During his Ten Good Reasons tour, in 2016, Jason Donovan would whip out a pair of heels and a leather jacket and sing Sweet Transvestite from Richard O’Brien’s phenomenon The Rocky Horror Show. Donovan had played the silky-tongued scheming transvestite Frank N Furter on stage in 1998 and the audience at the concert would go wild.
“I thought: actually this works, in a Jason Donovan nostalgia sort of way,” he says at a Notting Hill café close to where he has lived for many years with his wife, whom he met in 1998 on the original set of Rocky Horror, and their three children. “I’m 56 and I still look good in leather. I reckon I’ve got about a year and a half left before it starts looking tragic.”
Now, Donovan is in the 50th anniversary production, which toured Melbourne and Sydney last year and is now on a tour which includes the West End: Donovan freely admits that the average audience age was around 50. How does he think the show – a deliciously camp celebration of sexual emancipation that regularly attracts audiences dressed in codpieces and basques – lands in today’s new era of gender fluidity? Does it still retain a transgressive frisson? The question sends Donovan into a bit of a panic.
“I don’t know the right answer to that,” he says. “I don’t understand the whole woke thing. All I know is that people buy tickets by the truck-load. And the show hasn’t been cancelled. I think that enduring celebration of being different in all its forms strike a chord. I don’t think anyone has tried to over-analyse The Rocky Horror Show. Whenever anyone asks me about this sort of thing, I say it’s about an alien invasion.”
Fair enough. Donovan has been burnt enough before to want to avoid saying anything, however positive, on subjects that risk being misconstrued. In 1992, he famously sued The Face for libel when the magazine accused him of lying about his sexuality. Donovan, who is straight, won £200,000 in damages, which he waived. Still, he was accused of homophobia in the press, his career suffered as a result and the entire period is not something he enjoys talking about.
“It’s not a victory. I sued because I had been accused of lying. I was standing up for those people who wanted to be who they are and what they are without anyone else telling them what they should be doing. That mania [in the 1990s] for the outing of celebrities came out of America when politicians [who were in the closet] were making decisions on legislation that was against the life they were actually living, and it caught the attention of The Face. And I was red meat at the time. What can I say? Sometimes, you’ve just got to stand up for what you believe in.”
Donovan’s face bears the dents of a man who has been knocked a bit by fame. Yet traces still remain of the fresh-faced Scott Robinson from the Australian hit soap opera Neighbours, whose on-screen (and off-screen) romance with his co-star Kylie Minogue captured the hearts of millions towards the end of the Eighties.
His debut album, Ten Good Reasons, was number one for four weeks. In 1991, Andrew Lloyd Webber cast him as Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which gave Donovan his third solo number one with Any Dream Will Do. “How do you prepare yourself for success like that?” he wonders. “I was a 23-year-old kid wearing a Joseph coat thinking, ‘F-----g hell, look what’s happened to me.’ And it was amazing, but I’d missed that teenage period when all my mates were off surfing.”
Yet his pop career was petering out. After he sued The Face, his drug use escalated and in 1995, he was carried out of the Viper Room club in Los Angeles on a stretcher after overdosing on cocaine. I tell him I watched on YouTube his 1998 appearance on Jo Whiley’s talk show for Channel 4, in which Donovan appears looking the epitome of indie cool, shaved head, cigarette twitching between his fingers. He also seems anxious. “Was I making sense?” he asks. I assure him he was, but he was also clearly struggling with working out who he was, as a shiny-packaged Eighties pop star trapped in the Britpop era.
“The late Nineties were a rebellion against the Eighties, and I suppose I got caught up in that like everyone else. And my going a bit off the rails was a psychological way of blocking it out. But had I really wanted to get away from it all I could have gone to North Queensland and surfed for the rest of my life. So I have to answer to my own desire to remain in the spotlight. Maybe I always wanted that recognition.”
He got clean in 2000 after he met his wife, had a daughter and settled down. Yet that hunger for recognition remained. He continued to record the odd album, appear on stage, and in numerous reality television programmes, including in 2011 Strictly Come Dancing.
That programme has recently been mired in allegations of bullying and a failure to look after its contestants: what was his experience like? “I had a blast. I can’t comment on the current allegations. But I take my hat off to Prince William and Harry for bringing exposure to conversations about mental health.” Does he wish these conversations had been happening in the late Nineties? “Absolutely. In my day, you just got on with it.”
Donovan puts his ability to “get on with it” down to his Australian roots. “Even at my worst, I was always physically strong. I got that from my dad [the English-born actor Terence Donovan] – he’s 81 and still swims every day.”
He thinks hard graft is embedded in the Australian psyche. “Australia is built on convict labour. It’s a meritocracy in that respect, unlike England, which is built on blue blood and empire. I don’t know if I’m saying the right thing here, I hope I’m saying the right thing. But I love England. I love its democracy, its politics.” He’s not tempted to become a Holly Valance and enter politics? “God, no, not at all.”
Part of him wishes his life had taken a different turn. He did try a film career in 1995’s Rough Diamonds but the film flopped. “I made the wrong decisions. But also I became Jason Donovan. That can be bad news for producers who want actors to be someone other than themselves.” Yet he is not remotely ashamed of his career as a pop star. “Music in the Eighties and Nineties meant so much to people. I’m not sure it’s the same now. There have been no bands in the top 40 for three years. Record companies don’t want the hassle of dealing with them.”
For all his determination, Donovan’s career seems to have happened to him rather than the other way round. Had it been down to him, he might have plotted an entirely different life, perhaps as an indie singer: he’s an indie music buff. But he’s at peace with how it’s turned out. “At the end of the day, I’m just a f-----g soap star from Oz with a bunch of hits. I’m not out there saving lives. I’m just keeping people happy.”
The Rocky Horror Show is now on tour. Dates include the Dominion Theatre in London
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