Michael Barratt, known professionally as Shakin’ Stevens, is a Welsh singer and songwriter. He was the UK’s biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s. In the UK alone, Stevens has charted 33 Top 40 hit singles including four chart-topping hits.
About Shakin’ Stevens in brief
Michael Barratt, known professionally as Shakin’ Stevens, is a Welsh singer and songwriter. He was the UK’s biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s. His most successful songs were nostalgia hits, evoking the sound of 1950s rock and roll and pop. In the UK alone, Stevens has charted 33 Top 40 hit singles including four chart-topping hits. His last Top 40 single was \”Trouble\” in 2005 apart from his Christmas song, which has re-entered the UK Singles Chart each December since 2007. Stevens married his wife, Carole, on 7 October 1967, and they had three children together. They divorced in 2009 after 42 years of marriage. The Sunsets continue to perform, and still annually in the UK, Europe and Australia, fronted in recent years by Shaky’s nephew, Levi Barratt. In 1977 he was also called ‘Shaky’, as he was spotted during a London Sunsets gig by Jack Good who personally invited him to attend a planned West End musical Elvis! He played Elvis in the show and Shaky landed one of the lead roles, playing Elvis in his prime, during the course of the show. He is a lifelong supporter of his local football team Cardiff City.
He grew up in Ely, Cardiff, and as a teenager, in the mid-1960s he formed his first amateur rock and Roll band with school friends and became its vocalist and frontman. He later adopted the stage name ‘Shakin’ Stevens’. Stevens was associated with the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain through playing at YCL events. The band toured Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in between UK dates. He also took over the role of P.J. Proby in the film ‘Las Vegas Proby’, covering the earlier years of Elvis’s life in the 1960s and 1970s. He has a son, Tim Whitall, who is an actor and film star with young film and TV projects, including ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2’; he also has a daughter, Toni, who was born in 1998. He currently lives in Cardiff with his wife Carole and has three children, including a son and a daughter-in-law. He lives in a flat which formed part of an office block in inner-city Cardiff. The flat was demolished several years later and is now the home of Cardiff City football club Cardiff United.
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