[LMBTO] Me & Scott Fitzgerald at Eurostarz 2018...

Three down, one to go - Scott Fitzgerald was the fourth and final artist that I interviewed at Eurostarz 2018 at The Water Rats on August 18th.  By this stage, having more than ten minutes per guest had become the norm, mainly because, as I learnt after I had finished chatting with Scott, Linda Martin just arrived as the Press Event was due to finish and nobody got to chat with her!  So the singer of "If I Had Words" and more importantly "Go!" had as much time as he needed to chat about his really varied life and career, which I learnt was so much more than the week he spent at the Eurovision Song Contest.  His wife was nearby as we chatted and Jo, my photographer who took the picture at the top of this post, was chatting with her - here is the interview, which has a fair bit of background noise that I apologise in advance for but as we were getting to the end of the session, people were starting to mingle about the bar and near my table:

I really had to do very little with this chat - Scott had so much information to impart that I just gave a brief prompt occasionally and he provided such a wonderful interview!  It was a revelation to me to hear about how his wife had a link to the venue we were at and how he got to sing "Go!" - it was also interesting to hear how busy he was then with his singing career and how Eurovision appeared to be just slotted in amongst all his other singing work.  His thinking that Celine Dion might be listening to this interview might be a bit of a stretch though!

It would have been lovely to hear Scott sing in front of an orchestra again but as he said, he has moved on with the times and a backing track that evening worked just as well for him!  At the Meet & Greet for us VIPs, we got to see the two UK artists have a hug on stage:
As for his set, we were treated to Cliff Richard's "Power To All Our Friends" and something that was a real highlight for me at least, a rendition of Scott Walker's masterpiece "Jackie" - an unexpected treat...

Of course we couldn't have Scott perform and not have him sing his 1988 classic - again, Stuart Cameron videoed it all:



The vocals and stage presence from somebody who has been singing for decades and who knows how to entertain his audience, Scott was the consummate professional and I was delighted to have heard him sing live, as was everyone else that evening.  Hopefully he'll keep getting the call to do these gigs for as long as he wants to do them!
So that was all the interviews done at the press event - unfortunately one less than expected:
The main thing was that Linda had arrived so she could do the sound checks, be ready for the VIP Meet & Greet and then most importantly sing at the Concert!  Overall it was a very successful couple of hours - four great interviews, lots of pictures, two radio idents from Esther and Lindsay and plenty of material for this blog and my fledgling radio show!  We now had some time to kill before returning for the VIP session later that evening...

But that is for another post - I'll concentrate more on Linda Martin during that one and also point out a special guest that we weren't expecting.  I'll also talk about the VIP Meet & Greet session where there was some goofing around: