Steel City Crooner

“It’s like a favourite child you can’t kill,” Tony Christie says with a velvety chuckle. “At times you want to strangle it, but it just… won’t… die!”

There’s only one thing in the crooner’s life that could fit that worrying description – the song that re-launched his career in 2003, ‘Is This The Way to Amarillo’.
“It took on a life of its own,” he says resignedly. “Am I sick of being asked for it? Well, that song in itself has had a fantastic career – it came out in ’71, and for it to be a big hit 34 or 35 years later is just incredible, really.”
These days, however, the Sheffield-born singer is more preoccupied with his future endeavours – the most exciting of which is Made In Sheffield, a concept album co-produced by his fellow Steel City compatriot Richard Hawley. It finds Christie interpreting tracks crafted only by songwriters with a Sheffield passport – including Alex Turner, Jarvis Cocker and Phil Oakey – as well as several new compositions of his own. It’s a clever twist on the jaded ‘classic crooner does quirky covers’ formula that so many artists of his generation are cashing in on lately.
“I was listening to the radio late at night, on my way back from a recording session, and I heard [Hawley’s song] ‘Coles Corner’ being played,” he explains. “I turned to my son, who’s my manager, and said, ‘What a great song, and what great production that is. That’s the sort of stuff I want – that’s what I should be doing.’” A phone call, an introduction and a brief meeting later, and Hawley was on board for an entire album – which eventually spiralled into the project that the singer proudly describes as “the best thing I’ve done in thirty-five years.”
“I went in with the attitude of ‘Well, why not? What have I got to lose?’,” he says. “Except this time, I had a lot to lose because I financed the whole thing myself! It wasn’t until it was finished that the record label came in and said they wanted to be part of it.”
The diversity of the songs also exposes the wealth of talent – spanning three generations, here – that the Yorkshire city has bred over the decades. The inclusion of two of little-known Martin Bragger’s songs is proof, Christie says, of the copious unearthed musical treasures in the city, although he pinpoints his stripped-down take on The Human League’s ‘Louise’ (“it reduced grown men to tears in the control box, at one stage”) as his favourite of the bunch.
“There’s a certain sound about Sheffield,” he declares. “It’s very difficult to put your finger on what it is, and why it is. Manchester is always shouting about all the music they’ve produced, and so is Liverpool – but I feel that Sheffield has contributed as much, if not more. It has been a huge influence on the music scene in the UK.”
With the record’s release, a UK tour featuring members of Hawley’s band, and a Don Letts-directed documentary based on the album’s construction on the horizon, there’s no sign of the industrious entertainer, who officially became a pensioner this year, slowing down.
“There’s plenty of life in the old dog left, as my dad used to say,” he laughs. “No, I reckon I’ve got a good ten, fifteen years of work left in me. The voice is as good as it ever was, so I don’t see a problem!”

Tony Christie plugs Made In Sheffield in Vicar St. on November 16