by Dynamo
Sometimes he gets a bit of flak, but I think people don’t always understand him. And I believe he gives a lot back with the work he does with The Prince’s Trust.
ALTHOUGH I HAVEN’T met Prince William yet, I was introduced to Prince Harry a couple of years ago at a charity fund-raising dinner for the International Olympic Committee.
I brought my boy Gilera, who’s also my driver, and Dennis, who does my dance choreography. Wherever I go, I try to take my friends along so that we can experience these things together and share the adventure. I think I’d told them we were going to some sort of sporting event and they turned up in trainers and do-rags. When we turned up at the dinner, it was black tie; everyone was suited and booted, and it took place at the Grosvenor Hotel in London – a very fancy place. My mates felt really uncomfortable and after I had performed, they sloped off somewhere.
I finished my slot with my infamous lean-back where I’m suspended in mid-air, then I went off to try to find the guys. I started up some stairs to a roped-off balcony area which had been reserved for the people who were performing or talking at the event. Even before I got to the top of the stairs, I could hear all this laughter.
When I got there, I found Dennis and Gilera with Prince Harry, joking around. My boys were teaching him some dance moves and Harry was trying to do the lean-back – without much success!
If I’d had to guess who out of all the people downstairs that Harry would have ended up hanging out with, those two would have been last on my list.
Watching them mucking about, it struck me that, essentially, people are people. Harry was really cool, very normal, just a young guy who liked having a laugh – like we all do. It reminded me that if you can see past all of your own preconceptions, it doesn’t matter where someone is from. I love that things like magic, as well as film, literature, music, art, dance, has the incredible ability to transcend class and other divisions in society. It brings people together, people who might ordinarily never have got to meet each other.
I WENT BACK to Clarence House in 2011 for the thirty-fifth birthday of The Prince’s Trust. There was everyone from Rod Stewart to the Bond girl Gemma Arterton and the actor Dominic West from The Wire. Once again, we were split into different groups – I was with Kevin Spacey – and I knew I had that small window to really blow Prince Charles away.
I asked the Prince if he was a gambling man, and then I took out some lottery tickets. With a quick shake, I instantly changed them into a stack of crisp £50 notes. Everyone gasped and Charles chuckled. With that, my time was done but I think I’d impressed him. Charles said he’d like to take me home to perform for his mum. That would be my pleasure, Your Majesty!
My experiences at Clarence House put things in some sort of perspective and allowed me to give myself a small pat on the back. Although the first time I went, I probably thought that I was close to making it, in reality I was years away. But on that first visit, with Camilla chasing me about, and Brian May watching me do my magic, I felt quite proud of how far I’d come. I was trying to create something out of nothing and I didn’t let rejection stand in my way. In the years following, I had to face a lot of disappointments and knock-backs – and I’m sure there are more of those to come. But getting myself in that door with royalty was a real vindication of my early ambition.
I’m incredibly grateful to The Prince’s Trust. I might not be writing this book right now if it weren’t for them. I’m very thankful for the £2,000 start-up loan that they gave me because it enabled me to buy the equipment I needed, but also it let me know that someone had faith in me. The Trust helped me to see that you can achieve things out of the realm of normality.
FROM PRINCE CHARLES to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… It was through The Prince’s Trust that, two years after my first visit to Clarence House, I got to meet one of my heroes.
It was 2007 and The Prince’s Trust was holding a lunch at the Dorchester Hotel for their Celebrate Success Awards. That year they combined it with the premiere of Will Smith’s film, The Pursuit of Happyness. I was there to be recognised as someone who had achieved success through The Prince’s Trust.
The event was held in one of the hotel’s ballrooms and there were well over a hundred esteemed guests from the film and charity industries. Because I felt uncomfortable dressing up, I wore my baseball cap and trainers; everyone else looked incredibly smart. I felt a bit out of place, but by then I was growing in confidence.
Before the awards ceremony started, me and a few others who had been helped by The Prince’s Trust were asked to set up a display of our work in a room behind the main hall. Dan and I had arrived early to get ready. I had my Underground Magic DVD cover, a laptop playing the DVD and my cards all set up on a little table in the corner. Prince Charles was brought around and, as always, he remembered me straight away. We had a brief chat and then, about five minutes later, Will Smith came by with his wife Jada and his kids, Jaden and Willow.
As soon as Will walked into the room, everyone stopped talking. He’s a pretty magnetic guy. He’s also incredibly polite and down to earth, and, like Prince Charles, actually listens to what you say.
I reminded Will that I had met him briefly three years ago at The Prince’s Trust Urban Music Festival. He said he remembered me, but I’m not sure if he did! We’d performed something for him and Dan had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a picture of us together. The camera wouldn’t work and, eventually, Will had to leave.
He laughed when I reminded him, and I did a load of magic for him and his kids; his son Jaden all but ran away when I broke my finger in two and Willow seemed pretty freaked out when I pushed a coin through the bottom of a Coke bottle.
Will and his family were really gracious and as we shook hands he said, ‘Magical. Truly magical.’
