Darren Day recalls being booed by audience at height of | UK News

However, he admits the ideas of his darker days still sting a little as he recalls being booed by an audience. “I can remember walking onto a stage at one time in a club in London – I think it was the Café de Paris – to do a gig around the 90s when I was being talked about [for the wrong reasons] and I got booed. I tell you – unless you’re playing Captain Hook and you’re supposed to getting booed when you walk on – that’s tough. You’ve got to be pretty thick skinned to deal with that,” he concedes.

He admits this smarted for fairly a while but a big turning level for him was his stint on Celebrity Big Brother in 2016, where he positioned a respectable third.

“I remember the final night and I’m thinking why am still here I because I’m thinking I’m pretty sure all the public don’t like me anymore. The truth is when I got to the final it blew my mind and I can remember when I came out in third place.

“My son confirmed me the footage of that a few weeks in the past. I’d never watched it before and I genuinely received fairly emotional and teary about it because the response from the gang, it was prefer it used to be at the start of my profession when I walked on the stage.

“Because it did get to the point when it wasn’t like that. I was so scared when I walked out. I was so scared of being booed. I do feel like that helped me a lot. I can remember the stage door got busier again and my show started selling better again and there were people that said to me ‘I like you again now’,” he smiled.

Darren is refreshingly candid about his struggles and refuses to move the buck saying: “I had the world at my feet and I can’t blame anyone other than myself for the downfall of my career.” Things are massively different for him these days. “I’m walking out on the stage now and it’s not like 1996 when I’d walk out and the place erupted… but it’s a thousand times lovelier than what it got to when I was having all those nasty headlines and when I was a drug addict and a womaniser,” he smiles.

His pleasure and joie de vivre is clear when he describes his upcoming “incredible” function as the aforementioned Phillips. The show tells the story of a legendary evening in music when icons Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley have been introduced together by pure likelihood for a jam session.

It’s a dream function for Darren who is a enormous fan of Elvis. “I’ve loved Elvis my whole life. For my 50th birthday, one of the magazines took me to Memphis and I went to Graceland and I sat at Sam Phillips desk in Sun Records and there’s a mark on the floor where they did the million dollar quartet. So I was there never imagining I would ever get to be a part of this.

“The forged are unimaginable. There’s more stress on the 4 boys taking part in Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lewis because unless you might be an ardent fan of those days, people do not actually know what Sam Phillips regarded like or appeared like. So, there’s less stress on me,” he laughed.

Million Dollar Quartet runs in the Barn Theatre Cirencester from Monday June 15 until Saturday August 22 with tickets available from the venues web site.