'I'm sure I was a cocky git back then. But I was just being flash': Chesney Hawkes on life after The One And Only

Some might remember the 1991 movie, Buddy’s Song, in which he starred, and a few of his other tracks, but essentially the Wiltshire-born singer was a one-hit wonder. Though he churned out a few more singles, he failed to get another hit, and a couple of years down the line his record company dumped him and stopped returning his calls. In that time, stardom had gone to his head. He had spent way too much.

Coming from a showbiz household, Hawkes took a “rock'n’roll” approach to money, buying a studio, cars for his family and a London West End home. By 23, he was in mortgage arrears and £20,000 in debt.

So the YouTube footage is tinged with a kind of poetic resonance. The floppy-haired 19-year-old in dark sunglasses seems every bit the cliché of a teen star about to let fame go to his head. “I like posing in cars, with my shades on," he says. "That’s what cars are for. They’re not to get you from A to B. They’re to pose in.”

A quarter-century on, 44-year-old Hawkes is no longer what he describes as that “cocky” young star. Now a father of three and married to a yoga teacher and former model, he lives a whole different life in Los Angeles. Still, I can’t help but mention this bit of footage to Hawkes when I talk to him. After all, The One And Only remains the defining moment of his career. It’s still the song everyone asks him to play at gigs and music festivals. Audiences don’t want Aeroplanes, a rather lovely song about fatherhood, or his gentle but sad Caught Up In Circles.

They want The One And Only. And when, next month, he plays at the Icon Awards, the annual ceremony celebrating Scotland’s LGBTQI community, that’s what everyone will be waiting to hear. It’s also what inspired the event’s organisers to tweet that they were “The One And Only Icon Awards!”

Much of Hawkes's adult life has revolved around the way he dealt with overnight teenaged success, and the doldrums that followed it. “I’m sure I was a cocky git,” he says when I mention the 1991 interview. “I’ve never really been that into cars. Maybe I just thought that’s what pop stars do. They buy flash cars. I was just playing it up a bit, being flash. These days, I have a people-carrier. With three kids, I’ve got to do the school run.”

There’s a grace to the way Hawkes performs The One And Only these days. After all it’s not hard to see why, for a while, he hated it – why, in his 20s, he formed a “shoegazing” grunge band, and spent six years refusing to sing it. Recently, in celebration of the song's 25th anniversary, he played a brief snatch of it on GMTV, throwing it out there with a warming mix of enthusiasm and humility. He and the song seem like a couple who broke up and got back together and truly managed to let all the bad feelings go.

“Over the years, I’ve had an up and down relationship with it," he says. "But nowadays I have just let all of that feeling bad towards it drift off, because it’s so much fun to play it. You can literally feel the energy of the crowd lift as soon as I start it off."

The One And Only is one of a number of near-perfect utterly-catchy pop songs written by 1980s singer and hitmaker Nik Kershaw. Hawkes recalls how the song came to him when his father, The Tremeloes singer, Len “Chip” Hawkes, brought back a cassette tape of Kershaw songs. “Want to think about recording one?” he asked.

“It’s actually an amazing song,” says Hawkes now. “People don’t realise but it’s actually written in four different keys.” Hawkes remains good friends with Kershaw, with whom he occasionally performs. “I’ve got a lot of love for him. It’s one of so many intertwined feelings I have about that song.”

But perhaps Hawkes never was quite the cocky, arrogant pop star portrayed in that 1991 interview. Indeed even in it, there are glimpses of the man Hawkes was to become. “Are there any other ambitions you have in life?” the presenter asks. “Apart from owning a car like this?”

“I would really like to have a family,” he coyly replies. “I think I would make a good dad.”

Hawkes has achieved that ambition. He met his wife, Kristina, in the United States in 1995, at a time when he was trying to distance himself from the song that made his name. When they first started dating, he didn’t mention The One And Only. It was only when a fan approached while they were together that he had to confess.

He now has two sons and a daughter. The eldest is 15 and Hawkes's song, Aeroplane, with its lyric, “These moments make up a life and you want to take it all in”, is about the fast-passing of his children's childhood. "My kids are the most important thing in my life,” he says. “And if there’s one thing I’ve struggled with a little bit it’s the fact that I have to go away to work. I have my cut-off point: two weeks is enough, then I have to come back. But thank God for modern technology. My daughter WhatsApps me about 10 times a day.”

Meanwhile, although he didn’t become the Justin Bieber of his day, Hawkes has managed to make a good living out of music and the entertainment industry. His is a strange portfolio career that includes writing music, mentoring musicians and appearing in the full panoply of reality television shows, from Dancing On Ice to Celebrity Masterchef, taking roles in musicals from Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat to Can’t Smile Without You, and doing a bizarre circuit of gigs.

