How lockdown bathroom singing became a sensation

The bathroom diva lockdown star and queer cabaret legend will be offering sparkling songs, sassy story-telling and Liberace-level costumery, all of which sprang out of a very dark place.

Adam was just about to set off on a tour of West Coast America when Covid shut down everything. Instead of heading off to the States, he got the call that he had better get back to his parents in Jersey instead – before even that became impossible.

“And so it was just me and my mum and dad and the Boxer dog,” Adam says.

“It was a very miserable moment when the tour had to be cancelled and I just went into my childhood bathroom and shut the door... and there was this moment!

“It was the bathroom where I used to sing as a teenager. I used to go in there and sing to the mirror and imagine that I was singing in front of a big audience, just to escape all the grottiness of being a 15-year-old surrounded by people in Jersey who didn't really get gays! The bathroom used to be the imaginary theatre for me and I used to go in there and have all these fabulous Judy Garland moments by myself. Since then I've managed to have some wonderful Judy Garland moments of my own, but then it was all ripped away from me and I was back there again.

“And I just started singing. At first I was sad but I start ed doing more and more songs and I started putting them online. I was also thinking that it might be a good opportunity to expand my repertoire. I put the videos up and asked people if there were other songs that they wanted me to sing. And so I started doing songs that I had never done before. I had never sung Queen before but one of those was The Show Must Go On. I had always been a David Bowie and Kate Bush boy but it makes a lot of sense for me to sing Queen. You can't get more operatic than Queen!

“So it all started out as quite a lonely activity but it began to catch the imagination of a lot of lovely people living on Jersey and a lot more people became involved and then the Jersey Arts Centre discovered a particularly florid video that I’d done with me in Elizabeth I costume that I had made out of bubble wrap which works surprisingly well. I had my dad in there as well. He is in his 80s. My mum and dad were both wearing bubble wrap mitres and dad was sitting on the loo singing I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. Even the dog was there. And the Jersey Arts Centre saw it. They saw this ridiculous piece of madness and they said they would love to do a show out of it all as soon as we were allowed. I had never done a solo show before. I had done operatic recitals back in the day but not a solo cabaret show and so this dream started to raise itself out of these bathroom videos which were getting more and more wild and outrageous.

“But the problem in setting your imagination free as I did in the bathroom and as Jersey Arts Centre said that I should – they were wonderful – is that you set up this great big show that becomes difficult to tour, involving a bath, a loo, 15 changes of costume and all sorts of things, the most unwieldy piece of nonsense that you could imagine. But it is lovely to be touring!”