Ocean still has the drive N
O ONE was more surprised than Caribbean Queen singer Billy Ocean when he started hearing reports that he had died suddenly during a visit to South Africa.
The fake news went viral and the 67-year-old had to go on Twitter last October to announce he was still very much alive and well.
He can now joke about the death hoax and even chuckles as he points out: “They are always trying to kill me off. I don’t know why.
“Maybe, they think I’ve been around too long.”
Music has certainly loomed large in Billy’s life since he was a child in Trinidad. He says: “My father Hainsley Charles was a musician and that naturally caused me to be interested in music as well.
“I always thought I would do music one day. Little boys often tend to do what their fathers do.
“I grew up listening to calypso and steel pan music and my mother would always be singing. My father was also the first to get a radio in the village and suddenly I was hearing all this other music as well.”
His love of music grew further when he and his family moved to London’s East End when he was just seven years old and soon the calypso crazy kid was listening to soul singers like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke as well as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Billy brought out double album Here You Are last year filled with both his own hits and some of his favourite songs including Sam Cooke’s You Send Me, Having A Party and A Change Is Gonna Come, along with No Woman No Cry and Judge Not by Bob Marley.
“I had a list of 30 to 40 songs to pick from and I was surprised how many I remembered. It just seemed to fit perfectly; the songs that made me into the singer I became.
“I was listening to Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke and Bob Marley. Bob Marley was very special, very special,” he says.
“I remember there was a new kind of music coming from America in 1962-63. There was Stax, Motown and all these different labels.
“Black music never really had much representation in this country at the time. I remember Kenny Lynch and Emile Ford, who sang What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For.”
Billy is the biggest black recording star Britain has ever produced. He has sold more 30 million records and amassed a pile of gold and platinum records from across the world.
Caribbean Queen won him a Grammy and film stars Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito were the famous backing singers for the music video of When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going), the theme tune to their movie The Jewel Of The Nile.
Billy remembers: “I set my sights high and, thank God, I have achieved so much and been successful enough to have to have had hit records in America.
“I was a little boy in the East End with a head full of dreams and so that’s why I used a photo of myself as a youngster on the album cover.
“My mother passed away a few years ago and we were clearing everything out and found an album full of photographs that I never knew existed.
“There is a photo of my mother in the album notes as well. It brings back memories of her every time I see it. She had the most beautiful big eyes. She looked like an angel.”
It was his mother who insisted Billy train as a tailor in Savile Row when he was starting out so he would have “something to fall back on” in case his music career did not take off.
“I stayed there until I got fired,” he laughs. “My mum wanted me to have something in my back pocket if things did not work out, but luckily I never needed it.
“I was not a dedicated worker and you need to be to be a tailor.
“I wanted to be a musician and Singer Billy Ocean, above, is heading out on a UK tour this year, and his best of album, Here You Are, left, is out now when I got the sack it made me more determined to do what I really wanted to do.”
Billy says one of the proudest moments of his career was performing at the American leg of Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985.
“What a thing that was! One of the greatest in my career. To be part of that was so special, especially as the purpose of it was to help the Ethiopian famine.
“I found myself rubbing shoulders with all these people that I idolised, people like the Rolling Stones. They were all musicians offering to help.”
He chuckles: “I like to think I held my own on the day.”
Here You Are – The Best Of Tour launches in Llandudno, Wales on March 24 and will see the father-ofthree perform all over the UK with dates including Liverpool, Birmingham, Gateshead, Salford, Leicester and the London Palladium.
Fans will also be delighted to know Billy has no plans to ever axe hits like Suddenly, Get Outta My Dreams; Get Into My Car, Red Light Spells Danger and Caribbean Queen from his concerts.
“I really don’t have a problem with the old songs,” he smiles. “I love singing them. They are what people want to hear and what they expect. I feel like I have a readymade audience. I’m lucky.”
He recently marked his 67th birthday and admits: “I don’t feel like 67 at all. I really don’t. I think age is just a number. I went out with my family – my grandchildren, my wife and children – and had a lovely curry, drank some champagne... and relaxed.”