Dillie Keane: Still Curious – Crazy Coqs

Dillie Keane: Still Curious at Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Co-founder of outrageous satirists Fascinating Aida, singer-songwriter extraordinaire, brilliant pianist, comedian, sublime actress, author, failed politician, Sunday newspaper columnist, keen in bed, handy with a wine bottle and pretty darned good in the kitchen too. There is no end to Dillie Keane’s talents.

Above all, with her here-there-and-everywhere eyes, naughty gestures and wicked sense of humour, this supremely visual artist has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

So taking in 80 minutes of this formidable lady in cabaret on her three-night residency at the Crazy Coqs is not exactly a hardship. She’s been making us laugh for so long with her gentrified vulgarity you could throw the telephone directory at her and she’d make a song out of it that would either tickle your funnybone or make you tear up and pull out a handkerchief.

Comic song, sad song, love song – she has so many in her locker and knows exactly how to get every last drop out of them. Nobody works an audience better.

It’s three years now since the love of her life, John, her partner of almost 23 years departed after a stroke and much of her material is about coping alone as she approaches old age. It was such an intense relationship, you can see the pain is still there and even though she rounds off the set with Sophie Tucker’s upbeat ‘I’m Living Alone and I Like It’, I wouldn’t be so sure.

There’s the internet dating song where she lists her requirements: ‘Old lady seeks old bloke, looking for cuddle and occasional poke.’ Then being dragged off to a steam fair, a Metallica rock concert, camping in the Chilterns and a night in a Wetherspoons pub, all alien pursuits to her. Horrors!

Then the additional problems old age brings to the sex act itself, as divulged in ‘This Ain’t the Hokey Cokey Any More’ complete with not-so-nimble demonstration and star accompanist Michael Roulston in blazing form on piano. It’s all about the difficulties of lovemaking when hearing aids, stoutness and bad knees have to be factored into the equation. The agony too of solo senior socials on ‘Saturday Night’ when she has to sit between two widowers and doesn’t know which is worse, the one ogling the waitresses, the other needing a nurse.

She has us in fits too with her risqué number about the old French street prostitute ‘Allo! Bonjour Monsieur!’ and how it got her banned from BBC Radio 2. Keane was on a morning chat show and was, off script, asked to sing a couple of her songs by the mischievous host. She got through one safely enough but could think only of the entirely unsuitable ‘Allo!’ when egged on to do another.

Always generous in crediting the work of fellow songwriters although she could have filled the slot ten times over from her own vast catalogue, the nostalgic reminders of how good it was in the past with ‘(Ah, the Apple Trees) When the World Was Young’, Johnny Mercer’s Anglicised lyrics (a version of the popular French song ‘Le Chevalier de Paris’), fit perfectly into the picture she is painting.

There is one specially written for her from ‘Fleabag’ herself Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the Keane version of Hilary Rollins’ outstanding ‘Everything Must Go’ (music by Matthew Levine) when a marriage or relationship breaks up and it comes down to sorting out who gets what is a real heart-breaker. Keane had her own heartbreak when she moved to London from her country home in Oxfordshire after her beloved partner died. Four thousand much-loved books were among the ‘everything must go’.

Although she and John travelled widely together, they surprisingly never made it to Paris. Making partial amends, the Vernon Duke and Yip Harburg classic ‘April in Paris’, all romance and nostalgia, provides a blissful encore to the an evening when every song is a winner.

Once again an absolute pleasure, Miss Keane.

Jeremy Chapman