Leo Sayer: ‘I think Jimmy Savile fancied me’

“I’m not gonna read this article, it’ll be f______ horrible!” So declares Leo Sayer at the end of our time together, bouncing in his chair in the Brentford outpost of Novotel. The puckish 76-year-old says this with a smile, following a forensically detailed, cheerfully delivered account of the singer-songwriter’s 50-plus years in music.

A half-century that’s lurched from disaster to disaster, albeit studded by indelible, easy-listening-meets-music-hall Seventies earworms – You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, More Than I Can Say, When I Need You, Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance) – that brought him transatlantic Number Ones and a Grammy, and still bring him 2.5 million Spotify listeners a month.

But if ever a recording and performing artist had a career dogged by financial malfeasance, bad luck and missed opportunities, it is (as he characterises himself) Gerard Hugh Sayer from Shoreham-by-Sea. “I probably got five grand,” goes the tail-end of one of his many true-life tales, this one about his chaotic 2007 appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. “That’s what the f______ a___holes [name redacted] and his mate negotiated for me!” he says of his then-managers.

“Listen, I’ve had a history. Harvey Weinstein was once my agent! I did gigs with Bill Cosby! I’ve had all the rogues. Yeah, it’s been my karma. I think people who are intensely creative – which is what I think I am – and have open imaginations are easily got to. I make no excuses. I’ve been ripped rotten.” But to quote one of his own songs – something Sayer is fond of doing – “the show must go on” (UK Number Two, 1974).

All of which makes his upcoming UK tour a delicious prospect. It’s titled Still Feel Like Dancing? and is a 19-date celebration of those 50-odd years. But of whom, I start by enquiring, is he asking that question?

“It wasn’t my idea for a title, believe me. I’m older now, and I do dance around a little bit on stage. But I don’t know if I’m a dancer – I don’t know if I’ve ever been. And it was one f______ record in my career” – US Number One, 1977 – “and they picked that one. There’s a lot more to the show than You Make Me Feel Like Dancing. We argued for two weeks, and then my dead body rolled over. It’s the most stupid title of a tour ever. You can quote me on that. But that’s life.”

What words, then, do come to mind when he looks back over the decades? “I was just a boy giving it all away,” he replies, quoting the final track from his second album Just A Boy (1974). “And I was, because I basically signed off power-of-attorney to my manager, Adam Faith,” he says of the musician-turned-actor-turned-Svengali. “There were 15 years where I didn’t really make any money, and he and his cohorts did…” And we’re off.

Brentford Novotel is this well-preserved septuagenarian’s preferred pied à terre when back in the UK from his adoptive home in Australia. “I’ve got this arrangement with them,” Sayer says of he and the hotel’s 15-year, somewhat Partridge-esque relationship. “They give me free parking, and it’s very handy for getting everywhere because it’s close to the M25 and a route to the M1.” It is, too, a comfy, Olympian berth from which to gaze back on a picaresque journey through a music business that did its level best to wreck both his dreams and his talents.

Sayer’s first creative endeavours were as a graphic designer. He did Boat Show posters, Yellow Pages ads and then graduated to album art for Island Records artists: Millie, Desmond Dekker and Bob Marley’s iconic Catch A Fire sleeve (“with the lighter”).

“[Island founder] Chris Blackwell used to come in with photographs – ‘there, make that into a cover’. He used to take all these holiday snaps. F___, they were terrible. A lovely man, but a terrible photographer.”

A long-time “jotter of ideas in notebooks”, by his early 20s Sayer was writing songs with fellow Sussex hopeful David Courtney. The pair ended up writing nine of the 11 tracks on Roger Daltrey’s 1973 solo debut Daltrey. “Here was this young kid, and he was playing and singing all these incredible songs, but he couldn’t get a record deal,” said Daltrey of Sayer in an interview last year. “So I just, off the cuff, said to him: ‘Why don’t you write a few songs for me, and I’ll do a solo album, and see if that helps you, see if it gets you recognised for being a songwriter? And it just might give you a leg up in the business.’”

“That’s pretty much true. Roger did love the songs,” affirms Sayer. In fact, Daltrey let Sayer finish recording his own debut album, the same year’s Silverbird, at Daltrey’s home studio. “He would even engineer some of the sessions. A couple of times I went off to do gigs, and I said I didn’t have a decent PA. Roger said: ‘Right, get in the car...’ We’d jump in his Range Rover, go up to Mitch Mitchell’s house, take Jimi Hendrix’s old PA and Roger roadie’d the gig! He set it all up – he was a very strong lad.

