Leona Lewis talks of Jimmy Page, David Beckham and Bondage!
Leona Lewis spoke in an interview with the Daily Mail on Saturday about her contribution to the closing ceremony at the Beijing Olympic Games.
‘We were all tied up and bound with these straps,’ she says, ‘It was about 100 degrees, like a sauna, and it was so dark I couldn’t see David at all. He was somewhere to the side of me. I could just hear and feel Jimmy right next to me. The only air I could feel was his breath on my face. Completely surreal.’
She is of course talking about the Olympics. She and Jimmy Page were flown out to Beijing to perform Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love on top of a double-decker bus – flanked by David Beckham – as part of London’s contribution to the handover ceremony.
To enable the surprise ‘reveal’, she, Page and Beckham spent much of their time in a tiny, secret chamber inside the bus, each tied to a pod which then lifted them up to the audience once the ‘bus’ had unfolded into a travelling stage
‘It looked amazing when I watched it. But I can’t tell you how incredibly uncomfortable it was. We were in there for hours during rehearsals and the actual show itself. It was so hot I was terrified I’d pass out.
‘All I could think about was that once I was finally lifted into the air my hair would be a state and all my make-up would have run down my face. Jimmy was the same. And we couldn’t even whisper to David. He was in this separate little pod next to ours.’
‘No one would ever have thought to put the two of us together. Led Zeppelin and Leona? It isn’t a combination you’d normally think of, is it? But as soon as I was asked by the Olympics committee I was excited.
‘I met Jimmy and he was lovely. I completely knew who he was, because loads of my aunts were huge fans of his. What amazed me was that he knew who I was. He’d seen me on The X Factor and he even asked me for an autograph for his granddaughter. He was so lovely to me.’
Lewis says that it was she who made the decision to rearrange Whole Lotta Love to suit her own voice.
‘I knew I had to change it, make it into something a bit different, because there was no way I could do the original. I had to make it my own. I told Jimmy straight away. I sat with some producers and we worked it to what we wanted it to be and then called Jimmy.
‘I couldn’t actually be in the room while he listened to what we did to his song. But after a few minutes he just walked straight out of the room with a huge smile on his face and said, “I love it.” ‘I still can’t believe I did that with Jimmy Page at the Olympics. Some things are just so big they still don’t hit you even when they’ve actually happened.’ The full interview can be found here
when it comes to football, Beckham is of course the best player that i know “`
David Beckham is my idol and i wish that i was as good as him in the game of football.’~,
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