Dynamo at Glastonbury in 2017. The magician has been out of the spotlight for a number of years now. Photo / Getty Images
The Bradford street magician counted King Charles among his millions of fans. Then he ate a piece of undercooked chicken and his life imploded.
Steven Frayne has been Dynamo his entire adult life. Aged 19, while performing at a magic convention in New York, someone in the audience shouted: “This kid’s an effing dynamo!” Dynamo stuck. Now, more than two decades later, the performer wants to break free from his alter ego.
“Ultimately, I got to a place mentally where the persona of Dynamo was too hard for Steven to live up to,” Frayne says. “I felt like, in some ways, trying to be Dynamo was killing me. And I was losing sense of who I was. It was a bit like a Jekyll and Hyde situation.”
While Dynamo the magician pulled off death-defying stunts — levitating above the Shard building, walking across the Thames — Steven the man had become scared to leave his home. “I felt conflicted because on the one hand I can do the most impossible thing over here, but on the other hand I can’t get myself out of bed.”
After finding fame in 2011, the Bradford-born performer wooed a cooler, younger audience with his sleight-of-hand street magic and mind-boggling stunts. He travelled the world making TV shows, sold out stadiums and became the first magician to fill the O2. Then, nearly four years ago, he vanished. He wasn’t on our screens or on our streets making jaws drop as he magicked strangers’ phones to appear inside bottles (“a crowd favourite”). He made his last show in 2019; it came out in early 2020.
Sitting down with Frayne in west London, I can see that he has been through hell — a combination of severe illness, self-harm and identity crisis, compounded by grief. “The last five years, maybe even longer, I’ve at times lost the will to live,” he says, his watery blue eyes locking mine. “Certain things in my life made me feel that I couldn’t be myself, made me doubt myself, made me feel, like, what is the point in my existence?”
Life started unravelling in mid-2017 when he got food poisoning after eating some undercooked chicken at a fast-food chain. Due to his having Crohn’s, an inflammatory bowel disease, that poisoning triggered lengthy hospital stays and he developed agonising arthritis throughout his body.
Frayne, 40, rattles through the various treatments, drips and drugs that he has been put on in recent years. For a time he was trapped in a “vicious circle”: his Crohn’s medication made him well enough to perform, but also meant he wasn’t feeling any pleasure from performing. “I wanted to feel something again.”
On bad days he couldn’t shuffle cards because his arthritis was so bad. Some days it is still too painful to get out of bed. “You take magic away from a magician and you lose your sense of purpose. To the point where I didn’t understand why I was alive any more. To the point where I maybe took things too far and tried to end things in a way that maybe I shouldn’t have done,” he says quietly.
It sounds as if Frayne had a narrow escape. “When my wife found me after some of my self-harming incidents she was the one who really got me the help I needed.” In November 2020 he started therapy.
The more he talks, the more it becomes apparent that it’s remarkable that we’re sitting together at all. In 2021, still in the midst of his depression, his beloved Nana, his mother’s grandmother, died. “My Nana was the one that used to take me to the magic shops, the magic conventions and the magic competitions.” The same year two of his dogs died unexpectedly. (He now has Lily, a half-French bulldog, half-pug.) “I locked myself away in my house. I was scared to go out,” he says. “Even when I was offered bits of work I was scared to go on stage and then I was scared to come off stage … I knew once I came off stage that I’m going back to doom and gloom.”
Now Frayne is emerging out of the doom, making magic again and tentatively stepping back into public life. His new one-off television show, ominously titled Dynamo Is Dead, delves into his mental health and involves a live segment where he’ll be buried under five tonnes of soil. “Right now I feel happy to be alive. Albeit … I’ll be ultimately happier when I come out of that grave. Touch wood,” he says, smiling knowingly.
