – dueting with Shakira and opening the London Olympics for a start.

And as for Spandau Ballet getting back together after their infamous legal wrangle over copyright ownership, well apparently the rumours are all Shane Richie's fault.

According to Hadley, the Virgin DJ had been ribbing him for ages about a possible reforming of the band and eventually, "to shut him up", the former frontman admitted that it was time to bury the hatchet. The next "window of opportunity", he told Richie, was the 35th anniversary of the band getting together in 2011. And thus were born a hundred headlines.

For now, Hadley is busy plugging his album, last year's Passing Strangers, in which he puts his own stamp on his favourite swing hits, covering Jack Jones and Tony Bennett among others.

"I'm really proud of it," he says. "I didn't want to make a karaoke swing album. I wanted it to be an album where people think 'I haven't heard that before, that's Tony Hadley'."

The record has been universally well-received and, now that it's "finally in Tesco's", Hadley is taking it on the road to places as disparate as Norway and Bahrain, with an acoustic tour to South America and Australia to come at the end of the year.

In the meantime he's spent two and half months performing in Chicago, in "a role that was tailor-made for me" but has no plans to make a life on the West End stage.

"I've been asked to do West End stuff so many times and I was always 'no, no, no, I don't want to do that'. But then I suddenly thought 'this is quite good because it's jazz, it's 20s based Chicago, it's the handmade suit. If there was going to be a role on the West End for me then it would be playing Billy Flynn in Chicago."

Before his semi-conversion to the stage Hadley had toured with some true legends. He's performed with Joe Cocker ("a good bloke"), James Brown ("everyone calls him sir, I called him mate") and Alice Cooper ("a really cool guy and a great golfer") among others.
He'd have loved to have worked with Sinatra but with the great man out of the equation current chart-topper Shakira fits the Hadley bill. "She's got a belting voice. There's something sassy about her," he swoons.

And if that doesn't come off there's always the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics to aspire to. He's not keen on the idea expressed by near-on 7,000 petitioners on the Downing Street website to see Gold become the new national anthem, "with Tony Hadley the only person permitted to handle medal ceremonies where the national anthem is played". But raising the curtain at the 2012 Olympic Games is a tempting prospect for the London-born 46-year-old.

"I tell you what I'd love to do, I'd love to open the ceremony with Gold, with a philharmonic orchestra or something. That'd be pretty good. Then we can let the Queen hand out the medals."

Now he just needs to be asked.

Passing Strangers is out now. The latest single from the album, The Good Life, has also been released.

Martin Ashplant