“When he went to America, they’re all saying, ‘love this album, Roger.’ He said: ‘Yeah, but forget that. Wait till the year the guy wrote the songs. God, he’s better than me!’ All that stuff. Bull___, mostly. But what a PR man I had!”

Still, Daltrey’s faith was well-placed. Sayer’s second single, The Show Must Go On, released later that year, was a hit, Sayer promoting the single with a memorable Top of the Pops performance dressed as Pierrot the clown. Good luck tracking down footage, though. You can probably guess why.

“Jimmy Savile would not get off the stage,” says Sayer, still exasperated 51 years later. “I think he fancied me. I was quite cute in those days. We had to use BBC musicians… and they’re all playing live as you’re singing live. So it’s terrifying. And you’ve got Jimmy Savile whispering in your ear all the way through, ‘you’re really cute...’ How do you concentrate on singing the song? Somehow I managed to get through it. But they can’t show it. They wiped the tapes because Jim’s all over it.”

Daltrey also said: “Leo went more pop than he was when he came to my studio. He was much more avant-garde and a very quirky artist. But I suppose what he wanted to be was a pop star.” Pierrot aside, did Sayer ever regret ever not staying avant-garde?

“I never wanted to be a pop star!” he exclaims. “It’s just that Adam led me [there]. I can’t have any say in anything. We go off to America in 1975 because Adam’s got the idea, and I agree with the idea, that it would be really good to work with American musicians and American producers. Bring it on.”

He admits he was wary of Faith from their first meetings, with the Sixties face-about-town presenting an ultimatum of “‘we’re not going to go in the studio until you sign this bit of paper…’ I’m on the precipice of [deciding]: ‘Is this a guy shark? A crook? He’s very charismatic – and he’s Budgie! Maybe I should trust the TV character that I’m standing staring at.’ So I said: ‘Right you are, I’ll sign it.’ I didn’t realise what I’d signed. He then basically took over my life.”

Sayer’s next problem, though, was nothing to do with Faith. In 1977, US chart-topper You Make Me Feel Like Dancing won the Grammy – much to the chagrin of Ray Parker Jr., future writer of Ghostbusters. Talking to Variety in 2020, the American said that, in 1976, he presented what he said was his composition to a label executive. “He said, ‘Hey, if you cut that with Leo Sayer, I’ll give you part of the song.’ Well, I never got my part of the song.”

Sayer’s take on that? “Bollocks. Ray’s a good friend of mine, and he comes up with this stuff – good for him. He played guitar on the jam that led to You Make Me Feel Like Dancing. He did play some lovely licks. And I think he was the guy who turned around to me and said: ‘You make me feel like dancing, Leo.’ But his claim is bollocks. I wrote it, basically in the studio from the jam session, and then got Vini Poncia to help me with the chorus. So Vini and I share the song, 50/50.”

Equally, Sayer had other distractions that year. Ahead of a show in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin (”also notorious because the mountain next door later took the life of Stevie Ray Vaughan”) he fell 25 feet off a stage that was “propped up really high on a ski lift… Luckily, my leg broke my fall, and so did a bit of my back. I passed out immediately.”

His recuperation was aided by a “really huge, really lovely ex-Miami Dolphins football player called Michael” who he met backstage at a subsequent gig in Memphis. He put Sayer through several days’ physical therapy at his gym in Huntsville, Alabama – well-appointed facilities funded by another musician client, a “big guy” back in Memphis. Nearing the end of Sayer’s treatment, Michael handed him the phone. The voice on the other end said: “This is Elvis Aaron Presley, and you make me feel like dancing.”

Sayer laughs all over again at this. “That was his first line. We talked for an hour. He said: ‘Michael’s told me all about you. You got great energy, you’re a very positive guy. I’ve been listening to your records. I really love them. Some songs in there I could have sung, and maybe I could sing. Why don’t you come to the house tomorrow and let’s see if we can have some fun together?”

Unfortunately, that conversation took place on August 15 1977. The next day, Elvis Aaron Presley died. “And that was it. My chance to meet and work with Elvis was gone in 60 seconds. But I could never tell anybody that story. Because who would ever f______ believe that the Gerard Hugh Sayer from Shoreham-by-Sea had actually talked to The King?”

Fast-forward to the 1980s and 190s. Sayer had to battle Faith, and his record label, Chrysalis, for his rights as a recording artist. He prevailed, but of the agreed £640,000, he received only £200,000, none of it from Faith. “I lived with the promise of that money coming in. It never came in. I was a pallbearer at Adam’s funeral [in 2003], hoping some money would fall out the coffin. He was a rogue. He must have ripped 20 million off me.”

