Music's dark horse

Christopher Lee teams his classical voice training with his talent for playing villains in a new symphonic metal album.

Usually, news of an 87-year-old man planning a symphonic metal album would be laughed out of town or relegated to the quirky story at the end of a news bulletin. But this time the octogenarian is not some deluded pensioner with unfulfilled dreams. It's Sir Christopher Lee. That's right: Count Dracula is going into the recording studio. "It's fascinating for me that at this stage in my life people are beginning to look upon me as a metal singer," Lee said in a video message last week that launched his new album, Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross.

Well, maybe. People might be more likely to associate him with arguably the best Dracula of all time, the 1958 Hammer Horror Classic in which he played the count. Younger audiences - or those with less of an interest in blood sport - might remember him as Count Dooku in the most recent Star Wars trilogy. The character revelled in the dark side of the Force, memorably slicing off Anakin Skywalker's arm with a lightsabre.

More recently, when most actors his age might have been slipping into benign retirement, Lee starred as the evil wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Lee had harboured dreams of playing Gandalf but, rightly or wrongly, the prospect of him playing a hero stuck in the throat. Instead, he relished the role of the power-hungry leader of the Orc army. But playing the villain - which Lee has done in the majority of the 266 films he's made since 1948 - dovetails nicely with the darker side of metal music. And Lee has previous form: he is a classically-trained singer who appeared on the soundtrack of The Wicker Man. But if that was fairly straightforward, then his take on the Toreador Song from the opera Carmen decades later was not. Together with the band Inner Terrestrials, he rocked a furious metal version in 2006.

In his video message, Lee, his speaking voice brilliantly theatrical, says: "To my surprise and indeed great pleasure, I have suddenly found that there is another string to my bow." His love of metal has opened up a new avenue; he's collaborated with the American metal band Manowar and narrated and sung for the Italian symphonic metallers Rhapsody of Fire on two albums. Naturally, the standout performance was on a track called The Magic of the Wizard's Dream.

Indeed, Charlemagne isn't even Lee's debut album. That honour goes to 2006's Revelation, the album on which Toreador appears. It's not so much a revelation as a so-bad-it's-good curio, with Lee singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning and O Sole Mio to unintentionally hilarious effect. Toreador is the only time the chugging metal guitars get an outing. The new LP should be much better. Not only is it a coherent concept album, but it also features an orchestra, guest vocalists and, naturally, some full-on operatic metal courtesy of Marco Sabiu, an Italian who knows his way around a tune (he's worked on hits by Take That, Kylie Minogue and even the Britpop also-rans Sleeper and Dubstar).

The story, too, is straight out of a Lee film. Charlemagne was an eighth-century king who conquered most of western and central Europe, and was responsible for a renaissance in art, religion and culture. The fact that Lee sings the lead part of Charlemagne is a delicious subtext to a life peppered with film portrayals of counts. Lee is also the son of an Italian countess descended from Charlemagne.

The clips available online are intriguing: there are no growlingly anguished vocals. Instead, the orchestral treatment is poppy and cinematic. It will be fascinating to hear the finished record in March. March is also when Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland - starring Lee as the Jabberwock - hits cinemas. There are at least three more films in Lee's 2010 diary. It may seem incredible for a man born in 1922, but he's not the only creative type born that year who is still going strong. Stan Lee is still creating comic characters, the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author Jose Saramango is still writing novels and The Golden Girls' Betty White is still receiving Emmy nominations (for My Name Is Earl last year). None of them, of course, is making symphonic metal albums - and that is why Sir Christopher Lee will forever stand apart.

Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross is out on March 15. www.charlemagneproductions.org.