SUNDAY EXPRESS February 24, 2002
By Zoe Dare Hall    
his is a man who can stop his heart from beating, predict news headlines a month ahead & who's trickery with a deck of cards has seen him banned from almost every casino in the country. He has reduced royalty to mild expletives and women to tears of disbelief. If your image of a magician is stuck in the days of peculiar men with bow ties and bad jokes, mincing about with glamorous assistants and rabbits, you haven't seen the new masters of the craft, as typified by David Redfearn.
Magic has always struggled to find attractive purveyors of the art - Paul Daniels too cheesy, David Copperfield too plastic. Even David Blaine, the young America who injected some cool into the profession with his Hollywood friends and man-of-the-people approach, alienated fans by staring his way through an entire interview on GMTV. 		 

crowd, sidles up to a group and launches into a trick, until suddenly all eyes are on him.
He turned a tenner into £50 note for the duke of Edinburgh, leading HRH to exclaim, "Bloody unbelievable".
And at Dwight Yorke's housewarming party, surrounded by Manchester United team, David was so sure of the playing card Yorke would pick that he placed an advert in that day's newspaper stating which it would be.

is sleight of hand has ruffled the feathers of casino-owners everywhere, but it's his powers of prediction that are most chilling and increasingly attract high-profile clients and TV offers.
He won't venture into the sinister implications of being able to foresee wars or death.
I don't want to use magic for those things. Its just supposed to be fun." And having sworn the Magic Circle oath not to reveal his methods, he will only say of his mind-reading abilities:" I don't think I am psychic - I get feelings about things and, if I think about it, I get it right."
Were it not for the fact that he got so lost trying to find our meeting place that he had to ditch his car and get a cab - and that, a keen gambler, he hasn't yet managed to predict four winning lottery numbers in one go -  this would be near impossible to believe when you see him perform.
He can give endless demonstrations of mind-reading
-correctly picking a single word I choose from a 400-page novel and a playing card I have selected that emerges beneath my watch.
But to test himself, he agrees to predict the front page of the Sunday Express, two weeks in advance.
He presents me with a wax-sealed package, which I keep with me at all times so he cannot possibly tamper with it.
Inside is a tape which he recorded on February 7, revealing his prediction of the headlines on February 17.
On the big day we meet again.
The package never leaves my hands and certainly goes nowhere near his (so rule out any subtle switching of tapes).
He instructs me to put the tape in the machine and play it.
Sending a shiver down my spine, his voice recites that day's Sunday Express headline - an exclusive story which appeared in no other paper - with such alarming accuracy that the story reads almost verbatim.
"After many weeks absence from the headlines, Bin Laden will feature again, spies will have prevented attacks on British targets, M16 will have protected British interests in Africa and an AI Qaeda plot to attack central London will have been foiled. MI5 will carry out security checks at military bases."

  

UNFATHOMABLE SKILLS: David Redfearn is the epitome of the new breed of British magicians, able to play the crowd at close quarters and earn its respect           

There's a vacancy for a British Blaine, someone with the streetwise savvy & dangerous edge but not the creepiness, & Redfearn is prime contender. A tall, striking 38-year-old, he has a no-nonsense manner that can see off troublemakers (women may swoon at his tricks, but men have been known to vent their rage at not understanding them). David- smartly dressed for the swanky environs of the Ritz Club, in London's Piccadilly, his Favourite place to wind down after the show - reveals as little about himself as he does about his magic. He admits he talks fast, his eyes darting around for inspiration. He switches subject before you can gleam too much, distracting you by pulling out a pack of cards and performing another trick.
Redfearn, a former fireman from South London, was a late starter at magic. "I saw a magician at a party when I was 19 and had to know how he did it, so throughout my time in the fire brigade, I practiced and practiced magic, read every book on it and studied the tricks of David Berglas, a 1960s magician who was my biggest inspiration."
At 29, he turned professional and now his evenings are rarely without a glamorous gig. From parties at Premiership footballers' homes to city traders' jollies in Parisian nightclubs, he is cashing in on the desirability of magicians as the latest party accessory.
He is modest about the effect a magician has on the opposite sex but eventually concedes:" You can read someone's mind - of course women love it." Men make the most of his talents too, asking him to teach them tricks to impress the ladies. The heart-stopping trick never fails with any nurses in the room. "Obviously you can't actually stop your heart, " he admits. "I've just learnt how to control all my pulses so you can't feel them."
Unlike the old -style magicians performing at a safe distance on stage, Redfearn mills among the		    

 

How could he possibly guess that? Naturally, he's not saying, but he seems genuinely relieved that it worked.
"It's a weight off my mind, I'm never going to do that trick again," he says," I didn't do any research. I just spent a day thinking about it."
The only inaccuracy is the exact location - Docklands rather than Central London.
"I'm gutted about that," he says, "I even pictured a monorail train but I couldn't think where there was one in London."
He plays down his skill.
"Anyone could do it with some effort and concentration.
Everything I do is about guile and trickery and my predictions are all based on hunches and feelings, which can even be used to predict a single playing card."
It would surely take more than concentration to emulate his powers of prediction, but I do have a hunch that we will be seeing a lot more of David Redfearn.

 

DAVID REDFEARN WILL PREDICT THE RESULT OF A MAJOR SPORTING EVENT IN COMING WEEKS AND REVEAL HOW YOU CAN DEVELOP THIS ABILITY.

 

"Everything I do is about guile and trickery which can even be used to predict a single playing card"