Corrie Cath I’ll keep my family life in tune
Corrie star Cath Tyldesley is hoping to win over the punters with her new career – but not at the expense of her family.
Last night Cath, 32, who plays barmaid Eva Price, was due to sing at her first London gig.
The star got married in May and ha s an 18-month- old son Archie, who is already a music lover.
Cath said: “I sang the jazz song Baby Mine every day to Alfie when I was pregnant. Now I sing it to him every night before he goes to sleep.”
She has included the track on her album which comes out in November. But Cath added: “I can’t get through it without breaking down.
“Once you’ve had a child, they’re the most important thing in the world.
“He’s such a chilled out baby who loves music.
“He comes to band rehea r sa l s and he’s fascinated by the instruments.”
Life has not always been so easy for superfit Cath. As a teenager, she was a size 22 and was labelled “the fat funny one” at auditions.
She said: “There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the leading lady.”
The Corrie schedule is relentless for Cath, whose on- screen boyfriend is played by former X Factor winner Shayne Ward, 31.
Cath added: “Corrie takes priority and the singing has to slot in around that but we try to keep as many weekends free as possible.”
However, it was not always thus. Kids, back in the day, I was down there with the best of them.
After I graduated from Glasgow University in 1991, I went to work at Bomba Records on West George Street.
It was a rare weekend that didn’t see the entire staff making the rounds of the city’s nightlife: from The Arches to the Sub Club to Volcano in the west end.
Now and then you’d make the trip down the motorway to The Hacienda or Back to Basics in Leeds.
A couple of years later, I moved to London and the weekends would take us clubbing and gig-going across the broader canvas of a much bigger city: Turnmills, The End, Club UK, Bagley’s, The Astoria.
I know every generation tends to mythologise its own youth but it seemed like the early to mid- 90s really was a fantastic time to be in your 20s in Britain.
I made a buffoon of myself on dance floors and in DJ booths. (Once demanding that a bewildered Andrew Weatherall play a specific track. The very track he had in fact just finished playing.)
I made new friends in bathrooms and cloakroom queues.
I talked enough rubbish in booths and backrooms to put an entire Tory conference to shame.
I did this three or four times a week for pretty much the entire 90s.
Obviously the hangover from just one of those nights would put me in hospital for a week now but it was a hell of a time and I’m glad I did it all.
Actually, there’s a reason it seemed like a golden period. It was.
Out of all the clubs I just mentioned only one still exists – Glasgow’s Sub Club. (Which, you hope and suspect, will be as impervious to nuclear war as cockroaches and Keith Richards.)
The others are all long gone. To that list is now added Fabric in London.
The ostensible reason for the closure by Islington Council is that there have been drug-related deaths in the club. A total of six in the nearly 20 years the place has been open.
To put this in perspective, in the same period there have been more deaths in the custody of the Metropolitan Police, on building sites and at the London Marathon.
Fabric’s owners are baffled at the sudden U-turn of the police and Islington Council, who just a few months ago were holding the club up as a beacon of responsible drugs policy.
Responsible drugs policy or not, it’s worth pointing something out here. It’s a truth everyone knows but can be unpopular to voice politically. Ready?
Young people will always go to darkened rooms to get out of their minds to loud music. The police know this. The council know this. If you are reading this and have an IQ bubbling somewhere above the 59 mark (which you must have or you’d just be drooling and wearing this newspaper as a funny hat instead of reading it), then you know this, too.
So we can discard all the rubbish about closing nightclubs because they are unsafe havens for drugs. It is quite simply a lie.
The real reason Fabric is closing? Well, take a look at that list of nightclubs from the early 90s I mentioned earlier.
The Hacienda is now “luxury” flats. (Those inverted commas are well earned. God, I hate the term “luxury”. Was there a meeting five or six years ago where they decided everything has to be luxury from now on?)
The Astoria is being turned into luxury flats. There is talk of The Arches in Glasgow becoming a luxury hotel. Like all councils, Islington have seen their budget slashed in half since the Tories came to power in 2010. They’re facing enormous cuts to come. You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Some estimates say London has lost nearly 50 per cent of its nightclubs and music venues in the last decade.
As I said, I no longer have a dog in this fight. My evenings mostly consist of shuffling between the living room and the kitchen grumbling that all the good malt whisky is gone.
(As they say, if you’re in your pyjamas on the sofa at 10pm on a Saturday when you’re 21, you feel like the world’s biggest loser. The same thing when you’re 50 and you feel like you’ve won the lottery.)
But I hope to God my children’s evenings are not like this. I want them to make idiots of themselves on dance f loors. I want them to strike up a lifelong friendship with a plasterer from Bolton in the loo. I want them to tell Andrew Weatherall to play the same track again.
You wonder about the people who are going to live in all these luxury flats, who will stay in the luxury hotels – will they ever ref lect upon the fact that there is nothing luxurious about having absolutely nothing fun to do at night?
I have seen the future, my friends. And it looks like an enormous block of luxury f lats with a gigantic Wetherspoons in the basement. Enjoy.