Past #3: Taking tea and talking music, legalising drugs and World War Two with Tony Bennett

“This is how to do it. At 85, Tony Bennett scampers onto the Palladium stage in a perfectly pressed suit, a folded red hankie in his breast pocket – and before he sings a note, gets a standing ovation.”

I saw - and met – Tony Bennett in the Autumn of 2011. I reviewed that Palladium gig (not the one above, which was before I was born, but what a poster!) for the Guardian, and smiled for ninety minutes as he sang, quipped and twirled.

For the encore, he turned off his microphone and sang Fly Me To The Moon without amplification. Hearing that familiar voice, swooping, swerving and soaring through the stalls and the circles like a bird, agile but tender, was a remarkable thing to experience.

A few days before that I had met Tony in person for Word Magazine. This was a few weeks before Amy Winehouse was found dead at home only a few miles away in Camden; he talked of her in moving terms.