Del’s the king of Queen Street
A SHORT figure in a violet velvet jacket walks into the Greggs bakery on Queen Street, Cardiff.
It is a little before 10am on a nippy, grey Saturday. Cardiff is still groaning awake, but Keith “Del” Laslett is an oasis of colour and movement. With slicked-back hair, a butterfly-adorned bright blue shirt and twinkling smile, the 78-year-old buys a coffee. He is glad he brought his own sugar, because Greggs has run out.
“If anyone’s desperate for sugar, tell them Del has a bag,” he tells the server, pointing to a spot on the street where he will be singing karaoke.
While getting his coffee, Del has left his speakers on the street, playing the backing track to Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. “If someone else comes along and they don’t hear my music, they might set up here,” he explains. “I’ve had it then.”
Del says he might busk for more than 10 hours straight. He approaches what he calls his “stall”, a kind of trolley holding his speakers, laptop and CDs. He has no need for a chair – he will be on his feet dancing. It may not be how most pensioners spend their Saturdays, but Del is not your average pensioner. “I think I’m going to live to be one of the oldest people in Britain,” he says confidently. “I’m going to live to 100 easily. I am 78 and I feel like I’m 38.”
During our chat before he starts busking for the day, Del is never quite still. He speaks excitedly, swaying from side to side and often tapping my shoulder to emphasise a point. We have only just met, but I feel like I’ve known him for years.
In his six years serenading the shoppers and drinkers of Cardiff each Friday and Saturday, Del has become one of the city’s most recognisable faces, a nice replacement for another legendary Cardiff busker, Toy Mic Trev. As Del readily admits, his voice is not the best. But he can get people smiling and dancing, sometimes drawing big crowds.
Del’s energy levels are particularly remarkable given he spent 10 months bedridden in hospital following a serious accident 60 years ago. Riding his motorbike at the age of 18, a car turned suddenly in front of him and he “smashed up” his right leg and pelvis, he says. “That leg ended up an inch and a half shorter than the other,” Del adds, bringing them together to show me. “I had to wear a three-inch heel on it, then I weaned it down. I knew I would be all right.”
Del, who lives in Fairwater, believes dancing is the secret to his vitality. He jokes he was vaccinated with a gramophone needle as a child, adding: “I never sit down. I’m dancing all day. Yesterday I was serenading one woman to Elvis. She was dancing around by me and I was teaching her the jive.
“If I’m having a drink in a pub where there’s music, people say ‘sit down with me’, but I stay up. I am so short that if I sit down I disappear. I do limp now and then, but I don’t have any illnesses. I can still wear shirts I bought from the market in Cardiff when I was 18.”
Del thinks his height – 5ft 4in – has played a big part in his outgoing personality. “I was always the clown as a kid. You find that a lot with little blokes. It’s psychological, isn’t it? You have to be as good as the big bloke.”
Asked the origin of his nickname, he replies: “When I was an antique dealer I rented a warehouse, and if someone needed a drainpipe or a bit of wood or anything, I had so much stuff it was unbelievable. People used to call me Delboy – ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing.”
He shows me one of his CDs, which ranges from high-energy classics like Let’s Twist Again and Be My Baby to ballads like When a Man Loves a Woman. Del is not complacent though, learning newer hits too: “I did Ed Sheeran when he was in town. The youngsters love him.”
Del adds: “I expect to get £50 to £100 in a day to make it worth my while. If I don’t get much money here on Queen Street, I say, ‘Right you happy shoppers, I am going to see the happy drinkers, I get more from them.’
“After that I’ll go down the High Street and sing outside the Blue Bell, then maybe O’Neill’s or Coyote Ugly. I’ll sing as I’m wheeling my stall down the street.”
Del was a singer in a rock group called the Robin Bees in the ’60s, touring pubs around the Valleys before settling down with his wife Sandra. They were married for 43 years and “did everything together” before Sandra died of an aneurysm around 10 years ago.
The couple ran a successful antique and taxidermy business at Jacob’s Market on West Canal Wharf. Del remembers arriving at antique fairs with a seven-tonne truck, “loaded to the gunwales” with stock. He was not busking then, but still that side of him would find a way out.
“If it was quiet at the fair, I would be singing a few numbers and dancing in the aisle. I used to get an umbrella and walk down the aisle like Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a universal language, music. It brings people together, crosses all borders.”
Del, who also ran a heating engineer firm, retired around six years ago, but found he still had plenty of energy. He found the perfect outlet when a friend invited him to busk as part of a Cancer Research fundraiser in the centre of Cardiff.
“I was dancing along with the collection box on my wrist and jingling it around,” he says. “It was a good laugh and I loved the interaction. There were about eight of us doing it. We raised £4,500 in one day.”
That day was the spark for Del’s busking, and he soon fell in love with it. Del says: “It’s nice to see smiles on people’s faces. You do get a couple of people who put their fingers in their ears when they walk past me. When they do that, I put my fingers in my ears as well. But I try to be considerate of people. If someone from a business asks me to move, I’ll move.”
Del has a daughter who is a dog behaviourist, and a son who is a police officer. The busker “gets on great with all the cops” in Cardiff, though he recalls one tense moment during the pandemic.
“Back when the clubs had to close at 10pm, I was busking here on a Saturday and a fella suggested I come back after the curfew, so I did. It was absolutely dead on Queen Street and I thought I’d wasted my time.
“At about 10pm, a group of five boys slowly came along. One of them asked would I sing Sweet Caroline for a fiver. I said I’d sing anything for a fiver.”
Del picks up the orange plastic toy-hand he sings with, re-enacting how he waved it to the “reaching out” part of the song.
“Before I know it, there are gangs of people all around us, about 200 of them,” Del continues. “I am keeping my distance because of Covid, but everyone is dancing.
“I say, ‘Whoa whoa whoa, you are going to get me locked up, spread out a bit.’ Then, 10 seconds later, two police officers turn up and go, ‘Bloody hell, what are you doing?’
“I tell them I’m socially distancing, but the officers look at everyone and say, ‘They’re not.’ I say that I only did one song and it got out of hand and I’ll stop now. Everyone’s booing, but I’m saying, ‘You can’t boo them, they’re just doing their job.’”
Soon after Del tells this story, two Cardiff council officers approach us. They are members of the events management team, describing themselves as “the eyes and ears of the council on the street”. Their fondness for Del is clear. One of the men says: “He can’t sing, but he’s an entertainer. We say, ‘Del, you have a problem with your sound – we can hear you.’ But do you know what we love about Del? He doesn’t take himself seriously. He’s a Queen Street legend. People of all ages love Del because he’s like a grandfather. And he exploits that for financial gain.”
Shaking his head and laughing, Del acknowledges the limitations of his voice, telling me: “I don’t sing stuff if I don’t think I can do it. But it’s all about entertaining. You don’t just have to be a good singer. Some buskers are good singers but they don’t interact with the public. I can make people laugh.”
As we say our goodbyes, he puts on Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and begins to sing into his mic, waving to shoppers as they pass. The faces of Queen Street start to smile. A grey morning gets brighter.