After my presentation, I wasn’t supposed to be doing any more magic. They said that I would be brought up onstage and given my award by the actress Thandie Newton and we’d have a brief interview about the highs and lows of my life and career.
As I waited in the candlelit ballroom, distractedly picking at the food that had been laid on, Dan leant over and said, ‘I think you should have something ready to do onstage.’ I looked at his mischievous grin. ‘Really?’ I asked, unsure. It was a very formal environment and I didn’t want to upset the balance of things or break some weird protocol. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘We’re in a room with some of the biggest players in the film industry; let’s have something ready and if it feels right when you get up onstage, you should definitely do it. You only get one shot in life at things like this; take it. Magic is what you do; get up there and do it.’
Joanna Lumley was the host and she introduced the gorgeous Thandie Newton. Thandie asked me to come to the stage, where she started to conduct an interview with me.
‘You obviously have a brilliant talent, and you bring so much enjoyment to people. But you had a difficult time growing up; can you share with us a little bit about the beginnings of your career…?’
As she spoke, Dan’s voice echoed inside my head. Get up there and do it. I looked across at Thandie.
‘Sorry, my nan always said I should have fresh breath,’ I said, cutting her off. I took out a Polo mint, swallowed it, and offered her one. ‘A gentleman as well,’ she noted, before nodding at me to encourage me to tell my story. Suddenly, I started choking. Thandie looked panicked and when I clutched my neck and slowly pulled the Polo mint through my skin and out of my throat on a chain, her face drained of blood. Everyone else in the room gasped in a mixture of shock and horror and I could hear Will Smith in the audience, laughing heartily. Thandie tried to steer the interview back on course, but I had totally thrown her. It was a fairly naughty stunt I had pulled on her. Eventually she wrapped things up and presented me with an award that was signed by Will Smith.
Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I jumped offstage as Will got up to do a speech about his film. But before he got on with promoting his film, he appeared to divert from his
pre-prepared speech.
‘Listen, I know we’ve moved on, but that man just pulled a Life Saver [polo mint] out of his neck,’ he grinned, looking over at me. ‘That is absolutely stunning. You scared my son with your tricks earlier – but magic just gets me like that. When I think about being able to take something that doesn’t exist right now and create it out of thin air… it really is magic. The idea of life and living and being able to sit in your home… and you see a picture of who you want to be, and none of it exists right now. The journey that you have to take to achieve it, that is magic to me.’
This was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard about magic and something I’ll never forget. If magic is indeed creating something out of nothing, then magic is everywhere.
If you think about it, just about everything in our lives is created from human thought. And that’s magical. The internet, the wheel, incredible architecture and design, books, films… It’s all magic. It all started out as a thought in someone’s head and by magic it materialised.
Those words that Will said that day have stayed with me ever since. Whenever it got tough over the following few years, I recalled Will’s speech. I couldn’t give up on magic; it was my responsibility to keep going. To keep the magic alive.
FOR ME, MAGIC isn’t about ‘fooling’ people, it’s about sharing that sense of wonder and excitement and amazement. It’s about creating a moment of awe where, for a short time, anything is possible. Magic isn’t about ‘tricking’ people or making them feel stupid; it’s about opening the realms of possibility and creating a moment of joy.
I don’t do ‘tricks’. I perform magic. I remember hearing some wise words from my friend Maseo, who is part of the legendary trio, De La Soul.
A few years ago, Maseo asked me to perform at his kid’s birthday party, because his children are huge fans of mine. In return, he offered to pay for mine and Dan’s flights to Miami, put us up and show us all of the sights.
He took us on a crazy tour of Miami. We went everywhere from the infamous Ocean Drive to Downtown before we stopped off in a place called Boca Raton, which is where all of the retired mafia hang out. It’s a place with a real edge to it and you meet some very interesting characters there. We stopped by a tattoo parlour and I did some magic.
Afterwards, we went to a Denny’s, which is a fast-food chain in the US. As me, Dan and Maseo left, an old guy who had been hanging around the tattoo parlour approached us.
‘Hey, kid, do some more tricks,’ he asked.
Maseo shook his head. ‘It’s not tricks, man, it’s magic,’ he said, before turning to me and Dan. ‘People hate tricks because they think they’re being fooled. What you do is amazing, and magic is about amazing people, not tricking them or making them look foolish.’
It was another very important moment in my journey because Maseo really impressed upon me the importance of the terminology I used and also the way that I wanted people to think about magic. Magic is not about demeaning people; it’s about inspiring people.
I do feel a responsibility not to let people down. They want to experience magic, to feel that wonder of not being able to understand something. I guess it’s the only time people are taken back to their childhood, when everything in life was completely amazing and fun. Similarly, I don’t use the word ‘fans’ either, because I think that too implies that you’re somehow ‘above’ people. My magic is about uniting everyone, not putting myself on a pedestal.
There’s a good reason for that too. The thing I missed most as a kid was a family life. I had my mum and grandparents, but it wasn’t a ‘Mum and Dad’ family like my friends had. I always longed for that security. Magic was my way of bringing people together, and now I feel like my Twitter followers, who have named themselves the ‘#Dynamites’, are all a part of that community.
