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Elkie Brooks finds her voice
Elkie Brooks
After just three months or so, Elkie Brooks’ autobiography is being reprinted - proof of the great singer’s enduring appeal.
Finding My Voice sees Elkie in the fifth decade of her career, still with plenty more to do, plenty more to say.
“I have been working on an autobiography for about four years,” says Elkie who plays Horsham’s Capitol on November 22 (tickets 01403 750220).
“I thought that if I didn’t do it, then somebody else would do an unauthorised version. My husband Trevor and a great friend of mine certainly gave me a definite kick up the bum to get it together.
“I wasn’t really that keen to do it. It is not as if I need to go into therapy! A lot of people go into writing their books because they have got a lot of demons that they need to get out there, but I have managed to look after mine quite well.”
Elkie produced the book in collaboration with the journalist Simon Williams: “I got to know him very very well. We have been friends for more than 25 years. He is a very easy person to speak to, and with me not being the most educated person in the world, it seemed a good idea for Simon to make sense of my grammar and make sense of what I was saying. It was a lot of hard work going through the old press cuttings, but he would come over with his family. We live in the north Devon coastal area. His family would go on the beach and we would sit and discuss things for hours over endless cups of jasmine tea and croissants!
“There is very much a chronological order, right from when my grandparents came over from Dansk in Poland in 1886. I don’t go leaping about. I have read an awful lot of autobiographies over the years, so I knew what I wanted. I wanted a lot of humour and a lot of emotions - and I didn’t want it jumping about.”
And there is no sense of drawing a line under anything: “I certainly don’t feel that I am done yet. There is still part two to do. I have been through quite a few ups and downs over the years, certainly in a financial way. I have just started to stabilise now so it would be good to do part two.”
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Weather for Horsham
Wednesday 22 May 2013
Today
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