This year Hawkes is pushing his own music again and “slightly more concentrating on me as an artist”. Not bad for a man who says music is all he ever “wanted to do”, and who fondly recalls Roger Daltry, with whom he starred in the film Buddy’s Song, saying: “Imagine doing what you love and actually being paid for it.”

He is even working on an autobiography, one which tends to be written on planes, and is possibly to be titled What I Am (a lyric from The One And Only). It will contain “a bit of everything” about Hawkes's life, including growing up in eccentric showbiz household in Windsor, Berkshire.

One of the three children of Len Hawkes and Carol Dilworth, he recalls waking up in the morning for school, and stepping over the detritus of a party the night before, the musicians that littered the floor. He remembers sitting at the side of the stage during gigs and watching those musicians performing in “leather pants and shirts unbuttoned to their waist”.

As we speak Hawkes is about to board a plane to go to perform a ballroom gig in Dubai. “It’s like Russian roulette,” he says of the surreal collection of shows he is currently offered. “You never know what you’re going to get. My last trip to England was so fun. Oh my God, I had one of the weirdest gigs. I turned up to a holiday park over Norfolk way, and found I was on after the bingo and the youngest person in the audience was probably 75. Funniest gig ever.” Most of the audience didn’t know who he was, he says, so he went on stage and said something like: “Hello. My name’s Chesney and I’m from the 1990s.”

These days his audience demographic isn't the teenage girls that used to hang out outside his home when he was 19. Those fans from the 1990s are “all mums with kids now”, says Hawkes, adding: “I get a lot more men these days. And, because I’ve been quite big with my social networking and trying to get my music out there, I’ve actually got quite a young audience comes to my gigs.”

When approached to perform at the Icon Awards, Hawkes says he immediately recognised the event as a “good cause” and a “great event”. He also acknowledges that he has long had an appeal to gay audiences. “They say the pink pound is strong with me,” he says.

The variety of what is thrown at him is something he enjoys. “It’s funny and I absolutely love it,” he says. At the holiday park, he even texted his father from backstage with pictures of the old people doing ballroom dancing before he went on stage. His father texted back: “Welcome to my world, son.”

“It totally is his world,” says Hawkes. “He tells these stories and around the time the Tremeloes made it, even when they were really famous, they were playing to working men’s clubs where they would go on after a magician. They would like have the Who, the Tremeloes and the Herd all on one bill at a working men’s club in the middle of frigging nowhere. The stories were just classic.”

Hawkes's sister Keely is a singer and his brother Jodie, a drummer. It was, he thinks, inevitable that they would end up doing something in music. “My dad lived and breathed it and I couldn’t help but suck some of that up. The three of us siblings were never going to be accountants or lawyers, or nine-to-fivers.”

That showbiz tradition is apparently being passed on: Hawkes's 15-year-old son, Casey, is at a performing arts school "and the others too are very much heading in that direction, God help them”, he says.

He seems remarkably upbeat and relaxed. He disarms with what appears to be a genuine, unselfconscious positivity, and an openness that comes across even when he talks about the more difficult times he and his family have been through. Last year, his father and Tremeloes guitarist Richard Westwood, were accused of indecent assault of a 15-year-old fan in 1968. Those charges were dropped in the end, but the family, he says, went through a great deal of stress. “It’s all over now,” says Hawkes. “Thank goodness. And there was never a case. It was incredible that it ever got to the Crown court.”

He is now, he says, a little sceptical about some allegations of historic abuse and feels there has been a post-Savile witch hunt. “Of course there are people out there who are guilty. But when you get charges of ‘he touched my boob in 1968’, I just think, ‘Really? You’re really going to spend the crown prosecution’s money on that? You’re going to go after men in their late 60s or 70s who may have brushed someone’s boob in the corridor of Top Of The Pops?’ I’m just glad that they came to their senses in my dad’s case. It was nonsense.”

Returning to The One And Only, Hawkes has come to view the song as a gift, rather than some Sisyphean torment. Even the nosedive his career took, he now considers a blessing and a life lesson. “When there are things that come up in life which are problematic, or might seem stressful,” he says. “I think – what’s this going to teach me?’”

Lately he has felt driven to do more work for good causes, such as the anti-human-trafficking charity A21. “Something shifted in me recently,” he says, “and I’ve been thinking, ‘What’s it all about?’ It may be just an age thing. Why was I given this fame thing? And how can I use it for good? I’m at some stage in my life where I want to give back. I want to utilise in some way this fame in order to do some good for humanity.”

Fate threw him a song, and with it fame, and he wants to make the most of it. “Now I’ve come to a point where I fully embrace it,” he says. “I also fully embrace the fact that it’s not mine. And when I play it, it’s for those who love it. I can see what it evokes in people. It’s not me, it’s the song. It has a kind of nostalgia to it.”

Chesney Hawkes will be playing at the Icon Awards gala final in Glasgow on October 23

http://icon-awards.co.uk