Interview; Louie Spence, choreographer

Louie Spence was once described by Paul Morley as “joining the dots between John Inman, Liza Minnelli, Kermit the Frog, Tim Curry, H from Steps, Danny La Rue, Freddie Mercury and Alan Cumming ... His talent is to convince us that he lives life in a constant state of excitement and that this is an important, life-enhancing gift.”

That’s his on-screen persona in a nutshell, but it transpires that the surprise star of Sky1’s Pineapple Dance Studios is one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met, with many more facets to his character. Off-screen, Spence operates at a much lower volume, and I have to hold my tape recorder extra close to compensate for the movers and shakers noising it up over lunch at the ultra-chic Ivy Club, in London’s theatre district. Cosying up suits this interviewee, whose tactile, confiding ways are ingratiating.

It’s all a world away from the modest Essex home where Louie grew up, the third of four kids, and the only boy. Even then he had stars in his eyes. As his memoir, Still Got It, Never Lost It!, reveals, his dream was to learn how to move like Leroy from Fame.

Flamboyance isn’t the whole story. Spence suffers from panic attacks (they run in the family) and phobias. So, after shepherding me into a lift, he opts for the stairs, because he’s claustrophobic. He’s naturally energetic, limits his alcohol intake, prides himself on punctuality and has been monogamously loved-up with the same man – now his civil partner – for 11 years.

He may have grown up with very little, but this is no garment-rending misery memoir (I only cried once). Nor is it a tour through every oozing blister and strained ligament endured during a career that’s seen him dancing on the West End stage in Miss Saigon and Cats, and tripping the light fantastic behind pop phenomena Take That and the Spice Girls. Instead, it’s a funny romp through Spence’s life and times, chronicling all the hard work involved in becoming an “overnight success.”

Spence, 42, did everything with his sisters and followed them to dance classes – but long after they’d quit, he was still attending. He’d found his calling. Proper school held no appeal, but he couldn’t wait to slither into Lycra and bop off to thrice-weekly classes at Doreen Cliff’s School of Dance at the Braintree Institute. He also became the North Essex Trampoline Champion. Cliff’s school offered a good grounding in the basics and in acrobatics, but when glamorous, wealthy Dadina arrived on the scene he auditioned for the dance school she set up in the barn of her family’s mansion. He was 12. She was just a few years older.

“We’d never seen anything like her: she was so beautiful and so fabulous. She had black cork shoes and wore New Romantic blouses with frills down at the cuffs – to school! She had come from London where she was training as a dancer. Dadina was so worldly, at such a young age. She would teach us what she had learned in London. It was very different to what I was learning at Doreen’s during the week. But [my education] was more than just dance. I ended up staying there every weekend and I would get taken to a restaurant, which I’d never gone to with my parents. I’d been to the Wimpy, but I’d never been to a restaurant, with three sets of knives and forks, and a napkin to put on your lap! I was in awe of her.

Excitement fills his voice when he says: “Dadina understood what you wanted. She taught me a dance routine – it was something I’d only seen on TV and there was someone teaching it to me and letting me do this!” She demanded rigour. Spence writes, “The most wonderful thing for me was the technical ability that I was developing... [which] gave me the freedom to express myself through the music... In Dadina’s barn I experienced what it was to dance to a piece of music and feel truly at one with it.”

He keeps telling me that dancing comes naturally, but I won’t let him downplay the years of graft required to make it look as easy as breathing. I’ve seen the row of backflips and pirouettes, the high kicks and the twirls.

“When you get a move, everything just stops in time and you think, oh my God, I’ve done it!” he says. “And it happens again and it’s like magic. Because you try all the time: you can’t quite get your leg up, you’re falling off that turn, but one day you’ll get a move and then it’s in your body. Dadina made me feel invincible. It was like coming alive.”

Next he attended the Italia Conti Stage School. Auditions were fraught – he can’t sing, and his severe lisp introduced an unwanted comic element when he had to “recite a scene from Shakespeare”.

His dancing won him a place, but the tuition was beyond his family’s budget. His father John’s tyre and exhaust business wasn’t doing well and they’d recently mortgaged the house – though Spence’s mum, Pat, spent some of that money on a boob job. Nevertheless, they took out a second mortgage to enable their son to realise his dream. For his part, Spence gave up Saturday classes to go and work for his dad. He’d never spent much time with John, and the new arrangement made him anxious.

Bear in mind that the idea of coming out never crossed Spence’s mind. He understood and accepted his sexuality from an early age. His family never batted an eyelid when he pranced about in tights and ballet slippers. But when he was dancing in Miss Saigon, he felt he should formally make it clear to his sister Kelly. Don’t discuss this with mum and dad, he pleaded.

Of course she did, and they wrote him a loving letter. They’d known all along and felt guilty for never bringing it up themselves. Their chief regret was that Spence was keeping his distance from them. “I’m sure now we can have a better relationship as a family than ever,” they wrote.

Spence admits that he felt confused – he didn’t feel there was distance between him and his family. He was also frustrated. Much as he loved them, he didn’t want a life resembling that of his sisters or parents. He wanted a life filled with fabulosity.

“I had experienced amazing things which were so outside of their world. I loved them so much that I didn’t want them to think that I felt better than them,” he says. His sisters were both divorced with kids, and his parents’ situation worsened when John’s business collapsed.

