Dementia doesn't stop me singing. & crowd know the words to Amarillo if I forget!

When Tony Christie arrived to see his specialist last week there was a woman on the steps, disorientated and agitated, not knowing where she was.

- BY EMILY RETTER Chief Feature Writer

The man with her – her son, Tony presumes – had to reassure her that they had just seen her doctor and were waiting for a car home.

“It threw me for a moment,” the singer admits, quietly.

For a relentlessly positive person, this admission perhaps reveals a little of the fear Tony has felt since he was first diagnosed with dementia.

That lady was a glance into the future, a glimmer of what his own might hold.

Two weeks ago, the 79-year-old famed for early 70s’ hits Las Vegas, I Did What I Did for Maria, and (Is This the Way to) Amarillo revealed he had the condition.

Today, he has agreed to talk in detail about it for the first time.

But it is clearly difficult for this slim, energetic man with his perfectly white, youthful smile and snappy style, to consider its effects on him.

He doesn’t like to “dwell” and to that end he is about to travel to Nashville to record new music and start touring the UK in spring. He says: “I’m used to working, it’s daunting when I don’t work, and I love the music – and that is good for what I have got, it’s medication.

“Whatever this is, it is, and we will deal with it. I was a little bit down but I thought, ‘I can still work, it’s not affecting my singing, my voice, my show.’

“As long as I can get on that stage and do what I was born to do.”

I gently ask about the time which may one day arrive when he can no longer perform, when, possibly, he can no longer remember Sue, his beloved wife of 55 years, their three children and seven grandchildren.