The star’s backstory sounds straight from the pages of a superhero comic. He grew up on the rough Delph Hill estate in Wyke, Bradford, with his single mother, Nicky, who had him aged 17. His estranged father left the family when Frayne was four, then spent years in and out of jail on various drug-related offences. (Frayne didn’t learn of his death until 2015, after the funeral had happened.) Slight and mixed race (his father had Pakistani heritage), he was bullied at school, so his step-great-grandfather (“Gramps”) taught him some magic tricks to ward off his tormentors. On top of all that, in his teens he was diagnosed with Crohn’s. Magic became his escape, quickly catapulting him out of Wyke and into a different world.
“Being in those surroundings probably fostered a hunger in me to want to do more than what people expected of me … nobody had any expectations of me anyway so I had nothing to lose,” Frayne says. “Weirdly, I’m in a position where you feel like you’ve achieved everything that would make you whole and complete, but all I feel is fear because now I actually have everything to lose.”
Recently he has been unpicking some of the toughest elements of his childhood. In the past he has used those adversities to fuel himself. “But I’ve never really looked at how they played a part in some of the hidden traumas below the surface that I’ve maybe not dealt with,” he says.
In his new show Frayne speaks to some of his famous friends and idols — the model Cara Delevingne, the boxer Tyson Fury, the singer Demi Lovato and the skateboarder Tony Hawk, for example — about the addictions, afflictions and accidents that they have endured. Naturally, he weaves in some dazzling tricks, but sharing stories of life’s slings and arrows in the hope of helping others seems to be his new mission. “When I lived on Delph Hill estate we were told, as a man on the council estate, ‘If you have a problem, suck it up. Don’t tell anybody.’ It was ingrained in us,” he recalls. “But by asking for help you could save your own life.”
Back to burials. For his live TV stunt he’ll be six feet under about five tonnes of soil. “If it rains it’s going to be even heavier,” he says, matter-of-factly. He has been practising, and shows me a terrifying video on his phone of him lying under a mound of earth, getting huge buckets of dirt poured over his head. It’s not just about holding your breath, he says, it’s holding your breath while also having the strength to dig out. His bath at home is filthy. “I felt everything that the buried alive stunt encapsulates,” Frayne says. “I felt like the weight of the world was on me. I felt that I couldn’t ask for help because you can’t breathe when you’re down there. I felt claustrophobic, but I also felt more scared than ever.”
Live burial stunts have a rich and troubling history. Harry Houdini first tried it in 1915 and almost suffocated. He was rescued only because he managed to punch his hand through the surface. In 1949 the British escapologist Alan Alan was rescued moments from death during his attempt. In 1990 Joseph Burrus, an American magician, died after his coffin collapsed. In 2015 Anthony Britton, a British stunt artist, narrowly dodged death after he was pulled unconscious out of the ground. “You can’t go into these things lightly,” Frayne says. “Don’t be complacent.” For him it’s more than a stunt: “It’s laying to rest parts of me that I want to move on from.”
After a stellar career unfathomable to most magicians, Frayne has become spectacularly well connected, counting everyone from Coldplay to King Charles as fans. In 2006 the Prince’s Trust gave Frayne early funding to help to launch his career; this year he attended the King’s coronation and performed for him the next day. “Whenever I see him I’ll always try out my latest idea. Don’t misquote this, but he’s a great guinea pig for my new magic,” he says. “That’s not to be used out of context. I don’t want to piss him off.”
Is this Dynamo’s final act? “I think it has to be. There’s positive things that have come from Dynamo. But the pressures of being Dynamo are too much and I feel like I need to move on.”
Regardless of his connections, he has a tricky relationship with celebrity culture. “As humans, I don’t think we’re equipped or meant to have this many people staring at us, this many people’s opinions on us,” he says. “Fame is overwhelming.” His passion is creating — dreaming up magic, plotting it in his notebook, then bringing it to life — and the ultimate goal is bringing people, whether king or commoner, together. Although he appreciates that it doesn’t need to be taken too seriously. “One thing I’ve learnt is that it’s nice to be back having fun and living life.”
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
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