Sayer had to sue another manager, too. for mismanaged pension funds. Yet another manager “got me into a hell of a lot of problems… He came in and forged my signature on all my contracts, and gave away all of my estate, from my records to my publishing to everything, in a month or so of activity. That’s when I was absolutely broke.”

What did these serial legal fights do to Sayer’s mental health? “I can’t say I ever contemplated suicide, to get to the serious point. I did contemplate giving it all up and going back to graphics. It was all very evil. I remember lawyers advising me to file for bankruptcy. I’ve had Number One records, huge success and, by that time, 25 years of a fantastic career! File for bankruptcy? That gives the press a good story, doesn’t it? So basically we fought.”

An unlikely ally emerged in 1997: a Sun newspaper “Save Leo” campaign, called Prince of Perms, spearheaded by then-showbiz editor Andy Coulson. “I was doing wall-to-wall club [gigs] for one year. We did everything. We did gay clubs where they’d get their dicks out in front of me. It was horrible. But I got the money back to pay off my debt to American Express and Diners Club that he’d [racked] up because I gave this manager company cards.”

One wonders, too, whether these troubles contributed to his decision to leave the UK for Australia in 2005, with his girlfriend Donna.

“Sad to say, yes,” he nods. “Donna never likes me saying that. ‘No, you left because there wasn’t enough work.’ No, I left because I didn’t want to walk past all the horrible places that had ripped me off. I was so happy to get out of England. I feel differently now, because it’s lovely to be back, and I feel I’ve buried some of those ghosts. But honestly, I could not look at Wigmore Street or Bond Street [in London] or where all the f______ lawyers and accountants were. Couldn’t walk down there. I’d have killed somebody. Literally.”

The good will out, though. The year after he left for Australia, Sayer had another, unlikely Number One in the old country. But, true to form, for the dance remix of his 1977 disco track Thunder In My Heart his “stupid publishers” accepted what he characterises as “a 30-second sync right arrangement. A sample, basically. And [it constitutes] the complete f______ song! And I’m gonna get zilch out of it. I’ve got to explain to my co-writer Tom Snow that we are going to get five per cent of this record. I made nothing. It was a joke.”

The single’s success, though, did lead to a booking on the following year’s Celebrity Big Brother. His managers suggested the profile would help secure a new record deal.

“I didn’t really have many other answers,” sighs Sayers. “Well, to be quite honest, I was having an affair at the time with a Japanese stewardess who was in Dubai…”

Right, OK…

“So it was a chance for me to leave Australia and go and spend some time with this beautiful stewardess – and ask her to marry me, actually. It all went pear-shaped when her mum said no. We’re still friends...”

Being otherwise distracted, Sayer admits he didn’t think about the reality of CBB, a show he’d never seen.

“I went in there blind. And I didn’t realise that (a) I had a filthy cold; (b) I suffer from claustrophobia, which I didn’t know until I got in there; and (c) there was some guy called Donny Tourette from [plastic punk band] Towers of London. Three days before, he had a front-page article in the paper saying ‘I Shagged Leo’s Missus’, meaning Donatella.

“So it’s the first day, and Donny comes into the house through the swimming pool. He arrived wet on my bed, saying: ‘I’m so sorry, Leo, I didn’t shag your missus!’ But I didn’t know anything about that because you have a [media] blackout before you go in.”

He shakes his head. “Just mad times,” he says, which is some understatement given that that edition of CBB was also the one featuring the Shilpa Shetty/Jade Goody race storm. “I don’t know where my head was at,” Sayer shrugs. “I was just in a dream.”

All that, though, is behind him – we hope. Last year, after 39 years together, Sayer and Donatella were married in the garden of their home in Australia’s Southern Highlands, that interlude where he tried to marry a Japanese air stewardess clearly forgiven and forgotten. He’s releasing later this year his lost album from 1992 called, um, 1992. He’s in talks to make a documentary of his life. He continues to agitate for a slot at Glastonbury where, surely, he’d be a riot in either the Legends slot or on the stand-up stage. And he’s written a memoir and is already full-steam-ahead with the audio version, despite not having secured a book deal.

“I got turned down by loads of publishers because they wanted, in the first chapter, something dramatic happening. I refuse to let any editor near it. But it starts with Joey our dog hurling me out of my pram. I ended up with a flat head, which I’ve always covered with his hair, and a short neck. That was my first adventure.”

It seems we now have an answer to my opening question: he does still feel like dancing. “In my heart!” he replies, laughing. “The legs are hard to get moving, but they will! Oh, and I hope you can edit out the f*cks.”

The Still Feel Like Dancing? tour starts on September 24. Tickets here