©Al Macphee/MiraclePR.com
When I first moved to Paignton, one of my first Council jobs was a talent contest at the Palace Theatre. The winning act was called Keedie and Co: Keedie Babb, Kelly Worthington – Kelly Shaw at the time – and Keedie’s sister Nadine.
A few months later, I was working on Paignton carnival and they were there again doing a little bit of a sing-song on the stage. They did their bit and, of course, I dragged them over to do some pictures with them. At the time, the carnival had a storage container that was sprayed with graffiti. So because they were a young pop act, I said, “We can’t use the pier because that doesn’t suit your image; let’s use the container as a backdrop.” So we wandered over to that and we did the classic Charlie’s Angels pose with the guns on either side.
Then, in 2003 or 2004, I’m photographing people at the Face of the English Riviera contest. It was a beauty contest, a bit like Miss World or Miss United Kingdom. The entrants get their pictures done, they go in the paper, and people buy the paper to get a coupon or a telephone number to vote. They won’t accept copies of the coupon, so every time you want to vote, you’ve got to pay for another paper – it was one of those.
Keedie, Kelly and Nadine were going to enter but they decided not to. I think it was because Keedie had just made a single with Duncan James from Blue and she had a good reputation on the circuit. Her followers would have voted for her even if they didn’t have a clue what the competition was about, so they decided not to take the opportunity away from any of the other girls. But we re-enacted the Charlie’s Angels shot in front of the same background.
20 years later, I’m about to shoot King Cooper, this ten year old performer doing Elvis impersonations. I shot him last year at Paignton carnival and it was a pretty good performance. I didn’t know what I was going to expect this year, but he came out with a bright pink suit on, shiny shoes and the hair just like Elvis. Well, in 12 months, he’d really gone up in the world. He had it off pat. Really, really talented. He’ll go far. He also had a young girl as a backing dancer.
Now it turns out that King Cooper is Kelly’s son. She was beside me at the sound desk, and I looked across and asked, “Is that Keedie over there?”
“Yes,” Kelly says. So I thought, ‘If she’s backstage, she’s going to be chaperoning, isn’t she?’ Sure enough, it turned out that the girl who was doing the backing dancing was Keedie’s daughter. So you’ve got that stage connection again working its way through the family.
So what did we do? We re-enacted the Charlie’s Angels picture back stage, of course! The poor lad King Cooper didn’t have a clue what was going on!
Just before I was about to publish this blog, Kelly gave me an update. Turns out that King Cooper has got down to the last 100-ish on The Voice Kids and that Britain’s Got Talent had been in touch. Like I said, he’s going to go far!
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