Early Life
Pearce was born in Leeds in 1951. His father was a pianist and his mother Jean was a respected dance teacher, notably teaching a young Malandra Burrows to perform. He took up ballet as a child, developing a penchant for performing after appearing in amateur productions for Leeds Thespians and operatic companies. Despite this, Pearce had aspirations to be an engineer originally. This changed after he had a serious motorbike accident, which altered his outlook on life. He has explained, "From then on I couldn’t settle and I did lots of different jobs. I’d never been out of Leeds and the surgeon who operated on me let me stay at his place on an island in the Adriatic. I was the only British person on the island. All those things changed my life and I couldn’t settle after that. I certainly couldn’t go back to working in an engineering factory day after day I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just drifted." He moved to Iceland for a period, worked on fish docks, was a dresser for Yorkshire Television and a stage hand at Leeds Grand. Pearce, who had always loved entertaining people, then found employment as a redcoat for the British holiday camp Butlins in 1970, with a friend who had attended his mother’s dancing school; together they formed a musical double act, known as the Stewart Brothers. Stanley Joseph of Leeds City Varieties was impressed by the act and got them a booking playing alternate nights at a cabaret club in Barnsley and the Fiesta club in Sheffield. Pearce then went solo and set his sights on becoming a club-filler.
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