Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (25 page)

I’M LUCKY TO
have made friends with some of music’s greats. From Ian Brown from The Stone Roses and De La Soul, to Tinie Tempah and Snoop, I’ve found myself hanging out with some super-cool guys in the most random of scenarios. Not only that, but I’ve been involved in music quite a bit, albeit in a roundabout way. Sway rapped about me in his song ‘Still Speedin’’, and I’ve appeared in music videos for Dizzee Rascal, Example, SAS (which also featured a then-unknown Kanye West) and The Raconteurs.

The Raconteurs’ video for ‘Hands’ was just random. Jack White’s people called me up and said, ‘We want you to do this.’ I was like, ‘OK, cool.’ I nearly missed the opportunity to do that video, though. It was being shot in Oslo, so I headed to the airport the morning before, nice and early. It was only at check-in that I realised my passport was out of date. I had to cancel that flight, jump in the car with Dan and peg it down to Peterborough to get an emergency passport. We got there, waited in the massive long queue, and as we went to leave, the car decided to break down.

The video was being shot early the next morning, so I had to get a flight that night. We left the car, jumped on a coach, a train and in a taxi, and finally got back to Heathrow with about ten minutes to spare. It was so close, we almost didn’t make it!

I eventually got to Oslo and I realised that I was the main feature in the video. I was like, ‘Whoa!’ The next thing you know, it’s all over the internet and on the TV. It was such a different crowd for me and it gave me a new market. I remember Zane Lowe came up to me at a festival not long after the video dropped. I’d never met him before, and he was like, ‘Yo, Dynamo, I’ve got to get you on
Gonzo
. I loved you in The Raconteurs’ video.’ Of all the things he could have seen me in, that’s where he spotted me.

I think the indie kids like me. Since that video I’ve done magic at the
NME
Awards and performed for the Arctic Monkeys. Another time I was kidnapped by the Kings of Leon. It was after we’d been on Jonathan Ross together; when the Kings come calling, you can’t say no.

I’d been trying to get onto Jonathan Ross for a while. In the end, Dan and me sent a showreel to Jonathan Ross’s company, Hot Sauce, and they came back and booked me. It was quite a surprise. I got an opportunity to go on the show, very out of the blue, even though I didn’t really have anything to promote at that point.

I’d been in hospital the day before with my Crohn’s, so it was touch and go whether or not I could do it. But I pulled it together, and despite feeling pretty rough doing filming, I went and did what I had to do.

Kings of Leon and the Bond girl Ursula Andress were my fellow guests. After I’d done my thing, the Kings invited me to a party that night. So I went. I had lots of fun showing them and their mates some magic and hanging out. As we left, Jared pulled me aside and said, ‘We’re off on tour tomorrow, do you want to
come with us?’ I asked Dan if I was free to go, he said yes, and I was away for two weeks.

It was wicked fun; I loved hanging out with them as a band. We went all over the UK. They’d do their music and I’d do my magic for them and the fans. It was pretty rock and roll – but one lesson I’ve learnt along the way is this: what happens on tour, stays on tour!

BECAUSE I’M SUCH
a fan of music, the sounds I use in my work is really important to me. It’s not like I finish filming
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
and retire to the mansion, waiting for my minions to edit the footage, add a soundtrack and make everything wonderful. I’m involved all along the way.

Me, Dan, everyone in the team – we all throw a few ideas in. It’s a combination of what we’re listening to at the moment, or songs we know of that make us think. It has to be something that suits the magic, but doesn’t distract from it either. We picked a Dead Weather tune called
I Can’t Hear You
recently for a piece of magic in Las Vegas, where I make a car vanish whilst I’m doing doughnuts in it. It was in the middle of the desert, on this random dirt track where all the drifters go. The Dead Weather tune fit so perfectly because the music’s so hard. Some sequences work best when you have an electronic sound; some of them need to have that raw, real feel using guitars, like the noise of an engine revving. It really adds to the moment.

