Songs My Mother Would Have Hated: Dillie Keane – The Pheasantry

Songs My Mother Would Have Hated: Dillie Keane at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Dillie Keene has been making us laugh for so long with her gentrified vulgarity that you could throw the telephone directory at her and she’d come up with a naughty song about it that would tickle our funnybones.

The roar and the relish with which she delivered the bitter four-letter-word punchline to one of her classic numbers, ‘Pam’, a predatory collector of other people’s husbands (“one swallow doesn’t make a lover”) was so in-your-face it even had the dough balls on my plate jumping to attention.

Yet the co-founder of the satirical comedy act Fascinating Aida is far, far more than just a genuinely funny lady as we discovered in her Pheasantry show, her first appearance at the Chelsea cabaret room since “life jumped up and bit me” and the love of her life, her partner of almost 23 years, departed after a stroke.

Two months later the pain of her grief was still very evident, first in her opening number, the old Sophie Tucker song ‘I’m Living Alone and I Like It’, a brave choice, and more particularly in her closing ‘Thanks For the Memory’, forever associated with Bob Hope but here, in the context of Keane’s loss, such a heartfelt goodbye that we were all wiping away a tear or two by the end of it.

Even her second number, ‘Someone Who Can Stand You’, not one of hers but written by John Forster, recalled a life she no longer shares – “The hell you face, would be a better place, with someone who can stand you” and in the jaunty ‘Funerals’ she somehow managed to make it a celebration – “I’m off to a funeral, hippy-hip-hooray, a person I didn’t know very well has sadly passed away” – with no shame in nicking a bottle of wine to take home from the wake.

Again in the wistful ‘This Ain’t the Hokey-Cokey Any More’, about the difficulties of lovemaking when hearing aids, stoutness, bad knees etc have to be factored into the operation, and ‘When the World Was Young’ the actress in Keane took us on whimsical journeys to the past.

The perils of ‘Internet Love’ when it comes to the crunch of actually having to meet someone face to face and you can’t get away with telling him you’re 18 and ‘Bob’, the story of widower on the loose who is transitioning and changing his name to Babs are long-standing regulars but she understandably hasn’t felt like writing new material in the past couple of months. Even when you know these songs, they are so clever it is never a hardship to hear them again.

Her uber-talented pianist Michael Roulston is far more than an accompanist and he goes solo on ‘I’m Not Giving Up My Heart’ to give Keane a breather, the pair having previously duetted on the jolly ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice to be a Lesbian’.

And while “I’d turn my back on Casanova/ To share my life with someone who revered Navratilova” is not perhaps the most elegant of rhymes, you can forgive this wonderfully versatile performer anything.

Always generous in crediting fellow songwriters, Keane’s version of Hilary Rollins’ ‘Everything Must Go’ when a marriage or relationship breaks up and it comes down to sorting who gets what is a real tearjerker as well as being a rattling good song.

It’s a pity we had to go too as 90 minutes in the company of one of the true greats passed all too quickly. As ever, a total joy.

Jeremy Chapman