Love, laughs and living with Vanessa Feltz
“FROM THE outside looking in, I think people see a younger black guy who is quite trendy, and an older white lady who does news, and they don’t get it,” says Ben Ofoedu, the pop star partner of television and radio personality Vanessa Feltz.
The 44-year-old singer, best-known for being part of 1990s dance duo Phats and Small, is used to people raising their eyebrows at his relationship with an older Jewish woman.
But it does not bother the bornagain Christian.
“When people spend time with us they say it makes complete sense,” he says. “I love her. She is smart, funny and exactly my type of woman. But I get it, looks can be deceiving.”
Ms Feltz met Mr Ofoedu through a mutual celebrity friend — Boyzone band member Keith Duffy.
Mr Ofoedu recalls: “Vanessa had just done He knew we had the same sort of personality and I like my girls round. But we were both seeing people.
“Then magazine threw a Christmas party in 2005, and from there we started chatting. It got a lot flirtier.
“I made a joke about ‘you know what’ and I used the street slang saying, ‘it’s long’. She found it funny luckily, but it could have gone either way.” Mr Ofoedu was the new man in Ms Feltz’s life following her very public divorce from husband, surgeon Michael Kurer.
At the time Ms Feltz wrote a piece for the in which she said she had been hung out to dry by the community when her marriage collapsed.
“People who shlepped in the shiva chairs when your mother died,” she wrote, “now vault across M&S aisles to avoid you.”
She said the divorce “propelled me and expelled me from the community. I felt extremely ill-at-ease and cast into exile. It wasn’t that I rejected the north west London way of life. Not at all. I felt that it rejected me.”
Ms Feltz moved, ironically, to a converted church in north-west London. So perhaps it should not come as a surprise that her choice of partner was equally as far removed from the tradional community she felt had turned against her.
Sitting in a Mexican restaurant in central London, Mr Ofoedu, who is dressed in a tracksuit after returning from performing in Ibiza, reflects on their relationship.
He loves being part of a mixedfaith couple, he says, and highlights a number of similarities between their Jewish and Nigerian cultures. It helps make the relationship work, he believes.
“I’m not a bad boy from down the street — I really love my mum.”
Being with “V”, as he affectionately refers to Ms Feltz, has brought Mr Ofoedu closer to the Bible culture he grew up with. “I love faith and I love
We had the same sort of personality, but we were both seeing people’
I’m sure at the start people were thinking ‘what’s he doing with her?’
religion,” he says. “People ask how we get on religiously, and I say ‘easily’. It is all the same God, innit?” He boasts about knowing every story in the Torah. “I know every parsha. I’m interested in it, in the same way I’m into Star Wars. If I had to have a subject on Mastermind it would be the Bible and Star Wars.” Mr Ofoedu has become a fixture alongside Ms Feltz at Jewish communal events, where he is regularly the only black person in the room. The singer says he feels just as at home at a Norwood dinner as he does in shul on Yom Kippur. The community, and Ms Feltz’s two daughters, have always made him feel part of the family, he adds. “No one has ever made me feel otherwise. I’m sure at the start people thought ‘what is he doing with her? What does he want?’ “But you know Vanessa — you can’t tell her anything. If anyone said anything about me, then she would tell them about themselves anyway.” In the 10 years he has been with the former JC columnist, Mr Ofoedu has learnt many things about Jewish culture and his enthusiasm for Yiddish is impossible to disguise. He flows between words such as shluf and gefruntzled with the same ease as he uses urban street slang. “I just think Yiddish words are the best descriptive words. They sound like what it is. When you start using them you can’t really find other words to replace them. It is the kind of lan- guage you can tell by the sound.”
He gets excited as he acts out how the pair might use the dialect.
“Like Vanessa might say to me, ‘the younger brudda is slightly nebbish,’ or she says she is slightly ‘ gefruntzled’ or she wants a ‘ shluf’. She doesn’t have to say ‘this is a Yiddish word’, in the same way I don’t have to explain ‘this is a street or slang word’.”
Mr Ofoedu, who enjoyed international success with the single Turn
Around in 1999, did not waste time when it came to picking up Ms Feltz’s grandmother’s chicken soup recipe, and says he is now quite the kosher food critic. He says: “I’m a watcher, I just watched V once. She didn’t think a black brother from the street was going to be watching her cooking like that, but I got it. Some people make it too bland, but I think you cook how your personality is. So Vanessa’s soup is not bland.”
The singer, who is currently planning a series of comeback gigs with his band, grew up more inspired by West Indian cooking than his mother’s Nigerian staples, such as the onepot Jollof rice dish.
He now says that embracing each other’s faiths and cultures is a key ingredient to making relationships work, alongside two specific needs. “The secret to a man is he just wants to be respected, and the woman needs to feel loved. That need on both parts is biblical. Learning that comes with age.”
Keen to impart more of his relationship advice, Mr Ofoedu adds: “Even if she doesn’t respect me, she makes me think like she does. And that is good enough for me.”
He has noticed infighting within the community is similar to that of his own culture.
“Growing up, I adopted more West Indian culture than African, and there was prejudice against each other from both sides. It is actually very similar to the way there is prejudice between Sephardi and Ashkenazi culture. But as Vanessa says, ‘when the pogrom comes everyone is going to get killed’.”
Despite growing up in Gants Hill, Essex, and having many Jewish friends, dating Vanessa has opened his eyes to antisemitism.
“When you are black you are so concerned with being black, your whole life is about going through this and that because of your skin colour.
“You are not even thinking about anyone else being persecuted. It is only now that I think, rah, there are so many antisemites out here.”
Ten years Ms Feltz’s junior, he does not see why some refer to it as a “huge” age gap, and cannot understand why there is “such a fuss” over it.
“They call me a toy boy. I’m like, oh well thanks,” he says.
Having travelled the world together, his most bizarre story involves a visit to the Kotel where by chance the couple met New York rapper Shyne. After a shooting incident, the American had found Judaism in prison and changed his name to Moses Michael Levi.
Mr Ofoedu says: “I remember seeing him and being like, ‘Shyne?’. It was mad. He invited us to Friday-night dinner. Vanessa was like ‘who on earth is that?’ and I had to explain.”
The couple politely declined and stuck to their preferred choice of Shabbat dinner with friends and family.