A joker who's catches walking on air; After his massive hit record, Aled Jones added working on air to his repertoire. Philip Key up with him as he prepares for a new tour.

Byline: Philip Key 

IT WAS just as well that Aled Jones pointed out that he was 'only joking' at several points in our conversation.

Otherwise I would have reported that he had met his wife standing under a red light, thought his big hit Walking in the Air was badly written and wanted to enter the world ballroom dancing championships.

Jones's wicked sense of humour sometimes takes him over, so much so that I did have to double check some of his more outrageous statements. 'Only joking,' he would reply.

Jones is riding high at the moment. His first Universal album has been re-released, his autobiography Aled was published on Tuesday and this weekend he starts on a short ten-date tour which brings him to the Southport Theatre on March 14.

He is living proof that there is an adult life after schoolboy fame.

I caught up with the North Wales-born singer during a day of signings for his new book, written with Darren Henley. 'I wrote most of it,' Jones explains. 'Darren is managing editor of Classic FM and we spent a year working on it.'

Amazingly, Jones has never kept a scrapbook of his career - but was lucky that someone else had done so.

'The scary thing is that there was this woman in the congregation at Bangor Cathedral where I was a chorister who wrote to a local recording company asking them to record my voice.

'She sadly passed away two years ago but left behind a book containing every newspaper cutting you could imagine about my life. There were things in there that even I could not remember!

'It was quite poignant that the woman who started the whole thing should end that part of my life as well.'

So was the book commissioned or had Jones suddenly decided one day to write his life story? 'You cynical thing,' he laughs. 'It was all to do with This Is Your Life.'

Jones was the last person to be celebrated on the television programme. 'I thought it was horrendous, the worst thing that could happen to me. My parting gift to Michael Aspel was to say, 'Hey! I'm only 32 and you know what's going to happen now. I'm going to die!'

Anyway, it decided him to write the book which he wanted to call Chapter One. 'This was the childhood part and when I am 70, bitter and hating the world, I will do the other version.'

Now 34, married with one child and another due in April, Jones is far from bitter. 'It's quite sad because I am positive and love my life,' he says.

He included in the book all he wanted to say. 'I have put everything in, including dissecting a pig's heart and putting it in a girl's pencil case...'

There is also the story of the recording of his boyhood hit Walking In the Air from the film, The Snowman. As he points out, he was not on the original soundtrack. That was another chorister, Peter Auty, but when it was decided to record it for a Toys 'R' Us television commercial, composer Howard Blake suggested Jones.

For some reason, on the day of recording he had trouble with the song and had to record it line by line. Why the problem? 'It was because it was terribly written - only joking,' he replies. It was virtually his last recording as a schoolboy before his voice broke. 'It's the song everyone remembers but what people don't always realise is that I had made 16 albums before that.'

It would be 15 years before he made another album. 'As a kid the only thing that set me aside was that I was able to pick up a piece of music and just sing it straight away. People think I spent months recording those boy soprano albums but I was probably given the music ten minutes before and knocked it out in a couple of hours.'

Jones was not ambitious. 'I have always let things happen, never pushed myself. I am not one of those massively ambitious people driven like mad. But I have been really lucky and had some great opportunities. I make the most of every day and have a good time.'

After his voice broke he carved out a career as a juvenile chat show host, presenter and all-round personality.

I last met him 10 years ago at Blackpool where he was appearing in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, his first and so far only musical, although there are plans for a West End show this year.

'I love Blackpool,' he says, ' and that was a significant time for me as that was where I met my wife.'

She was not standing under a red light as he first suggests ('only joking') but on the North Pier 'which is almost as funny'. He and his wife Claire ('she comes from a circus family') now have a daughter Amelia and are expecting a son on - and he knows the date exactly - April 9. Most recently, Jones became a star of television's celebrity show, Strictly Come Dancing, reaching the semi-finals.

'Doing that show has changed my life completely,' he says. 'It has made me more confident, given me more energy. Whatever people say about Saturday night television being boring, I can only say that being watched by 12 million people doing something you have never done before is exhilarating.'

It was a change of pace for Jones who had turned down offers from OK and Hello magazines for his wedding pictures and declined to appear on Get Me Out of Here I'm a Celebrity. 'I don't like bugs,' he explains.

Before the show, he had rarely danced. 'On my wedding night I hid in the free bar with my best mate drinking gin and tonics while everyone looked for me to dance.

'Now I can't wait but no one has invited me to a wedding unfortunately. I want to be up there doing my John Travolta. I would love to become world champion in Latin American dance just to annoy all the people doing it now. Er, only joking.

'No one thinks of me as a little boy after that show. Now they think of me as a Latin God,' he laughs.

It had been hard work, however. His BBC contract had asked that he rehearse six hours a week. 'I spent six hours a day and completed 296 hours of dancing. It was total commitment.'

His new tour will find him singing songs from his various albums and some from a new one due out in October. There will also be a question and answer session.

'At the start of a concert I leave cards on the seats asking people to write questions. No-one else does this in the classical world. In the second half I try to answer them. A lot of the questions are quite dirty but of course I read those out too. I am 34, you know, with red blood running through my veins. And it does make every concert different for me.

ALED JONES is at the Southport Theatre on March 14; his book, Aled, is published by Virgin at pounds 18.99

CAPTION(S):

Aled Jones has gone from angel-voiced child singer; right , to slick TV presenter, above , and managed to marry, left , and start a family along the way; Aled with his Strictly Come Dancing partner, Lilia Kopylova