Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician

by Dynamo

  Television has lost a key demographic; generally speaking, it has lost its young audience. Because the whole industry is fragmented, there are far fewer people watching each television channel, there is far more competition, advertising space is worth less, and I think because of that, the quality has been pushed down. The cost of making television programmes is high, so they’re obviously very careful about what decisions they make, but some are not in tune with current trends. No one wants to take a risk on the unknown and unproven.

  So I think that the other, really pertinent reason for the success of Dynamo: Magician Impossible was that we were making a show that was relevant. Yes, it’s a magic show, but the music we were choosing, the people who were in it, the places we were going to and my own story was relevant to people in my age group. I was talking to my peers in a way that they could understand and relate to, and in a way that no other show was really doing.

  Not only that, we weren’t producing it on the cheap. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, here’s a little niche thing for you guys.’ This was a proper, big-budget TV series that felt like a movie. I said from the outset that I wanted to give people something of real value; that for me is always the starting point. The amazing thing is, as I think Dynamo: Magician Impossible has shown, once you create a show that has that quality and that detail, then you stand a good chance. We really put ourselves on the line, because we could have lost a fortune by approaching it that way.

  There was nothing else like Dynamo: Magician Impossible on television. Because of the way programmes are commissioned, we were lucky we got through the door – there are many brilliant people out there who could be doing similar things, but they aren’t able to get their first break.

  As soon as people saw that Dynamo: Magician Impossible was a hit, every channel that had turned us down in the past started to come back. But I didn’t want to seem like I was just jumping ship. ‘Thanks for the money, thanks for believing in me, thanks for everything, but I’m off to a terrestrial channel.’

  I didn’t want to give the impression I was selling out. I had formed a good relationship with UKTV, and I had also been granted a certain amount of creative freedom. We also realised that we were by far the biggest thing on that channel. We were The X Factor or Big Brother of UKTV. And that’s a very rare position to find yourself in. If I had gone to a bigger channel, I’d be right down the pecking order. I would rather be at the top of that chain than further down it.

  The second series of Dynamo: Magician Impossible was an even greater success; our viewing figures hit the 2.1 million mark, becoming Watch’s biggest-ever television show and the third most-watched show in its time slot – including the terrestrial channels.

  Now, of course, when you get a big hit like ours then suddenly you find that everyone else starts trying to replicate its success by commissioning magic shows. But what they don’t realise is that it’s not a gimmick. It’s not just about having somebody who’s kind of cool doing magic. It’s about the ten, fifteen years of work that I put in to really understand my craft. It’s about the thought behind it; it’s the story behind it. You can’t just fake it.

  I hope now that TV production companies might change their approach to making programmes a little bit. It might actually open the door to other new talent, because it’s a shame that television can be so conservative.

  I have learnt a valuable lesson on this journey. Having a successful show with huge viewing figures is one thing. But knowing that what you do brings joy to people is a completely different matter. Now I’ve achieved, finally, what I set out to achieve, it’s about what I can do for other people. I’m in a position now where I can make a difference.

  I can’t describe how it feels. We made it happen

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE

  I’VE WALKED ON water, thrown myself down an eighty-foot building, I’ve walked through walls, disappeared into thin air and turned snow into diamonds. Snoop freestyling about me was the coolest moment, while walking across the Thames was a pivotal event and walking down the Los Angeles Times building was the scariest. But one of the highlights of my career is the time I used my magic on Tinie Tempah.

  It was November 2010 and Tinie was playing in Manchester. Before he did his show, I headed backstage to give him one of my own.

  ‘Yo! Mr D, what’s going on? You made it down, come in, come in,’ said Tinie, ever the gracious host, welcoming me into his dressing room. ‘This is the best magician in the world,’ Tinie told his boys. He yelled at all his mates to come into the dressing room.

  Once they’d all piled in, I made Tinie pull a chain through my neck. ‘Oh my God,’ he laughed, looking a bit disturbed at having to then touch the same chain. Next, I told him I wanted to do something else.

  ‘I know it sounds silly, but every time I see you, I never get you to sign anything,’ I said. ‘I know you’ve signed thousands of CDs, but I’d like to get mine signed.’

  ‘Cool,’ he replied. ‘Let’s do it.’ I produced the CD and showed it to him.

  ‘You’ve signed loads of them so I want mine to be a bit special. I want to see your eyes,’ I said.

  On the cover of his album Disc-Overy, Tinie is staring into the camera, but his eyes are covered by a pair of dark shades. I held the CD, rubbed the case and took Tinie’s sunglasses clean off.

  He actually dived into the wardrobe. ‘That picture doesn’t even exist, Bruv! He took the glasses off of my eyes and moved them onto my forehead!’ he shouted, jumping around in astonishment. I had taken the album cover, and, in front of his face, removed his sunglasses to reveal his eyes and created a one-of-a-kind Tinie Tempah album.

  It’s the one moment in my magic career that still stands out as the most memorable. There are a lot of reasons why. His reaction was incredible; it got amazing feedback from viewers and for me it felt like Tinie and I were two people on the top of their game doing something great. I finally had my own TV show; he’d been to number one with ‘Pass Out’ and had won BRIT Awards. He was a huge star.

  I had the idea to do the album illusion on the very same day. On the drive up to Manchester, I pulled out his CD, and I was like, ‘Let me see. Could I do something with his lyrics? Could I do something with his songs?’

  I looked at the album cover and I was like, ‘He’s always wearing glasses, maybe I should do something with them… Yeah, that could be cool.’

  So I called Dan, and said ‘What do you reckon about this?’ and he replied, ‘I’d have to see it, but it sounds all right.’ Three hours later, we were in Manchester doing it.

  I love Manchester – it’s such a vibrant city, and I love the northern humour, I guess because I’m a northerner myself. There’s no messing about with Mancunians – they say what they think. It might rain all the time but the streets are always full of life and energy. The centre was heavily regenerated after the 1996 IRA bomb, so the city feels very modern and buzzing, and it’s full of brilliant little bars and clubs around the old canals.

  It’s also one of those places that have a huge musical heritage. There are so many cool groups that come from there – Oasis, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, The Buzzcocks, The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order… even The Bee Gees and Take That! You have to respect a city that can produce that number of groundbreaking bands. I have a very eclectic taste in music: everything from rap and R&B to indie and pop. In fact, music has landed me in the most random of situations at times.

  IN 2006, I was honoured when Damon Albarn, who had seen me do my magic backstage at a Blur show, asked if I would open for his new band, The Gorillaz, at New York’s Harlem Apollo Theatre.

  The band was doing five nights at the Apollo for the Demon Days album. They invited all the artists who were on the album to perform, so you had everyone from Shaun Ryder (Happy Monday’s lead singer) and Ike Turner, to Dustin Hoffman doing the intro, to my mates De La Soul on the song, ‘Feel Good Inc.’. Every single collabor
ator from the album turned up. It was epic.

  After one of the performances, I sat outside the back of the Apollo with Shaun and Damon, just chatting about the show, New York, life in general. They were smoking and we were hanging out. It was mad – we had a normal conversation, which you wouldn’t expect to have with those kinds of guys. They’re rock-and-roll stars. At one point, though, things weren’t so normal – Damon pulled a stone from his pocket, drew a circle on my head and kissed me on the head. It was a bit odd, but it’s Damon Albarn, what are you going to do?

  I got a totally different view of New York on that trip. As well as doing all the sightseeing that I hadn’t had a chance to do on my previous visit, I also spent time in the historic area of uptown Manhattan. Harlem has produced music greats from Billie Holiday to P. Diddy. Historically, it might have been a violent place, but it is rich in music, dance, art, literature and theatre. Nowadays, it’s quite upmarket; there are organic shops and macrobiotic cafes, and it’s been heavily regenerated. Back when I visited, though, it was still a little bit lively.

  Through De La Soul, I had hooked up my friend, Luti, to film a video for De La’s Maseo, who had signed a new artist to his label. We were waiting for him to arrive and we ended up at Rucker Park, which is a famous court where the street basketballers go. It’s the best b-ball you’ll ever see. I think these guys are better than the highly-paid professionals.

  When they first saw the cameras they were like, ‘What’s going on here?’ because we had a big crowd and it looked a bit dodgy. But once they saw what we were doing, and that we weren’t filming anything that was going to make them look bad, they loved it. I did a bit of magic for them and they were buzzing.

  I remember one of these guys gave me a one-dollar bill and I changed it into a twenty. As soon as I did, he ran straight into a nearby shop. ‘I spent it before you changed it back,’ he laughed on his return.

  About forty minutes later, we were in a completely different part of Harlem. Some random guy comes up to me and he goes, ‘Hey, are you the magic guy?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah…’ So he goes, ‘Change my dollar into a twenty, change it into a twenty!’ The news had spread throughout Harlem. I just laughed, because you could tell he was serious, but it was funny as well. It was just weird to see how fast news had travelled through Harlem like that. I was reminded once more that magic is a powerful thing.

  I wasn’t scared to be in Harlem. If I’d been nervous on my first trip to New York, I wasn’t on this occasion. I do find that, for some reason, I’m fine around people who others generally feel uncomfortable with. Maybe because I’m a bit different myself. I can relate to those people. I can appreciate growing up in that situation and not having any opportunities, so I can see why people might go the way that they do.

  Obviously, now I have a luxurious lifestyle, but growing up things were very different. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have had everything given to me on a plate.

  I went to New York to hang out with Damon Albarn, but I actually had the best time on the streets of Harlem.

  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.