Born fighter, soul sensation Kenny Thomas (Image: Will Hutch)
He is the ex-boxer from a London council estate who turned himself into a platinum-selling 90s soul star. But for the last eight and a half years, Kenny Thomas has been fighting a very different battle – to save the life of his youngest daughter. Christina, 12, was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour when she was four years old. “I was told it was inoperable, and therefore terminal.” Kenny, 56, recalls. “They gave her six months.” Some parents might have accepted that, and the standard course of disease-managing chemo and palliative end-of-life care. Thomas did not. The singer, best known for his 1991 smash Thinking About Your Love, has a Bachelor of Science degree in Chinese medicine and was aware of alternative cancer treatments.
“I was talking to doctors abroad and looking at things like immunotherapy. An Indian professor told me that if I was looking for the holy grail of brain tumour treatment, I should look at dendritic cell therapy in Germany.”
Although hugely expensive, the family’s many visits to Cologne kept Christina alive. “All the boxers I’ve met, and she is the greatest fighter,” Kenny beams. “She’s a walking miracle, defying all the odds.”
The tumour – a high-grade glioma – has not grown for some time. “There’s been some shrinkage, and it remains stabilised. The doctors are happy because it’s not progressing. We’ve not won but we’ve not lost. Thanks to the cell therapy we might have got ahead of the curve.”
Kenny was set to shoulder all the costs, but music biz buddies rallied round, including soul stars Jocelyn Brown and Omar. He had been singing with 80s group Living In A Box, whose keyboardist Marcus Vere also stepped up. “Marcus put on two fundraising nights at Chelsea FC’s Under The Bridge, with Tony Hadley, Midge Ure, Kim Wilde, Carol Decker, Heaven 17, Go West, Beverley Knight, Nick Kershaw…all the best singers from the 80s. I had to pinch myself.”
The shows raised £40,000, enough to cover the Cologne trips. “If I’d done it alone, we’d have been on the floor now financially,” he admits. “But you’d do anything to save your daughter’s life.”
Not for nothing is Kenny’s new album called Unstoppable. “I am relentless,” he says. “I don’t give up on things. I can’t let something go; once I get the bit between my teeth I go for it.” Admirable surely? “It can be, but it can also be annoying. Ask my wife Francisca. As soon as she wakes up, I’ll be reminding her she’s got vocals to do” – in the recording studio can-do Kenny has built on the side of their five-bedroom Norwich home.
Thomas grew up on a council estate in Stamford Hill, northeast London, listening to soul-loving DJs like Robbie Vincent, Tony Blackburn and Greg Edwards, and pirate stations pumping out the latest American tracks. “I bought soul, jazz-funk, funk, Rick James…a melting pot” – as were his neighbourhood pals, who came from multiple ethnic backgrounds – Jamaican, Jewish, Irish, African, Indian, Pakistani – all united by their love of black American soul.
Kenny’s father, Big Ken, an ex-pro boxer in the building trade, loved Johnny Mathis; his Gran-Canaria-born mother Maria adored reggae star John Holt. “I could mimic Mathis reasonably well and I’d sing along with 1000 Volts Of Holt. People remarked how adaptable my voice was.”
Kenny got involved with a band in their local church, playing guitar and singing, while also being a keen amateur boxer, with fifty fights under his belt. It only became a problem when he got his first job at city bank Williams & Glyn’s. “I was due to work on the cheque counter with customers, but I’d just fought a very tough kid who beat me on points – we went the distance, but a rocketing swing broke my nose, and I had a couple of shiners. I turned up for work, they took one look at my mangled face and stuck me on the franking machine in the post room for the first year. I finally realised showing up to work with a black eye wouldn’t work, so I knocked boxing on the head.”
He left the job after eighteen months. “I got bored. Deep down, I knew I had something else to be. Not necessarily famous – I wasn’t one of those kids. I just wanted to be around music, and recording studios.”
His first recording deal fizzled out, so Kenny started working for British Telecom. A demo he’d cut, covering the Gap Band’s Outstanding, landed him a new deal with Cooltempo (a Chrysalis label). And in 1991, Outstanding went Top 15. The next, Thinking About Your Love reached No 4. More hits followed, including Best Of You, and his debut album Voices went double-platinum.
Kenny had eight hit singles and two Top Ten albums before manufactured pop bands boomed. “I was warned it was going to happen and told I’d have sit back and ride it out. But I never stopped gigging, writing, and recording. I wrote a song that Rod Stewart recorded, a song George Benson recorded. I got in the studio with the boy bands and worked with them…”
Out of curiosity, he did his three-year BSc course and is a qualified practitioner of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine. “I still study alternative medicine now. Some people are into train sets, I’m into that.”
Kenny met South African-born Francisca at a 2007 charity gig in Cheshire. “She was singing, I was singing, we had a chat after that. She was staying in Manchester I took her out on a date – me, her and Shane Richie who was doing theatre up there. “I’d told Shane I’d met this girl, and he said come to the show and hang out. BT earned a lot of money out of me phoning Cape Town that year. I knew she was the one. We got married in 2008 in a registry office and again in 2011 in a church.”
They have two sons and two daughters.
In 2016, Kenny fronted Living In A Box, after singer Richard Darbyshire turned down a chance to reform, but their gigs started to clashed with his own one. At the start of his career, he had encountered hostility at some gigs. “There were a couple of occasions when I’ve had to defend myself. Someone came at me and it didn’t go so well for him.” His shows are nothing like that now. Last year he sold out the London Palladium. “It was magical, all together in a collective moment…I’m just part of it.”
He first played the Royal Albert Hall in 1991 with Edwin Starr, Freddie Jackson, Donny Hathaway, Mica Paris – “all the people I’d grown up with; I’ll never forget that.”
Kenny’s latest irrepressible album Unstoppable features a duet with Kim Wilde and huge numbers like If I Can’t Have You. He also recorded a fresh take on Thinking About Your Love; the classic number went viral on TikTok after he performed it at London’s Kings Cross station with DJ Ag two months ago.
Laughter keeps Kenny buoyant. “Remember when comedians were funny?” he asks, smiling. “I like the old comedy – Tommy Cooper, Spike Milligan, Morecambe & Wise; Ronnie Barker was an absolute wordsmith. My dad had a lively, sarcastic building site wit; you had to watch yourself around him. And Christina makes me laugh. She said to me, ‘Dad, I know you’re getting old but I won’t chuck you away, you’re still useful.’ And the other day she said, ‘Dad, you look like a movie star…you should make horror movies’. She probably didn’t mean it like that sounds, but we were rolling around in the kitchen.”
Next year he’ll mark the 35th anniversary of Voices with The Unstoppable ‘best-of’ tour.
“I’m selling out bigger venues now than I did at the beginning of my career – Hammersmith Odeon next year, we didn’t do that at the height of it. At school I was a naughty boy, but now I’ve come good. It’s nice. Anyone who wants to get under my bonnet should read my autobiography, Burying My Soul.
“I’ll never retire. The best way to go is like Tommy Cooper did — on stage, doing the thing you love.”
*Kenny Thomas’ new album Unstoppable is out now. The Unstoppable Tour takes place in March 2026, tickets available now from: KennyThomasMusic.com