My nights with Princess Margaret made me want to be a famous singer...
IT’S NOT everyone who can say that they started their music career with a performance by “royal command”.
But then again James Leopold Somerset Lonsdale is not your average singing star.
Jamie, as he prefers to be known, is an ex-royal Naval officer who once sailed the world on the royal yacht Britannia with the Queen and also has a lucrative City finance career.
Princess Diana was a guest when he married first wife Laura Greig in 1984.
But it was another royal guest that day, the Queen’s sister Margaret, that helped stoke the flames of his singing ambitions that have led to the release of his first album, Footprints.
He says it was his parents’ musical nights at the grand piano with the likes of singer Cleo Laine and pianist Johnny Dankworth, brought along to entertain house guest Princess Margaret, that helped fuel the shy young man’s desire to one day become a performer himself.
“I’ve got Princess Margaret to thank for that – building up my confidence to perform in public, we were all singing around the grand piano in the manner of long-gone Edwardian soirees,” he remembers.
And he’s spent a lot of time in the spotlight. His widower father had a five-year affair with Princess Margaret in the 1980s. The couple travelled the world and the relationship made him a source of constant speculation in the gossip columns.
Now Old Etonian Jamie, 61, just bouncing back from coronavirus, has the limelight to himself with an album on which he bares his soul with heart-wrenching self-penned songs about love and loss.
For despite his wealth and privilege Jamie’s own life has not been without drama and even scandal.
After a long marriage and four children – Leonora, Rosanna and twins Arthur and Esme – Jamie split from his wife, Laura.
There was quite a stir when he formed a relationship with blonde ex-model Crystal Knight, whom he married following a divorce reportedly costing £9million.
Now that marriage is over, too, though he and Crystal remain close. “We were together five years but unfortunately we are now divorced. We are still friends,” he says.
And if he sometimes sounds melancholy he says the real inspiration for his poignant love songs is the loss of his eldest, Louis, born in 1992.
“He died of a cot death at eight weeks. There was nothing anybody could do. It remains the worst tragedy of my life,” he says. “The grief was awful. To cope, I plunged myself into studying the opera La Traviata about love and loss, and then all these years later it carried on.
“I wrote songs which just came to me in the street, getting out of a taxi, wherever, sung them into my iphone, and which have got me through it and made something positive come out of this tragedy,” he says.
As a small boy Jamie grew up surrounded by music, his bedtimes reverberating with auditions from the drawing room in the Chelsea London family home where his parents had a record company specialising in musical theatre and worked with some of the world’s biggest Hollywood stars such as Vivien Leigh and Peter O’toole.
But with ancestors such as Lord Raglan, who served under the Duke of Wellington, when he reached 18 he came under increasing pressure to uphold the family military tradition.
“My grandmother reminded me I had a duty to join the Grenadier Guards,” he says. “But I had always been a bit of a softie and didn’t like the idea of spending nights in trenches!”
Instead Jamie opted for the Royal Navy where he spent five years – including a tough one in Northern Ireland – before following a traditional landowners route of studying Chartered Surveying at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural University.
“This is why I didn’t become a professional opera singer until I was 48!” he declares. Indeed Jamie has built up his
‘I wrote songs which came in the street' ‘I feel I'm gravitating back to childhood'
second career since he was 40 – while simultaneously working in finance – slowly but surely, starting off in minor roles in country house opera.
“I was fortunate in my business life and now I trade on equity markets,” he says.
“I’m single and living in Pimlico and have one of my children living with me and her husband, I feel like I’m gravitating back to my childhood. My second wife and I had an amicable separation, unfortunately the marriage didn’t work out.” Jamie has only recently come full circle back to his childhood roots surrounded by music, spending long hours at recording studios.
“I was brought up quite a lot by my grandmother in the countryside and I always felt more like my grandmother’s grandson in terms of who I was.
“Instead of exploring one’s own creativity I was distracted by property matters.
“But after many years it created head space and at the age of 38 I started singing lessons!
“I was a choirboy at Pangbourne College and then later
on in life my teacher, Betty, had me performing at various concerts and I progressed from there.
“I said to Betty, ‘I’m rather enjoying this’ and she chided it was too late for me to be an opera singer!
“I was not happy,” he admits. But Jamie didn’t give up. “Despite not continuing with a military career my father was tickled pink when I made a career out of music.
But he says his genial father still couldn’t resist a joke.
“He said his showbusiness experience entailed working with some of the greatest voices in the world ‘But Jamie, your voice is not one of them!’
“All those years it was Cleo Laine who stuck up for me and told my father, ‘Everybody can sing!you must encourage him!’”
Suave and debonair, bespectacled Jamie in his Savile Row suits has something of his father Norman Lonsdale’s urbane aura.
Norman’s relationship with Princess Margaret – he was said to be Margaret’s final lover – made him a celebrity.
Now, Jamie is the celebrity, dreaming of getting his music played on the radio so people can connect with the emotions that he sings about on the opera-inspired, orchestra- and choirdrenched album.
Indeed, after his disturbing brush with the killer virus, he has taken time to think about what sort of legacy he wants to leave for his children.
“I have been very ill with Covid-19 the past two weeks and it makes you think. I am 61 years old and at the end of my life I want to leave something behind for my children, and that is why I called the album Footprints, so my story will always be there.
“My sister teases me, ‘Why don’t you write a happy song for once?’
“But my songs are about my emotions and experiences, I’ve been touched by joy, blessings and, at rare moments, tragic loss. The thing is to feel something... to be sad, to cry and let those emotions out.”
● Footprints is available from jamielonsdale. databeats.com