In a bustling Piccadilly restaurant, my father and I are trying to decide which are the best lines from “Two Sleepy People”. It’s a song I’ve long loved.

“Well,” I say, “I have always liked ‘Here we are in the cosy chair/Picking on a wishbone from the Frigidaire.’” It’s both grand and informal, like all the best kind of entertaining styles, I hazard. Lavish and casual is how I most like things to be. And the word “Frigidaire” is surprisingly glamorous.

A couple come and sit at the table next to us: she is upholstered in glossy tomato satin, and he has long white hair. I try not to listen but it becomes clear that he is a vastly successful West End producer. His new show is 99 per cent full – and in this climate! The investors – and this is almost unheard of, it transpires – got their money back after only 11 weeks. “You can make a lot of money,” he says to his companion and her native oysters. “You can lose a lot of money, but you can make a lot of money too.”

“I’m so glad I’m not a theatrical producer,” my father says.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I wish you were!” I don’t quite say. No good ever came of daughters who were shoehorned into showbiz by their folks, but still.

Two days later I am at the back entrance of the London Palladium, where I have been invited to meet that sincere and elegant interpreter of the Great American Songbook, Michael Feinstein. I want to talk about what he will be singing at his concert here on November 1. As I walk timidly across the back of the stage I pause, and stick a toe out on to the dark, hallowed floor.

I try not to think of all the famous feet that have trodden this path before me but my toe, with its freshly applied coral-coloured polish, enjoys the limelight. It seems to swell and colour bashfully; it toys with the idea of taking a bow.

Moving on along the corridor, I encounter an industrial vacuum cleaner swirling white foaming soap into the Palladium’s rose-coloured carpets. It’s not a tremendous claim to fame, my witnessing this little task, but it’s an oddly rewarding moment none the less. Behind-the-scenes life, even of the most modest sort, has always thrilled me.

Michael Feinstein probably knows as much about American songs as anyone else in the world. “Do you feel a responsibility, somehow, to keep these songs alive?” I ask him. I love the idea that singing songs, especially ones that aren’t very well known, is a tremendous civic act: the opposite of pollution. I once read that it would be just as sad if “Zing Went the Strings of my Heart” became extinct as, say, tigers. I put this to my subject.

“So much of what was commonly known 20 years ago would now be considered obscure,” he says. “People know ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ by Jerome Kern, they know ‘Showboat’, but they’re much less likely to know ‘Look for the Silver Lining’. It’s a winnowing process.”

. . .

He is too sophisticated to bemoan this, but his love and belief in the power of songs is clear. He cites “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” by George and Ira Gershwin, a song that begins by speaking of hats and tea and dancing and the way you hold your knife, and then, out of nowhere, you’re suddenly hit by the line, “The way you changed my life”. We agree it’s quite a moment, this journey from seemingly trivial domestic detail into something enormously meaningful.

“Of course,” he adds, “Gershwin was that rare thing: a genius entirely lacking in angst. There was no gap between what he wanted to create and what he actually realised.”

We both silently ponder this notion for a moment. As a very young man Feinstein worked as Ira Gershwin’s assistant for several years.

I ask him if, like many people whose stock in trade is songs, he constantly uses stray bits of lyrics in his conversation, or does he try not to? I tell him I’ve a friend who chimes, “Turn that frown upside down!” the moment he sees anyone looking downcast (you can imagine how welcome that isn’t), and I often find it difficult not to murmur, “The outlook was decidedly blue,” when this is patently the case.

Feinstein laughs and says he once had a telephone call with a friend when they were both at their pianos and the conversation was fashioned entirely out of lines from songs they played to each other down the line. It’s a lovely image.

Still, I say, so many show-business people seem to find their chosen profession harrowing. “It’s a very punishing arena, and even if you are super-successful fame is so distorting,” I say. The reality of being extremely famous isn’t very conducive to staying sane. I wonder if it’s better and happier to look on lovingly from the sidelines.

“It’s what I call a privilege problem,” Feinstein says. He is celebrating 25 years in show business this year. “Why would I complain?” he says, and his face lights suddenly with cheer. I spy the lady with the carpet shampooing machine again and wonder about asking her if she could do with some help. It would be a start.

susie.boyt@ft.com
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