Brighton: Fascinating Aida happy to get back on tour​​​​​​​

For nearly four decades – from their first album entitled Sweet Fa (1984), through the late 90s show It, Wit, Don't Give A Sh*t Girls to the 2012 smash-hit tour Cheap Flights, Fascinating Aïda have captured the political and social fixations of our times.

Their brand-new show will feature “a selection of old favourites, songs you haven’t heard before and some you wish you’d never heard in the first place”, they promise.

Dillie said: “There may not be any Dogging, there may be an updated version of the Brexit song and it’s likely that Cheap Flights will be truncated due to new immigration controls. But the songs are mostly topical and the glamour remains unstoppable.”

Dillie Keane founded Fascinating Aïda in 1983 and was joined by key writing partner Adèle Anderson in 1984. Next year marks their 40th anniversary.

The trio have enjoyed viral online success, more more than 27 million views on YouTube and counting and have also been nominated for several awards, and won Best Musical Act in the London Cabaret Awards.

Dillie admits: “I’ve never been able to describe our shows. However, I can say that the shows are very very funny, highly topical and up to date. You can usually expect to hear mention of current news or ongoing scandals. People love our use of language which is, though I say it myself, complex and rich and, yes, occasionally enchantingly smutty. I was born in Portsmouth and I blame my rudeness on the sailors I frolicked with in my girlhood.”

As for that big anniversary: “Liza’s dad, who was the television dramatist of his day, apparently used to say ‘All you have to do is outlive them.’ There have been times when past sopranos have left us for sunlit uplands when my spirit has been very low and I have had to retire to a corner to lick my wounds, but I always quote a couplet from Kipling’s If to myself: ‘If you can see the things you gave your life to broken, Then stoop to build ‘em up with worn out tools.’

“And yes, I know the poem ends with ‘You’ll be a man, my son’ and I have no problem with that in these gender fluid times. And I say to myself, ‘Head down, collar up, shoulders into the wind’ and I just battle on.”

Like everyone, they are coming back from the lockdowns: “We lost 13 dates off the end of the 2020 tour, and then three more full tours were cancelled. I didn’t miss performing nearly as much as I missed seeing shows and going to galleries. That, for me, was a special kind of purgatory – to be denied the joy of inputting culture.

“And my brother-in-law died, and my great friend and co-producer died. And then our labrador died. So I was very sad.

" I gardened, grew vegetables and listened to a lot of books.”