I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

For my part, I was lobbying for a Mother’s Day release, given the album’s style, and because I thought my fans would appreciate the opportunity to receive or give the album as a gift for Mother’s Day. In retrospect, I think Music Music Music lost its way.

That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of things I loved about this album. The idea for the title and the style of Music Music Music originated from one of my signature responses to contestants when I’m a talent-show judge,28 and the fact that I’m superstitious and do a lot of things in threes. The album also consisted of three distinct styles of music that I love: pop, country, and musical-theatre songs.

The single ‘What About Us?’, which Gary Barlow penned, was terrific. I was particularly proud of how well my idea for the video was received, exploring the parallels in a relationship between a male/male couple and a male/female couple. The song and the video received a lot of airplay.29 On one memorable occasion, the video came on the big screen in a bar when I arrived at the Hub convention in 2008. Without any prompting,30 I climbed up onto one of the tables and lip-synched to myself.

Another time, Clare and I snuck away from the Hippodrome in Birmingham, between my panto performances, to have a quiet meal at a local restaurant. We managed to remain relatively incognito through most of the meal – until the music channel broadcasting on the row of wall-mounted flat-screen TVs began showing ‘What About Us?’ I might as well have been dancing on those tables, too, we had so many people staring at us. So much for being sneaky.

I did find out something later, though, about the Barlow song that bothered me a little. ‘What About Us?’ came to me not quite in the manner I’d originally thought. I was told that Gary Barlow had penned the track exclusively for me, when the truth was that he and Sony had intended the song to be a release for another artist, who didn’t want it. I love the song and I think I made it my own regardless of its provenance.31

Given all of this, my next album for Sony will be an album of songs from musicals. A good friend at Sony, Daniel Hinchliffe, who worked on both of the earlier albums and was once a dancer – or a hoofer,32 as they are fondly called – in the West End, and who is now part of the Sony group responsible for Celine Dion and Barry Manilow, will be much more involved in the collaboration to make sure this next album is on track.

And, I hope, in time for Mother’s Day.

TABLE TALK #6

‘Was That Captain Jack Racing a Rickshaw?’

‘Stop the car!’ I yelled.

Team Barrowman – my mum, dad, Carole, Scott, Clare and I – had just been escorted to our limo in the secure parking lot at the rear of the San Diego convention centre, where I’d spent the day at Comic-Con 2008, signing autographs and presenting on a lively panel with other Torchwood folks, including Naoko, Gareth, and the show’s executive producer, Julie Gardner. We’d answered questions from a packed house, and, on the request of a fan, Naoko and I had sung, a cappella, an excerpt from ‘The Last Night of the World’ from Miss Saigon (which, as you may know, was the West End show on which Coco and I first met).

Comic-Con is the mother of all conventions for anything new, cool or will-soon-be-both in Popular Culture.1 Movies, television shows, video games, and – of course – comics, graphic novels and anything related to sci-fi, superheroes or animation are previewed at Comic-Con. For me, the appeal is all of those things, but I also love looking at and meeting the fans who attend conventions like this one.

The massive convention centre is set up with rows and rows of kiosk-like areas, where collectible companies, television networks and movie studios pay celebrities to sit and sign; in some booths, it’s even possible to watch artists creating their illustrations. As I sat behind my table at Mary Lee Holzheimer’s booth, and signed autographs for hours on end, I loved to watch as the cavalcade of characters crossed my path. Someone2 made the mistake of giving Gareth, who was signing at the same booth as me, a soft-tipped dart gun, and pretty soon he and I had a contest going to see how far we could fire the darts – and who we could hit as they passed in front of us.

‘See that Stormtrooper over there?’ Gareth would taunt. ‘I can hit him in three darts.’

‘I can hit him in two.’

And so it would go. One of the workers from the booth then dashed out into the crowd, quickly gathered up our missiles and rushed back with them. If people noticed who had nailed them, then we’d call them over and chat with them, but most of the time, they had no clue that they’d just been tagged.

After a couple of hours of this, I noticed that a distinct pattern had begun to emerge as to the nature of our respective targets. I was picking fans dressed as recognizable characters that I found to be intriguing or really impressively created, like a Lando Calrissian or a stunningly detailed Boba Fett, whereas Gareth was hitting on3 scantily clad women in sexy leather costumes, like Batgirl or Elektra, or young women dressed in erotic chain mail – like an amazing Barbarella who strutted past.

The entire spectrum of sci-fi characters from TV, movies and games crossed my path in those couple of days. And I thought I was a geek. I couldn’t have named half of them for you. I did, though, love the Star Wars characters I saw, including a few I’d completely forgotten about and a handful of droids I’d never even heard of. There were also lots of elaborately costumed superheroes, villains and aliens, some already real in