“I’m sick of people putting me in a box. There’s much more to me than there is to my ‘Mr Nasty’ Strictly character,” says Craig Revel Horwood. After 20 years on primetime TV spent “mostly holding up paddles marked from one to four” and delivering withering feedback to crestfallen celebrities, he “wants people to get to know the real me”.
To this end, the 60-year-old star is embarking on nationwide tour Revelations, telling the story of his journey from an abusive upbringing in small-town Australia to the bright lights of Paris, London and Broadway. He’ll sing songs from his 2024 debut album, Songs Boys Don’t Sing, and promises to “drop a few bombshells” of backstage gossip from Strictly Come Dancing.
He’ll remind us of his work as a director and choreographer (“People don’t know I choreographed Paddington 2 so I’ve dug out some film of Hugh Grant learning that prison scene tap dance. He worked very hard!”) and, less predictably, he’ll also be showcasing his prowess on the, er, recorder.
“Because the recorder is where it all began for me,” he explains earnestly via video from the be-turreted, 17th-century, seven-bedroom home he shares with his fiancé, horticulturist Jonathan Myring, in rural Northamptonshire.
“People don’t know me as a musician, but the recorder set me on the path to playing guitar, french horn, tenor sax and trumpet: I was in marching bands!”
He recently found footage of himself performing lead descant with his seven-piece recorder group at the Sydney Opera House in 1978, when he was 13. “We played ‘Try To Remember’ [from the 1960 musical The Fantasticks],” he says, launching into song. “Tryyy to remember the kind of September/ When life was slow and ohhh so mellow…”
The nostalgic number (a hit for Gladys Knight & The Pips in 1975) fits perfectly into a show themed around Horwood’s lifelong passion for musical theatre. Born in 1965 in Ballarat, Victoria, the eldest of four siblings, he had a difficult childhood as the son of an “abusive alcoholic” father who struggled to accept his son’s homosexuality. In the first volume his of autobiography, All Balls & Glitter, in 2008, he described the former Australian Royal Navy Lieutenant Phil Horwood (who died in 2015) as a man whose violence and ranting outbursts made it impossible to bring friends home.
Musicals became “a form of escapism” for young Horwood after his mother took him to see Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar when he was eight. “It was just: WOW! That kind of music was brand new to theatres,” he recalls. “People think of musicals as safe, jolly, old fashioned. But they help us process darkness. Think of South Pacific, which seems like it’s going to be a lovey-dovey sort of thing but actually it’s about war, and heartache. West Side Story – the first musical I directed – is a ballet about knife crime.”
He now credits the way “music and dance elevated the storytelling” for helping him express his own emotional turmoil. “You know what they say,” he says. “If you can’t say it, sing it. If you can’t sing it, dance it, darling.” He gives a little shrug. “Dance is a great outlet for the things we can’t speak aloud. All the pent-up anger, aggression, frustration.”
Horwood discovered dance aged around 12 or 13. “I was a fat kid at school and I hated sports,” he says. “A friend suggested I go to these exercise classes with music. It turned out to be a jazz ballet class and I fell in love with it.” Can he describe the feeling? He mulls it over. “I felt invincible. I was on another planet in the dance studio. As thought I’d been airlifted away from the struggle and animosity of family life. My worries just melted away and I was treated kindly. I felt people were… liking me for the first time. They would say: ‘Oh, you’re good at that.’”
In his memoir, Horwood revealed that, when he was 16, an unnamed celebrity sugar-daddy funded his dance tuition and flew him around the world.
“That’s how I got out of Ballarat,” he wrote. He trained in Melbourne and, aged 17, moved to Sydney to join the chorus in La Cage aux Folles, later moonlighting in clubs as drag queen Lavish (a character he has channelled more recently in panto). At 22, he moved to Paris to perform at the Lido cabaret on the Champs Elysées but tells me he quickly became frustrated at being “one of a hundred people with a blue fish on my head. I wanted more!”
So, in 1989, he moved to London. “Today is actually my 36th anniversary of arriving in England to do Cats!” he grins. At casting calls he was on the receiving end of the kind of criticism he dishes out on Strictly. “My flaws as a dancer were pointed out at every audition,” he says. “Turning to the left and high kicks on the left were always a problem for me. I was also conscious of my flailing arms. Mine are two inches longer than most people’s” – he’s 6ft 2in – “and I couldn’t control them. I also found tap really difficult. But I persevered and persevered until it clicked, and frustration turned to fun.”
He went on to win West End roles in Miss Saigon and Crazy for You – where his leadership skills were spotted by the producer who dispatched him to Broadway to teach the touring company Crazy for You, then sent him on to mount the entire show in South Africa.
Horwood has continued to direct a musical every year since starting work on Strictly (his production of 80s-embracing Now That’s What I Call a Musical! is on tour now) and says the work allows him to embrace his nurturing side. “I love encouraging people,” he says. “But the kids just coming out of theatre schools need to be hugged, they need to be stroked… You can’t just tell them the actual truth.” He makes a face. “Young people in shows, who aren’t used to touring, will say: ‘It’s all got too much for me – I need a mental health day off.’”
He’s equally unconvinced by the celebrities who’ve complained about bullying behaviour by some of the professional dancers on Strictly. Three weeks into rehearsals for the 2023 season, Amanda Abbington complained to the BBC about her partner Giovanni Pernice. A year later, the corporation apologised to Abbington and upheld verbal bullying and harassment complaints, but cleared him of the most serious allegations of physical aggression. Last summer, Zara McDermott also claimed her partner, Graziano Di Prima, kicked her in rehearsals and junior staff told BBC News that the culture behind the scenes was “toxic”.
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Horwood shrugs. “I am still friends with Giovanni,” he says. “One complaint against him was that he trod on a toe. Well, I’m sorry but that is going to happen. In dance training I’ve dropped girls and broken their ribs accidentally. I’ve broken fingers doing lifts.”
He’s “all up for people making complaints if the situation is abusive”, but he thinks the celebrity contestants need to accept “they are being challenged to do something they have not been trained to do”. There will be failure on both parts. “Every contestant has to be taught in a different way depending on the mental state they’re in at the time. The professional dancers are not psychologists. They can’t always work out what is going on,” he says.
“Everybody is different, but sometimes it takes an argument for somebody to do it right. Then you say: ‘Now we’re got fire! Now we’ve got passion! Hold that tension in your muscles! Now we can tango, darling!”
Horwood points out that when he heads out on his Revelations tour he’ll be making himself as vulnerable as any Strictly contestant. Standing alone at the mic, he knows he’s “a lamb to the slaughter, darling”, but says that singing songs from musicals that changed his life “just makes me HAPPY!” The show will end with his cover of the empowerment anthem “This is Me” (from The Greatest Showman) “because my life goes into that song”.
He smiles, gently. “After being bruised and battered, I’m not afraid to come out and be seen for who I really am.”
‘Songs Boys Don’t Sing’ album tour ‘Revelations’ runs until 28 June (craigrevelhorwood.com)
