Marti’s journey to the dark side

Marti Pellow spoke to Helen Geraghty ahead of his appearance in a musical version of Jekyll and Hyde.

Teenage Clydebank schoolboy Mark McLachlan opened the pages of his latest school text, Jekyll and Hyde, and started to read the tortured thoughts of scientist Dr Henry Jekyll.

Alone in his bedroom, he shuddered as he read: “I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.”

Mark was soon to change his own identity, to Marti Pellow, frontman of Wet Wet Wet, who went on to sell millions of albums worldwide. But now, years later, he is playing leading man in the musical stage production of the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson – and the fascination he felt when he first read the book is still with him.

He says: “Jekyll and Hyde is what you could call a gothic masterpiece, and whatever way you look at it, reading it is a rite of passage. I remember very well the first time I read it, when I was at school. The story is very much part of the British psyche. I mean when you talk about someone who changes a lot you say “He’s a real Jekyll and Hyde character.”

Wet Wet Wet’s record-breaking run at UK No1 with Love Is All Around was an eight-year-old memory when musical theatre first knocked on Marti’s door in 2002. He was in a charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall when he was approached by the American producers of the musical Chicago and asked to play the role of Billy Flynn. He then spent two years starring in Chicago.

The trend continued when he went on to play the devilish Daryl Van Horne in a UK tour of the Witches of Eastwick in 2008. The Jekyll and Hyde tour is currently touring the UK, heading for Tunbridge Wells from Bank Holiday Monday.

When he tells me he knows Tunbridge Wells and my own home village well, I think he is teasing, until he reveals he used to have a home at Wittersham, near Tenterden, and knows parts of Kent very well. And not many people know that.

Marti, 46, says: “Because musical theatre came to me so late, I’m like a kid in a candy store. I loved the music of this production first and foremost, which is always my first port of call. I’ve been on the tour now for a wee while and I’m very happy with it.

“I think when you are dealing with Jekyll and Hyde you go on a journey and believe in the plight of Dr Jekyll. He seeks to rid the world of evil but because of being so suppressed he unleashes this ‘venom’ on London.”

“Meanwhile, I enjoy the whole journey! I get to flip between the two sides.”

When I ask if Marti is planning to leave his pop star days behind him for a full-time theatrical life, he laughs at the very idea.

He has had his own problems (show me a man who hasn’t and I’ll show you a bore). But while he may have disappeared from your radar over recent years, he has been very active with seven solo albums, including his new album Love to Love.

The Wets, all lifelong friends, have never been far away either, reforming in March 2004.

He says: “ I think I’m afforded the luxury of first and foremost being a singer/songwriter and to have the support to be afforded that luxury is a wonderful thing. I like to grow as an artist, be it in music or wherever.”

Marti’s legions of besotted female fans will doubtless be out in force for the Tunbridge Wells dates. But don’t bother to try to catch his eye. He now lives in Berkshire with his very, very long-term girlfriend, now turned fiancee.

FACTFILE

• Marti Pellow is in Jekyll and Hyde, at the Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, Monday, May 30, to Saturday, June 4.
• Shows are at 7.30pm daily and also 1.30pm on Wednesday, June 1, and 2.30pm on Saturday, June 4.
• Tickets from £14.50 to £30.50