I’m not a leader – I’m just one guy. But I do want to inspire people and I think that I can inspire people. I owe it to everyone else and I owe it to all the people who have helped me along the way. I couldn’t have got this far on my own. I may have performed the magic, but everyone from my manager Dan, to The Prince’s Trust, to Will Smith, to the promoters who booked me and the newspapers that helped me tell my story, have all played a part. It was my duty to share the gift I have, but I’m acutely aware that without help along the way, I wouldn’t have been able to reach people in the way that I have.
You should never forget that one person alone achieves very little.
* * *
CHAPTER 8
* * *
WHO’S THE MAGICIAN?
AS MY CAREER began to take off, exploring new weird and wonderful places became a more regular thing for me. In my time, I’ve found myself in the most amazing places and my journey has been full of surprises. Sometimes the unexpected and the unplanned can be one of life’s greatest gifts.
In terms of some of the places I’ve ended up, Singapore has to be among the most outrageous. I have a few friends who live out there and it’s always a bit ridiculous; when we go out, we roll in a convoy of Ferraris, drop-top Phantoms and Porsches – the most over-the-top cars you’ve seen. It’s like something from the Gumball Rally. Our friends in Singapore look after us very well – they’re internet entrepreneurs and very successful, so it can be crazy seeing life through their eyes. It’s the funny thing about my new way of life: one minute I’m at Ronnie Wood’s birthday party in his house, the next I’m in the shanty towns of Brazil. Even to this day, I pinch myself. Dan and I will look at each other like, ‘How the hell did we end up here?’ Some of the hotel suites I’ve booked into in Dubai or Singapore would fit my entire flat in them twenty times over.
It’s in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore where I’ve witnessed wealth on an incredible scale. It’s thanks to Formula One that I’ve been invited to these cities in the first place; and it’s through them I’ve met many of the people I admire such as Richard Branson and Pharrell Williams, and hung out with the likes of Lewis Hamilton.
In December 2009, Formula One invited me to the Singapore Grand Prix to perform for F1 Rocks. An idea was floated around that I would drive Beyoncé around a racing track – blindfolded. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, her team went off the idea of letting their multi-million-selling artist hurtle around a racetrack at 150mph with a blind kid from Bradford behind the wheel.
So we approached someone else instead: Lindsay Lohan. Now, ordinarily I like to have at least a little bit of time to hang out with someone before we film, just so I can get to know them a little. But when you are dealing with a huge celebrity, it is often the problem that they only have a very limited amount of time to spare. It can really put the pressure on when it comes to getting the footage you need.
Lindsay had had a nightmare getting to Singapore, missing four flights and being delayed all around the world as she tried to make her way from LA. As soon as she landed, she was piled into a car, which raced her to a huge shopping mall in the middle of the city.
It was a boiling hot day. The steel-clad building omitted heat all around us; it was touching 40°C at one point and the humidity was off the scale. In order to reach me, Dan had to guide Lindsay through the vast shopping mall, packed with thousands of people. After trawling through the shops, up the back stairs and in and out of various lifts for half an hour, they eventually stumbled up onto the roof. We were supposed to have an hour to get the shot, but we only had twenty minutes by the time she arrived.
It was so hot; I thought we were both going to pass out. We’d had to hire industrial fans to try to keep us cool enough so we didn’t sweat our way through the shoot. Time was so tight; we only had one shot, and one shot only, to get it right.
Lindsay perched on top of a bar stool and I asked her to hold my hand as she closed her eyes. By this time a curious crowd had gathered, adding to the tension. I stood back and levitated her off the chair. Slowly, she rose up into the air. But rather than freak out, Lindsay giggled nervously, trying to keep as calm and composed as possible. Up
and up she rose, until there was a metre-long gap between her and the chair. I passed my hands beneath her to show there was nothing there.
The gathered audience had a 360-degree view of what was happening. Their mouths opened wide as they stared at Lindsay, in her little vest and skirt, floating in mid-air among all the magnificent buildings in Singapore. It was a real sight.
In the twenty minutes we spent together, we got on really well and I think she enjoyed doing something a little out of the ordinary. I’ve seen Lindsay since then in Cannes and in London, and she’s always really cool.
Singapore was hard work – it just seemed to get hotter and hotter and it took a lot to persuade people to give me even two minutes of their time. I wanted to do a good job for F1 Rocks, as they had flown me out there, so I knew they’d be counting on me to get great footage of the various stars who had also been brought over for Formula One.
Will.i.am was really jet-lagged and overheated. I could tell it would be a challenge to engage him. So I left him alone to chill out and instead showed Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas some magic. I pulled something off that had Taboo, and his band mate Apl, going crazy. I snapped a piece of string off my T-shirt, swallowed it and then I lifted up my T-shirt to reveal my stomach. Protuding from it was the piece of white thread. My skin puckered as I pulled and pulled until the string was free from my body. Their reaction was brilliant – they ran about like headless chickens as they tried to process what they’d just seen. Eventually, Will.i.am burst out laughing and really got involved.