By day three of Glastonbury, it’s a welcome time for a pick-me-up, something jaw-dropping, perhaps even magical. At Guardian Live at the Astrolabe theatre, members of the audience were treated to an impromptu show from Steven Frayne, the magician formerly known as Dynamo. “I’m a bit like Prince,” the Bradford-born entertainer jokes, having laid his old name to rest recently. As interviewer Zoe Williams and the crowd looked on in wonderment, Frayne reminds everyone why he’s one of the UK’s most gifted performers, as he brings people up on to the stage for one of his famous card illusions. On the surface, this is literally one of the oldest tricks in the book. But Frayne brings a nimble – and yes, dynamic – edge, demonstrating his “Dynamo shuffle” where he moonwalks as he jumbles his deck.
With kind-of-self-taught magic, does it feel limitless, Zoe asks. “The more experience I have in the world, the more I can keep pushing the boundaries,” says Frayne. “For me, it’s not actually about what I do, it’s about the way it connects with you guys.”
The talk is interspersed with clips from Frayne’s TV documentaries, where he’s visited classrooms, hospitals and community football teams to uplift and inspire. “It’s important to inspire the next generation, they’re the future leaders,” he says. “You don’t have to be confined by your environment, or defined by it. It’s important to show them that you can be anything you want to be.” Magic, which he learned from his grandfather, he continues, was a gateway out of his difficult school years. “Two guys would pick me up and put me inside a wheelie bin and take me to the top of the hill and then push me down the hill. It was horrible.” He started doing tricks to distract the bullies and “it saved me, I didn’t get beaten up any more.”
Though his parents weren’t around so much while he was growing up – “my dad was in jail”, he confides – he credits being “left to my own devices” for his vivid imagination and “hustler” mentality. He says that he “felt isolated,” as a child, “but through magic, I can bring people together.”
“I got to not have adults telling me what I could and couldn’t do,” he continues, “I had no direction in some respects, but I believed anything was possible. I would try anything and I didn’t care about failure. Somehow I’m still trying but I keep landing on my feet.”
He speaks about auditioning as a young man for a King’s Trust grant, which he won and it helped him to buy his first camera equipment. The rest he spent on tickets to hip-hop shows, where he’d charm his way backstage. In response to a reader’s question about the best experience of his career so far, he also goes back to his early years, when he would blag it backstage at hip-hop shows and impress his favourite rappers. Including one Mr Snoop Dogg.
“I ended up backstage with him in a green room that was verygreen, right? I’m doing my magic for Snoop.” Afterwards, he asked to film the rapper doing a shout out for his new website and the rapper “turned around, found the beat on his laptop, put it on full volume, and then, for my camera, did a five-minute freestyle rap about all the magic he’d just seen. As a hip-hop fan, to have Snoop Dogg do a rap about you …” He felt as if he had “made it”.
In 2018, his Crohn’s Disease became so severe that “I was basically in a position where I couldn’t even hold a pack of cards any more,” he says. “It knocked me out of the game. It got to the point where I felt quite worthless. I didn’t see the point in my existence if I couldn’t share magic.” After pulling himself back from the brink – and undergoing some hefty keyhole surgery, which he shows the audience – he decided that he wanted to pay his gift forward. Asked where he finds his inspiration these days, he says, “from real life: reading a lot, watching movies. When I watch a film and see a special effect, I’m like, ‘I want to figure that out!’”
Increasingly, though, he is inspired by the people he meets along the way. “More recently, I get inspiration from going travelling around, meeting young people, trying to find a way to give some magic back.”
He’s hoping to do a lot more of that this year. Frayne has just finished a run of 50-odd shows in Soho, London, under his real name, for the first time – a return to his closeup roots, rather than the eye-popping stunts he later became known for on national television. Clearly buoyed up by the experience, he’s hoping to take it on tour later this year. Closing this heartfelt in-conversation event, he adds: “I spent so much of my life focused on the magic in me,” he says, “I was missing out on the magic of everybody else, and now it’s like a whole new lease of life in me. I just want to, I want to show people my magic, but show people their magic as well.”