You’ve gotta have Heart

Jul 31 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

What’s it like to be branded as the next international singing sensation? Peter Elson meets Liverpool singer Asa Murphy, who is being transformed for the very big time

YOU could be forgiven for getting big-headed if told Burt Bacharach might compose your first album, and Oscar-winning lyricist Don Black could pitch in. Or perhaps Elton John’s lyricist Bernie Taupin will give a hand?

Sitting in a Dale Street frothy coffee shop, Asa Murphy, the Liverpool singer potentially poised for a massive international breakthrough, shrugs his shoulders and manfully accepts his fate.

The anonymity which he enjoys could soon disappear.

Already confirmed is a change of surname from Murphy to Heart, as his new hot-shot London manager Tony Nunn, who runs Elite Squad, is certain this will play better in the US.

“I’m very proud of my Liverpool-Irish roots, but Tony’s the expert. Without him, we wouldn’t be talking to Bacharach, Black and Taupin,” says Asa, 35, who lives in Maghull, with wife Kelly and two-year-old son Shea.

In an eventful career, Tony Nunn has managed rock wildman Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin, sacked another – Jeff Beck – and spent 40 years looking after television comedy doyen Stanley Baxter (even though he retired 21 years ago).

Tony also steered Norman Wisdom into his award-winning first straight role and persuaded two former Chancellors to dress up as Father Christmases at 11 Downing Street.

Now in his 60s, he regards Asa as his last great act and will launch him nationally at Britain’s premier jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s, in London later this year, backed by Liverpool’s Danny Mannix band.

The singer will then make an album of 12 new “standards”, produced by Nick Tauber, formerly of Decca and EMI.

In this starless world, blighted by trashy tabloid television so-called talent shows, Asa glows with a natural gift contained in his big, magnificent tenor voice able to tease out the nuance of any lyric.

This formidable talent sits comfortably upon one of the most likeable men you could meet.

Supremely confident in his singing, in conversation he is engagingly honest with a self-deprecating humour.

“When you come from a big family like mine, you can’t get away with anything. My brothers cried laughing when I told them I was being renamed Asa Heart.

“At my last Varsity bar show with Liverpool University Big Band, they sat in the audience waving a heart-shaped card with ‘I love Asa Heart’ written on it.”

He quit the dependable cruise line work to spend more time with his family and advance his career.

Amazing luck struck on his last engagement aboard Fred Olsen’s liner Boudicca when a passenger offered to contact a friend who was a top show business manager.

“You get so much of this ‘I’m Elton John’s best friend’ stuff. You politely give them your number and forget it,” says Asa.

However, this time was different.

He was put in touch with Tony Nunn, only to be told by the management maestro: “I don’t deal with cruise ship acts. They’re not good enough.”

Yet a week later, after hearing our troubadour’s CD, Tony revised his opinion to words which are music to any performer’s ears: “You, my boy, are a cut above the rest.” Ah yes, talking of ears. Good looking though Asa is, nature is always improvable and, as Tony says: “His ears stick out a bit, but we’ve not made a final decision.”

Obviously Asa’s ears will stay, even if reangled, but what about his Heart? Surely, even Hart, as in songwriter Lorenz Hart, is better?

“From now on it’s Heart, with an ‘e’.

“He’s a singer with heart,” emphasises the expert who was present when the unknown Arnold Dorsey was renamed Engelbert Humperdinck.