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Cats up to scratch

24/04/2003

Chrissie Hammond didn't feel like the star of Andrew Lloyd Webber touring musical Cats when she found a six-foot mugger in her dressing room. She talks to Viv Hardwick about fighting back from the shock which robbed her of her singing voice for one night and recalls her rock music life with Rick Wakeman .

Memory is the showstopper song from faded beauty Grizabella in hit musical Cats. The woman currently wearing the moth-eaten fur coat as Grizabella, Chrissie Hammond, gained one memory too many at Manchester when she entered her dressing room and came face-to-face with a 6ft 3inch bald-headed mugger.

"It was a couple of weeks ago at Manchester. He said he was an electrician, so I don't know why he was looking in my handbag.

"I was standing there looking completely useless, not knowing what to do and he knew that I knew what he was doing. Then he picked up a heavy metal thing and said 'I need you to wait here' and I said 'how long?'"

Incredibly, it wasn't the loss of her money or having to cancel credit cards that upset Hammond the most.

"I thought I was cool until it came to my song Memory and then my voice caught in my throat and I sounded a bit strangled. What made me mad was the mugger had actually robbed me of my song for one night in Manchester," she explains. Fortunately the mugger, who had managed to get backstage through the theatre's front of house, was caught.

Hammond has always been a crowd-pleaser in Cats having played Grizabella for two-and-a-half years in the West End and returning to celebrate the show's memorable 21st anniversary performance at the New London Theatre.

A run as Mama Morton in Chicago at London's Adelphi Theatre followed and Hammond was back behind the Cats' whiskers this year when David Ian's Clear Channel Entertainment company took Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous show on tour. The musical plays Sunderland's Empire Theatre for three weeks from Tuesday.

Hammond's route to joining the Jellicle Cats is quite eventful. Born in England, she was brought up in Melbourne, Australia, and returned to this country in 1986.

Her musical debut came as Mary Magdalene in Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. At the same time, she founded the band Air Supply with fellow musicians Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock. Hammond than became one half of the 1980s duo Cheetah with her older sister Lyndsay and produced three top five hits.

She then joined keyboard legend Rick Wakeman as lead vocalist, touring Russia, South America, Japan, Europe and the UK and recording nine albums with him.

Hammond is delighted to hear that Wakeman is on tour again himself and reveals that the music master used to tease her mercilessly about being very short-sighted.

"At one event he brought a toy labrador and a white stick on stage and I also used a stick to help me get around backstage when it was dark. It was christened Mr Stick and if Rick and his band got too laddish I used to belt them with it. Then one day, Rick called me out on stage and gave me a gift in a box. When I opened it, I found Mr Stick cut up inside. I don't think the audience understood why I was chasing him around the stage while the band were in hysterics.

"I do hope the two of us meet up somewhere on our tours because it'll be a hoot," says Hammond who still has a distinctive Aussie twang to her voice even though she hasn't returned too often in 17 years.

Her last memorable visit, before her father died, involved her collection of animals which increased from four cats and four dogs to include a fairy penguin which was washed up exhausted and oil-logged.

"I'm a total animal welfare freak so we got the oil off and I went out to buy sardines. When my father came home he thought he was hallucinating because we had a penguin in the bath. At 5am, he helped me return it to the beach on condition that I didn't tell everyone it waved to me just before it dived back into the sea... I'm such a drama queen," she laughs.

Another true confession is that Hammond still hasn't got the rock 'n' roll days out of her system.

"If anything falls down on stage or anything breaks in Cats, I'm always the first to go straight to the front of the stage and start looking for a microphone to grab so I can keep the show going," she jokes.

Hammond loves the teamwork involved in the world's longest-running musical and claims she doesn't mind the show always being more important than the cast.

"I worry more about the audience not enjoying themselves because they've seen through us as a bunch of performers in fur and whiskers. I used to be vexed early in my career and wonder if I was going to achieve this or that. I'm more philosophical about work having had a fantastic time in my 20s and 30s. We're part of a theatre record and we're in a musical that's unbelievably fun and exciting and wonderful for us.

"I could have moved into a solo pop career but I missed being with the cast of a big musical. Luckily the cat fights between cast members are not what they used to be."