Oh What A Night, Grand Opera House, York, February 9 to 14

THE last time Kid Creole played in York, there was room to swing a coconut tree.

His Easter Day show on The Coconuts' Legs Akimbo tour in 1998 enticed only 100 people to the Grand Opera House to re-live the gangster swagger of I'm A Wonderful Thing, Baby, Stool Pigeon and Annie I'm Not Your Daddy, his trio of 1982 Top Ten hits.

Next week, however, Kid Creole returns to the Opera House to lead the cast of Oh! What A Night, the celebration of Seventies' disco music that goes from strength to strength.

"When we started in 1997 we thought the Seventies' thing would die in a year but that decade just won't die," he says.

Oh! What A Night had begun life on the golden mile at Blackpool seven years ago, since when New Yorker August Darnell - alias Kid Creole - has made the role of ace DJ and club owner Brutus T Firefly his own.

"Yeah, we've been doing it for quite some time, one thousand and five hundred performances so far, so it's coming out of every orifice, but I do say thank god for that," says August, who never tires of the show.

"It's great for keeping your talent finely tuned, as you get to sing and dance and act, and I have the chance to be a consummate entertainer - and I've always been an entertainer first and foremost. On my visa I always put my occupation as 'entertainer'.

"In this show, I'm the narrator, I set the style, I sing, I act, and the only thing that's not there is my compositions, which are not true to the Seventies."

Oh! What A Night started as a three-hour musical with a cast of 25; now it runs for two hours with 15 performers, and anything extraneous has been removed.

"It's always changing, always evolving, every six months, thank goodness. I call it a work in progress and I'm quite proud of it now," says August. "Now we're going to take it to the West End and Broadway but at first I never thought it would get further than Blackpool, and then the long run in Manchester made us think differently.

"That gave us the courage; we got such a word-of-mouth reaction that it spread through the country that this was a show you go to and have a good time."

Kid Creole had continued to tour and release albums - 14 since 1979 - when Oh! What A Night offered August a new opportunity in 1997. "I got this call from my British agent, a Liverpudlian, who said 'How about doing this show?'. My American agent said 'Why do you want to do that?', and I said 'I need a distraction'. I wasn't selling any records any more and I was playing B-grade venues," he recalls.

So he jumped at the chance. "I never thought of it as a career change, just a distraction and I just saw it as a big challenge to be told what to wear, what lines to say," he says.

"Having said that, I had majored in drama at Hostra University in New York. That was in the early 1970s, when I got my degree in drama, English and education."

August starts heading off on a nostalgic detour. "I was up for the draft but got out of it by changing my major to English, which they took as a serious major. If you were doing a drama major, they felt you could be killed without them losing anything," he says.

"Even in those days, I'm quite proud I had a conscience that told me there was something wrong with that war, and it saved my ass long enough for me to set up Kid Creole and The Coconuts."

Kid Creole may be associated with Latin and Calypso music and his live shows may have the cocksure theatricality of band leaders Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan, but Bronx boy August has his musical roots in the Seventies' disco scene that gave rise to Oh! What A Night.

"I was first into disco, in the early 1970s in the Savannah Band with my brother Stony. We had hits, Right Out Of The Box and Cherchez La Femme, which was our first number one, and then I wanted to do nothing else but music because it seemed so easy."

Easy it was not, however. New York club band Kid Creole and The Coconuts caught on first in Britain, not the United States. "The UK was so good to us and without that I don't think we would have continued as America didn't take to us. Bringing us to England saved our lives," he says.

Kid Creole gave August his trademark look: the sharpest of zoot suits in the brightest of Liquorice Allsorts colours that he continues to wear in Oh! What A Night.

What inspired that look? "It was my dad's fault. He would take us to the movies and we loved the way they dressed in 1940s black-and-white films. Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart; we wanted those suits and ties," he says.

"Then I saw Cab Calloway with a zoot suit and that was it. I said 'That's what I want to look like', and I've been a dandy ever since I fell in love with those movies. It's still my everyday look, even when I go to the post office."

Those zoot suits will accompany August and Oh! What A Night to Germany and Belgium on tour, and in his continuing Kid Creole and The Coconuts activities.

"The band is tight. I've still got Bongo Eddie as my right-hand man, the Coconuts are now the children of the Coconuts, and we're still looking for that elusive hit. In the meantime Oh! What A Night keeps me fit," says August, who is 51 this year and remains as slim and slick as ever.

"This musical is not Shakespeare, Ibsen or Chekhov, but give me the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd, and I want to taste that."

Oh What A Night, Grand Opera House, York, February 9 to 14. Performances: Monday to Thursday, 7.30pm; Friday, Saturday, 5pm, 8.45pm. Box office: 0870 606 3595.

Updated: 16:11 Thursday, February 05, 2004