The Daily Tonic: Waltered States

Before the world became widely connected with Skype, Zoom and FaceTime, telephones were the only good way for pop and rock stars on tour to check in with their loved ones at home.

Freddie Mercury loved his pet cats so much that he’d often make long distance calls to them from wherever he was in the world. According to his former personal assistant, Freddie liked to meow to them over the phone and maintains the cats would know it was Freddie, so purred and meowed back to him.

Jo from S Club had something similar when she got homesick. She frequently phoned home to talk to her dogs but, rather than bark to them, she was known to sing S Club songs down the line.

We’re putting quite a wide scope on today’s question, but essentially we’re just looking to hear fun stories about celebrities and their pets. Who has a weird one? Who gave theirs an incredible name? Who spoils theirs in the ways that only bonkers superstars seem to know how? Whatever it is, we want to hear about it.

Today’s Question: Which celebrities have the strangest pet stories?

Send your tales of famous furry friends to hello@popbitch.com and we’ll send out some prizes to our favourites.

P writes:
“I once had a perfectly pleasant phone conversation with Julie Waters, during which she suddenly screamed: ‘YOU’RE A CUNT!’

Turns out she was driving and got cut up. In her best Brum accent she then said, “Sorry about that, you won’t think I’m a lady anymore.”

GS writes:
“This is public record but still makes me laugh every time I remember it. When Roy Keane was manager of Sunderland in 2008, he tried to sign BT Sport’s floppy-haired twat-in-chief Robbie Savage from Blackburn. Mark Hughes sanctioned a conversation between Savage and Keane, and gave Keane Robbie’s mobile number.

“The call went to voicemail, whereupon Keane was greeted by Robbie Savage recreating the famous Budweiser ‘wazzup’ advert. The one that had aired nearly ten years previously.”

Upon hearing the message Keane instantly changed his mind and said “I can’t be fucking signing that.”

Among the stories of celebrity answerphones we received yesterday, we were told that Miriam Margolyes has recorded a message for a friend in which she pretends to be a rather confused cleaning lady – which means we can add her to our list of eccentric theatrical types who like pretending to be the help.

We’ve mentioned in issues gone by how Barbra Streisand has been known to wriggle out of talking to unexpected visitors by unconvincingly pretending to be her own cleaner, but our favourite remains Andrew Lloyd Webber.

At his castle in Ireland a number of years ago, Lloyd Webber hosted a rather fancy dinner party. Once dinner was over Andrew excused himself, only to return moments later dressed in a full maid’s outfit.

His guests found the costume change highly amusing, but ALW took the role extremely seriously. Without breaking character at any point, he made his way around the table insisting to everyone that “Andrew” had gone for the night and that “The Maid” needed people to leave so that she could clean up.

Here’s another ten tracks that we’ve hacked up and stitched back together in an extremely perfunctory mix. Your job is to listen to it and then identify where all the fragments came from.

You get a point for each correct song title and a point for each correct artist. There’s ten songs, so that’s twenty points in total.

[Here you go]

A couple of people have been asking if we’ve been keeping a record of all the daily audio quizzes.
[The answer is: YES]

Otters released into the wild
[See on Twitter]

In what would have been Eurovision week, Radio 1’s Newsbeat have released a documentary they were making following James Newman on his road to Rotterdam – before everything went tits up…
[Watch on iPlayer]