The music we feature is not always stuff that I like necessarily. Some of it is, but a lot of the times we choose it because it’s authentic to the place where the magic is situated. Obviously, in Brazil we really researched a lot of the local music. In the end,
we actually found a South American drummer who provided the best soundtrack for us. It’s partly about authenticity; and partly about pacing, or it can be something that helps to tell the story. For me one of the things that worked really well in series one was Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrops’, which we used for an impossible body suspension.

For the River Thames, we used Linkin Park’s ‘Crawling’. It isn’t the same without that song.

We always do a test-run, and if the music stands out, it’s a bad thing. Because you actually want to almost forget the music is there, so that it gels perfectly with the scene. Often we’ll try loads of things, and sometimes one song just fits. We definitely spend a lot of time making sure that it’s right.

We also try to include different music and genres. For me, the soundtrack was always about having something that felt timeless. So we’ll have a mix of modern music that I’m into – like the instrumental of Kano’s ‘Spaceship’ – but then we’ll also go back to a lot of classics. In series two, episode one, of
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
, we used the O’Jays and at the start of the series we used Dinah Washington’s ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’. For me, everything has a history to it, and there’s no future without the past. Even though my demographic is a relatively young one, all of that modern music has come from somewhere. It’s nice to give the series that classic feel.

As a film fanatic, I’m aware that directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have amazing music scores because they are music addicts. I’ve read all the interviews with Tarantino about the record choices that he put in his films. Tarantino has the most incredible rare record collection, all organised into genres and sub-genres; it’s an astonishing library of music. I remember Scorsese talking about
Goodfellas
, too. There’s a shoot-out scene that is underscored with Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’.
He said that the reason he used such a poppy tune is because when he grew up, that’s what would have been playing then in his locality, even though it wasn’t particularly dramatic. Watching this scene taught me that sometimes things look more exciting if you have a contrasting or understated soundtrack. So we play around with the music in
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
constantly to keep it feeling really natural.

There’s another technique we use – there’s actually a name for it – ‘diegetic sound’. It’s when the only sounds you hear on screen are natural ones coming from the action itself, in other words there are no sound effects or music added later. For example, you might have music that’s coming out of a car radio or a shop in the background rather than being played as a soundtrack over the top of the scene. If you’ve seen
The Wire
, pretty much all the music in that show comes from organic sources, like people on the street. There’s no score, apart from the theme tune. When we first came up with the idea for
The Art of Astonishment
, as
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was then known, we talked about having the music coming from buskers and other organic sources. The idea was to make the magic feel as real as possible. However, for various reasons, including technical ones, we decided in the end to go with a soundtrack.

I think there are a lot of people out there making TV who perhaps don’t have the same attention to detail when choosing music. They’ll use the same songs that everyone else goes for. People have been so complimentary about our choice of music. ‘It’s amazing that you’re not using Katy Perry,’ someone said to me once. We did actually use Katy Perry, to be fair, but only in the right place…!

Our challenge with
Dynamo: Magician Impossible
was to make something really special, both visually and aurally arresting, like a movie but on a TV budget. I like to think the viewing figures proved we succeeded.

CHAPTER 11

THE LOOK ON PEOPLE’S FACES

‘WHAT? WHAT? HOW
did you do that? Oh my GOD, tell me, how did you do that?!’

As David Blaine proved early on with his television series,
Street Magic
, the most important part of any magic show is the spectator. With television, everyone expects camera trickery, CGI, Photoshop and special effects. So the thing that sells the magic itself, that really proves to people that what they saw was real and not camera trickery, is the reaction of the spectator. If you don’t believe the reactions of the people you are watching, then the whole thing is a mockery and the show would lose credibility.

With YouTube, Instagram, Photoshop, the internet and so on, people are a lot savvier. When I was a kid I didn’t question the fact that Superman could fly around the world so fast that it could make the world spin the other way, despite the clunky special effects. It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t real. Nowadays, though, kids want everything CGI-laden and in 3D. They know, from a much younger age, that what they’re watching is a film. Sure, they don’t care – it’s film, a fantasy – but they’re too technologically clued up to believe in it. So it’s my job to bring back that childish innocence and wide-eyed wonder, and show that magic is real and not about CGI and camera tricks.