Home for Christmas

Acclaimed jazz singer and pianist Joe Stilgoe has a packed schedule this month, including gigs in Brighton, Hastings, Chichester – and the Royal Albert Hall. He tells Jenny Mark-Bell about family festive traditions, carol-singing with The Rolling Stones, and his new Christmas album

Those of us despairing at the encroachment of Christmas into the autumn months might spare a thought for jazz singer and pianist Joe Stilgoe, who spent the July heatwave in a Hastings recording studio, wearing a Christmas jumper and singing about Jack Frost.

But as Joe explains in the Hove home he shares with wife Katie Beard, a theatre director and choreographer, and daughters Sylvie, four, and Clementine, one, he kept one story in mind. “Mel Torme, who wrote The Christmas Song [the festive classic performed by Nat King Cole] was with another writer friend in a villa in Palm Beach. His friend said ‘Oh man, it’s so hot it’s like chestnuts roasting on an open fire.’ Mel wrote the song there and then. So I think all great Christmas songs are written in deep heat.” If nothing else it is certainly a compelling reason to take a lot of tropical holidays.

Making a Christmas album seems almost overdue for the man the Observer called “a songwriter of uncommon originality”, an old-fashioned entertainer as adept at onstage repartee as tinkling the ivories. In fact, he says, his first ever public gig was a Christmas show in a Balham pub in aid of the charity set up by his father Richard Stilgoe, The Orpheus Centre. “It was perfect, because you’ve got a friendly, already quite drunk, audience who are ready to have fun.”