Why Darren Day is finally comfortable to be Darren Day

From Chicago to Footloose, it’s back-to-back national tours for Darren Day and he absolutely couldn’t be happier.
Darren DayDarren Day
Darren Day

Footloose The Musical, which was postponed in 2020, bursts back onto the stage for 2022 with dates including Theatre Royal Brighton from February 21-26 and The Mayflower Theatre, Southampton from May 3-7.

Darren was on the road with Chicago last year and for the first part of this year. In December, it was rehearsals for Footloose – and now comes the tour.

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One of the great challenges, he says, is to slip from one American accent to a very different one, from the slightly New York-ish accent of Chicago to the much more country accent of West Virginia.

“It’s a bit of a jump!” he laughs. “I don’t really know how you do it but I’m quite lucky with accents. I did a lot of voices for Spitting Image in the early 90s. When the show ended with the titles going up, they used to do a parody song of famous artists. I did Sting and I did George Michael and I did Elton John and I did David Bowie. I had a repertoire of voices and they had a list of what I could do. If a particular voice came up I would get the call and if memory serves me right, we recorded the show on a Friday so that it would be as topical as possible when it went out that weekend.

“There were six or seven of us that did the voices and if there was a voice that nobody did they would send a – and this really dates it! – VHS tape to whoever they thought could give it a crack.

“The one that I worked with most of the time was Steve Coogan and we are still pals. People forget that he was an impressionist to start with and when we started, we were doing very much variety shows. Steve that did that for a while.”

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As Darren says, accents still highly remain relevant to his own career: “I have done it a lot and I use the ability to do impressions to do accents now.

“When I did Grease in London many years ago it was a bit of an impression of John Travolta and then when I did Summer Holidays, I was very close to an impression of Cliff. I’ve used that ability with accents whenever I can think of a way of enhancing my performance.

“In fact I’ve done it ever since I was a kid.

“My mum and dad embarrassingly tell me that when I was about three, Tom Jones had a show on TV and I’d pick up a biro and pretend it was a mic and just sing into it. I’ve always been fascinated by voices.”

And in some ways other people’s voices are easier. “This is a terrible thing to admit but when I was a teenager I would go to the clubs and I would chat up girls in a voice. I can remember vividly being a club and chatting up a girl as David Essex!”

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It’s a confidence thing: “I am very comfortable as Darren now but I never really been before. Certainly now I am. I have had a lot of issues with stuff, things in the last few years and some mental health issues but I think, having gone through that, this is probably the time in my life that I have actually felt most comfortable with being in my own skin.

“I have never really got that therapy thing where they tell you that you’ve got to love yourself. Voices were an escape in a way.

“It has been hard and I don’t even particularly like myself but I’m more comfortable now in my skin than I have ever been before.

“And that’s great. I think I appreciate stuff more. I’ve been close to death three times in my life and as a result I appreciate every single day now, every single moment of life.

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“Before the bad stuff happens you just take things for granted. Before, I was never happy just to be OK. I was always extremes but now through it all, through all that has happened, I’m really happy to be OK.

“After all that has gone on, it is just brilliant to be OK.”

From Chicago to Footloose, it’s back-to-back national tours for Darren Day and he absolutely couldn’t be happier.