I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.