Did he feel guilty? “A little bit, because they had given up so much, which is another reason I didn’t want to go back and say, ‘I’m having such a wonderful time!’”

It went deeper than that, though. “I have the most wonderful, open parents, but like I say in the book, I didn’t go places with my dad because I didn’t want him to have to protect me. He was a man’s man who told jokes about poofs. I didn’t care, I laughed, that’s my family, that’s what they do. In a pub, straight men do that. Any gay man who’s going to start getting all prissy about it, well, forget it. We make jokes about straight men and bloody lesbians.

“It didn’t bother me that he was laughing, but I was like, I’m what you are laughing at. Even though it was very clear that my parents knew, if I’d told them [officially], then when I was in that situation with my dad he would have felt the need to stand up [for me]. I didn’t want that. They are his friends, that’s his life. My life was so wonderful and I was so happy.”

When Spence moved to Rome to live with his first love, he landed a well-paying job dancing on an Italian television programme. He doesn’t say so in print, but when I press, he reveals that he wired money home each pay day. “They had moved into a smaller house, but they still had a mortgage on it, so I paid it for a while. Every time I had a good job I would help them out.”

One of the reasons Spence is such a valuable resource as artistic director of Pineapple Dance Studios, is that he’s connected. All these years in the business means he knows every choreographer past and present, and the dancers, as well, since they all pass through Pineapple’s doors eventually. Many of the programme’s reviewers noted that for a man claiming to be busy 25/8, Spence didn’t seem to have any real responsibilities. The book explains that he decided to quit dancing, and took a job at the reception desk to ensure that he had an income. So what is his job, exactly?

As artistic director, he explains, not at all offended by my question, his job is to make sure everyone is looked after. Debbie Moore, OBE, the studio’s founder and the first woman to float a company on the London Stock Exchange, was quick to spot his potential.

So whether it’s Arlene Phillips or an as yet unknown choreographer, whether it’s a pop group rehearsing their next video, or a long-standing member in to take a class, Spence is there to make them feel welcome and looked after.

His job is to stay alert to trends and talent, and he’s called in to consult with Moore on the fashion side of things as well, because he goes into classes so he knows what trends the young dancers are actually following. He’s also well placed to make introductions when, for instance, someone needs to hire 32 dancers in a hurry. Recently, acknowledging his now international profile, Moore re-branded him Pineapple’s Global Ambassador.

Among the stars he’s encountered over the years, Spence singles two out for special praise: Gary Barlow and Emma Bunton. He met Barlow and the boys – apart from Robbie – in 1995, at the peak of their first wave of fame, when he was hired to dance on their world tour.

One memorable night the lads came back to Spence’s central London flat to party, and squashed themselves on to a clapped-out foam sofa. Two weeks later – surprise! -- there was a knock on the door. It was Habitat, delivering a new sofabed. The note attached said: “Enjoy the new sofa. The one you have is shit. Love, Gary.”

“But apart from that,” Spence recalls, “the most wonderful thing about Gary – and all the boys were wonderful – is that he has a sense of humour that is so dry. And he’s generous. We got to go round his house, use his swimming pool and his sauna. Whenever he was sent things, like cologne, he’d give it out to the dancers. He is ... The. Nicest. Person.”

Bunton, meanwhile, remains one of Spence’s closest friends. “You will never meet a nicer person in showbusiness. She is a sweet, kind person, and another one with a great sense of humour – and very opinionated. That’s the Emma I know well. We talk two or three times a week.”

People like Bunton pique my curiosity. Let’s be honest, they don’t need to work anymore, and yet they do. What’s that about? “She works because that’s what she does,” he answers. “She could sit at home, but me and Emma are from very similar backgrounds, both from council houses. We joked that Sunday night would be beans on toast, share the bath, and bed. Emma’s very close to her family, too. There’s no way she would ever have got above her station, but it’s just not in her nature, either.”

These days, despite a phobia about flying, Spence is an international commodity. He hosted Mardi Gras in Australia, and is not long back from New York, where he starred in Louie Spence’s Dance Project, for Oprah Winfrey’s television network.

His anchor, while all this is going on, is the husband whose identity he won’t reveal in print. The eight-years-younger Spanish bombshell (trust me, I’ve seen a picture) prefers it that way, but the book does describe how they met and their wedding day.

“When he asked me I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get married,” admits Spence. “I always had this view that as gay men, we’re only together because we want to be. There’s nothing material holding us together. I was with him because I love him. But on the actual day I got really emotional. I didn’t know where it came from.”

Being Latin, his partner is even more family oriented than Spence, which is saying something. “It was really important for him to show his family that he’s found somebody. And it’s also to say, ‘Look, we can bond our love the same as you and we can commit’. A lot of people think gay men are just out and taking drugs and sleeping with everyone. For me there’s no way that could ever happen. I wouldn’t share.”

It’s been a heady 18 months, but if anyone can withstand the dizzying highs and lows of fame, I’d wager it’ll be Louie Spence. After all, you don’t master the art of executing eight pirouettes in a row without learning a thing or two about maintaining your equilibrium.

Still Got It, Never Lost It! is published by Harper Collins, at £18.99. Louie Spence will be doing two book signings in Scotland on 22 October. At 11am he’ll be at WH Smith at 53-55 Argyle Street, Glasgow, and at 3pm he’ll be at Waterstones in Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh.