I had to watch some old YouTube clips of Armstrong and Miller to remind myself of Armstrong’s singing voice. Having launched a tour based around his “gloriously powerful baritone”, it seems extraordinary that this man, who has his fingers in so many pies and genres, has added another fiddle to his already prolific bow. Is there nothing this man can’t do?
“What can I say? I am a master of multi-tasking,” he grins, “but I did a gig at the Hippodrome, and it went from there, they suggested a tour and here we are...” Here being a brief glimpse of the “real” Alexander Armstrong, singing his heart out, chatting to the audience and having a grand old time.
Still, singing? Nonplussed by my reaction, Xander, as his friends call him, reminds me that he was a choral scholar at Cambridge and nearly took up a career as a singer. “I was a semi-professional singer in my early 20s and a choral singer at Cambridge, producing three CDs and going on endless global tours. So I have a lot of experience of singing and I did consider becoming a classical baritone at the Royal College of Music in London which would have been a glorious career,” he admits.
Yet his during his last tour, which brought Armstrong to Oxford with Miller, he admitted to being terribly homesick. “I was,” he agreed, “and did far too much that year, but this is just three gigs a week, and I don’t even have to learn my lines,” he smiles.