Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (17 page)

FROM PRINCE CHARLES
to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… It was through The Prince’s Trust that, two years after my first visit to Clarence House, I got to meet one of my heroes.

It was 2007 and The Prince’s Trust was holding a lunch at the Dorchester Hotel for their Celebrate Success Awards. That year they combined it with the premiere of Will Smith’s film,
The Pursuit of Happyness
. I was there to be recognised as someone who had achieved success through The Prince’s Trust.

The event was held in one of the hotel’s ballrooms and there were well over a hundred esteemed guests from the film and charity industries. Because I felt uncomfortable dressing up, I wore my baseball cap and trainers; everyone else looked
incredibly smart. I felt a bit out of place, but by then I was growing in confidence.

Before the awards ceremony started, me and a few others who had been helped by The Prince’s Trust were asked to set up a display of our work in a room behind the main hall. Dan and I had arrived early to get ready. I had my
Underground Magic
DVD cover, a laptop playing the DVD and my cards all set up on a little table in the corner. Prince Charles was brought around and, as always, he remembered me straight away. We had a brief chat and then, about five minutes later, Will Smith came by with his wife Jada and his kids, Jaden and Willow.

As soon as Will walked into the room, everyone stopped talking. He’s a pretty magnetic guy. He’s also incredibly polite and down to earth, and, like Prince Charles, actually listens to what you say.

I reminded Will that I had met him briefly three years ago at The Prince’s Trust Urban Music Festival. He said he remembered me, but I’m not sure if he did! We’d performed something for him and Dan had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a picture of us together. The camera wouldn’t work and, eventually, Will had to leave.

He laughed when I reminded him, and I did a load of magic for him and his kids; his son Jaden all but ran away when I broke my finger in two and Willow seemed pretty freaked out when I pushed a coin through the bottom of a Coke bottle.

Will and his family were really gracious and as we shook hands he said, ‘Magical. Truly magical.’

After my presentation, I wasn’t supposed to be doing any more magic. They said that I would be brought up onstage and given my award by the actress Thandie Newton and we’d have a brief interview about the highs and lows of my life and career.

As I waited in the candlelit ballroom, distractedly picking at the food that had been laid on, Dan leant over and said, ‘I think you should have something ready to do onstage.’ I looked at his mischievous grin. ‘Really?’ I asked, unsure. It was a very formal environment and I didn’t want to upset the balance of things or break some weird protocol. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘We’re in a room with some of the biggest players in the film industry; let’s have something ready and if it feels right when you get up onstage, you should definitely do it. You only get one shot in life at things like this; take it. Magic is what you do; get up there and do it.’

Joanna Lumley was the host and she introduced the gorgeous Thandie Newton. Thandie asked me to come to the stage, where she started to conduct an interview with me.

‘You obviously have a brilliant talent, and you bring so much enjoyment to people. But you had a difficult time growing up; can you share with us a little bit about the beginnings of your career…?’

As she spoke, Dan’s voice echoed inside my head.
Get up there and do it
. I looked across at Thandie.

‘Sorry, my nan always said I should have fresh breath,’ I said, cutting her off. I took out a Polo mint, swallowed it, and offered her one. ‘A gentleman as well,’ she noted, before nodding at me to encourage me to tell my story. Suddenly, I started choking. Thandie looked panicked and when I clutched my neck and slowly pulled the Polo mint through my skin and out of my throat on a chain, her face drained of blood. Everyone else in the room gasped in a mixture of shock and horror and I could hear Will Smith in the audience, laughing heartily. Thandie tried to steer the interview back on course, but I had totally thrown her. It was a fairly naughty stunt I had pulled on her. Eventually she wrapped things up and presented me with an award that was signed by Will Smith.

Feeling pretty pleased with myself, I jumped offstage as Will got up to do a speech about his film. But before he got on with promoting his film, he appeared to divert from his pre-prepared speech.

‘Listen, I know we’ve moved on, but that man just pulled a Life Saver [polo mint] out of his neck,’ he grinned, looking over at me. ‘That is absolutely stunning. You scared my son with your tricks earlier – but magic just gets me like that. When I think about being able to take something that doesn’t exist right now and create it out of thin air… it really is magic. The idea of life and living and being able to sit in your home… and you see a picture of who you want to be, and none of it exists right now. The journey that you have to take to achieve it, that is magic to me.’

This was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard about magic and something I’ll never forget. If magic is indeed creating something out of nothing, then magic is everywhere.

If you think about it, just about everything in our lives is created from human thought. And that’s magical. The internet, the wheel, incredible architecture and design, books, films… It’s all magic. It all started out as a thought in someone’s head and by magic it materialised.

Those words that Will said that day have stayed with me ever since. Whenever it got tough over the following few years, I recalled Will’s speech. I couldn’t give up on magic; it was my responsibility to keep going. To keep the magic alive.

FOR ME, MAGIC
isn’t about ‘fooling’ people, it’s about sharing that sense of wonder and excitement and amazement. It’s about creating a moment of awe where, for a short time, anything is possible. Magic isn’t about ‘tricking’ people or making them feel stupid; it’s about opening the realms of possibility and creating a moment of joy.

I don’t do ‘tricks’. I perform magic. I remember hearing some wise words from my friend Maseo, who is part of the legendary trio, De La Soul.

A few years ago, Maseo asked me to perform at his kid’s birthday party, because his children are huge fans of mine. In return, he offered to pay for mine and Dan’s flights to Miami, put us up and show us all of the sights.

He took us on a crazy tour of Miami. We went everywhere from the infamous Ocean Drive to Downtown before we stopped off in a place called Boca Raton, which is where all of the retired mafia hang out. It’s a place with a real edge to it and you meet some very interesting characters there. We stopped by a tattoo parlour and I did some magic.

Afterwards, we went to a Denny’s, which is a fast-food chain in the US. As me, Dan and Maseo left, an old guy who had been hanging around the tattoo parlour approached us.

‘Hey, kid, do some more tricks,’ he asked.

Maseo shook his head. ‘It’s not tricks, man, it’s magic,’ he said, before turning to me and Dan. ‘People hate tricks because they think they’re being fooled. What you do is amazing, and magic is about amazing people, not tricking them or making them look foolish.’

It was another very important moment in my journey because Maseo really impressed upon me the importance of the terminology I used and also the way that I wanted people to think about magic. Magic is not about demeaning people; it’s about inspiring people.

I do feel a responsibility not to let people down. They want to experience magic, to feel that wonder of not being able to understand something. I guess it’s the only time people are taken back to their childhood, when everything in life was completely amazing and fun. Similarly, I don’t use the word ‘fans’ either, because I think that too implies that you’re somehow ‘above’ people. My magic is about uniting everyone, not putting myself on a pedestal.

There’s a good reason for that too. The thing I missed most as a kid was a family life. I had my mum and grandparents, but it wasn’t a ‘Mum and Dad’ family like my friends had. I always longed for that security. Magic was my way of bringing people together, and now I feel like my Twitter followers, who have named themselves the ‘#Dynamites’, are all a part of that community.

I’m not a leader – I’m just one guy. But I do want to inspire people and I think that I can inspire people. I owe it to everyone else and I owe it to all the people who have helped me along the way. I couldn’t have got this far on my own. I may have performed the magic, but everyone from my manager Dan, to The Prince’s Trust, to Will Smith, to the promoters who booked me and the newspapers that helped me tell my story, have all played a part. It was my duty to share the gift I have, but I’m acutely aware that without help along the way, I wouldn’t have been able to reach people in the way that I have.

You should never forget that one person alone achieves very little.

CHAPTER 8

WHO’S THE MAGICIAN?