Guest Blog: Melissa Errico Discusses the Allure of 'Noir' and her Show OUT OF THE DARK at London's Crazy Coqs

I'd like to invite you, London lovers of American music - and especially of dark, sexy American music - to my cabaret nightclub concert fantasy on November 1-3. For three nights in a row (yes, you can even come each night and unwind from your busy London day!) I'll sing from my new film noir album, "Out Of The Dark" - with shows every evening at 7pm.

I'll be in the basement of the Cafe Zedel, down that exquisite winding stair lined with Art Deco show posters and chrome sconces, nestled amongst the alluring American Bar and the expansive, stunning brasserie where we all tend to dine into the late hours after.

Stepping into Crazy Coqs, at least in my preparing mind, feels like I'm going to enter the absolute truth of this project. The Art Deco nightclub, leather seating with drinking patrons, candlelit and ready for a story, curled around the chanteuse and her jazz band, blowing hot and cool as the song demands. It's 1948 on W.52nd Street all over again in my mind... I can sense it.

My noir fantasy is a throwback affair, but a throwback that came out of a sense I got deep inside while watching those evocative film noir movies during the pandemic - loneliness, isolation, longing, crimes of passion, and passion as crime- that this sensibility was a distant mirror of our time. Noir for me is a present state of mind, not a sentimental journey.

I never feel as erotically alive as I do when I'm singing these noir songs. (And to add to the brew I've been blessed with some brand-new noir songs from the likes of David Shire that are like little existential dramas in themselves.) They're all unashamed anthems of the anxieties of desire - songs that woo the listener to bad behaviour and then punish the bad behaviour with even worse consequences - and no one complains!

In this concert, I don't just get to sing great songs - though Harold Arlen and Oscar Levant and David Raksin, all the rest are there; I even found a Sondheim noir song!- but to inhabit a whole role, a flawed but heartfelt femme fatale who loses her head as she sings her heart. She flirts, feels, lectures, gets fed up with men and then breaks her heart with them all over again. I get to wear her couture Noir nightgown and share her love of black velvet sounds, her dreams of nights with reckless gangsters and reconciliation with lost French poets. It's the most theatrical fun I've ever had on a cabaret stage - but in another way the most heartfelt, from-my-soul thing I've ever attempted.

I knew one great noir femme fatale myself, just when I was starting out down the strange path of song, the incomparable Lauren Bacall. She came to my dressing room once, after a show, and said to me, "You're going to be a star. Now all you need is a scandal!" Seems I've had to wait all this time to invent one of my own, on stage. Come join me in my sexy, scandalous, but I hope still slightly sublime, show.

Melissa Errico presents Out Of The Dark-The Film Noir Project from 1-3 November at 7pm at Crazy Coqs

For more information visit www.thefilmnoirproject.com

To stream the album, click here.

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