Martin Kemp
English musician and actor
I wanted to play for Arsenal. When I have a kick-around with my boy, I still feel as if someone’s going to spot me.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What song would you like played at your funeral?
Death & what remains
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
In 1975, I watched the film Stardust, and Adam Faith said, “I supply the birds, the pills and the pot.” And I thought, “I want that.”
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 August 2017 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 222 →A foreign correspondent.
Belinda Carlisle
American singer
A travel agent, so I could see the world.
Ralph Ineson
English actor and narrator
A Yorkshire cricketer, but I wasn’t good enough.
More from Shaun Ryder
View profile →The 12 years I spent in receivership. That was me being a dick. I lost the court case when I wanted to sack my management and had to pay them £120,000. I said, “I am not paying you, because I should have won.”
I had a gun shoved in my eyeball in New York by a crack dealer in the 1980s. I have also watched somebody next to me get shot in the head in a gun battle – that was in Jamaica in the early 1990s.
One Nation Under a Groove, by Funkadelic.
When I was 15 and starting my first job as a messenger boy at the post office, delivering telegrams.
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Billy Porter, Richard Coles, Adrian Edmondson, Gloria Estefan, Michael Stipe, Matt Goss
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