Nging Sixties are back
volved as well. It’ll be incredibly exciting,
. d, apart from dancing, I’ll get to play drums r songs, just like I did with McFly.” Will ever re-form? “I hope so,” says Harry, ooner rather than later.” is, 29, has much invested in the show, finally hung up his gymnast’s leotard. He bronze and two silvers over the course of 08, 2012 and 2016 Olympics. “No one can hose medals away from me,” he says. “But look forward to a career performing. nnily enough, though, Aston does more saults in the show than I do. In the first Up – The 50s [which toured in 2017], I was seven somersaults a night. By the end of ur, I ached everywhere. Somersaulting on surface is tough. It gets your ankles, your es, your calves. And I was wearing hard shoes, not soft trainers. when the 60s version of the show was put together, I kept dropping hints to the ographer, Gareth Walker. ‘Aston can do saults, you know’, I’d whisper in his ear.” is and Aston go back a long way – to orough, in fact, where their families were s. “We’re mates from childhood but I never ht we’d work together, although I was in o once for a JLS song called Proud.”
Aston, 30, is chuffed too. “I also knew Harry and Jay from the circuit. We’ve had a pretty similar professional life. We’ve all been in big bands. And I know I would say this but we all get along really well. If it was a girl band, it would be very different,” he adds, the twinkle in his eye acknowledging that he’s dicing with danger here. Harry and Louis teased Aston throughout the first Rip It Up – The 60s tour. “We’d say how great it was to have three Strictly champions appearing on the same stage and then stop. ‘Oh no’, we’d correct ourselves, ‘one of us is a loser’. He took it pretty well,” says Louis. And while all four are looking forward to the four-month run of Rip It Up, they all agree that nothing can equal the euphoria of lifting the Glitterball on high. That said, Strictly also had its low moments.
For Harry, it was the samba. “I’d spent my entire life being unSouth American, uncool, unsexy and yet somehow, in the course of five days, I had to get to grips with this incredibly difficult Latin dance.
“By the Wednesday evening, I’d barely mastered the first 10 seconds and the routine was meant to last 90 seconds. And that’s when I had my one and only proper meltdown. I remember wailing out loud, ‘I can’t do this. What am I going to do?’
“My dance partner, Aliona Vilani, was very patient with me as I continued to throw the toys out of my pram. But somehow I stumbled through it on the night.”
LOUIS’S NEMESIS was the quickstep. “It was going to be at Wembley so I was getting stressed about performing in such a massive arena. And yet the practice space was tiny. At the end of the final rehearsal at Wembley, the floor manager suddenly said it wasn’t working for the cameras. He told my dance partner, Flavia Cacace, it was going to have to be changed.
“In the dress run the following day, I had to dance a routine that had only been explained to me in theory overnight. I got 10 seconds in and, although it was being filmed as live, I just stopped dead. I had no idea what I was meant to be doing. By a miracle, we got through it on the show itself but with very low scores. I was mortified. If we were going to be sent home, it would have been my fault, not Flavia’s. But we weren’t – and we smashed it the following week.”
Jay was faced with a quite different dilemma. “As we planned Blackpool,” he says, “my personal life took a bit of a nosedive. There was a family bereavement which I’ve never talked about and I seriously questioned whether I should carry on. I certainly didn’t want it to be exploited for the show. “I found the rehearsal room a great place to escape, somewhere I didn’t have to dwell on my sadness. But we’d been working on a happy routine and that just felt wrong. The producers had different ideas but we stuck firm and they came round to our way of thinking.”
So what of life after Rip It Up? Unexpectedly, Harry has his eye on trying a bit of cricket commentary. He was a promising batsman before giving it up for music. “I have the enthusiasm and the knowledge,” he says. “So you never know.”
Jay would like to remain in musical theatre. Aston is planning another solo tour – his third – and releasing new music.
On the personal front, he and fiancée Sarah, parents to one-year-old Grayson, plan to marry in the summer. And Louis is taking acting lessons. “I’d love to be in a big Hollywood action movie one day,” he reveals.
At first sight, he seems the picture of angelic innocence. Don’t be fooled, say the other three: he’s always playing tricks. For example? “Ask him the way to the toilet,” says Aston, “and he’ll say: ‘First left, second right and keep on to the end of the corridor’. And it’s complete nonsense. He’s just made it up without even cracking his face.” Louis simply smiles beatifically.
Rip It Up – The 60s is at the Garrick Theatre from February 7 – June 2. For tickets, call box office on 0330 333 4811 or visit ripituptheshow.com