Gareth Malone - Choir - Gareth Malone

Would I do the same today? I hope I would have found a better way to ask him, perhaps more sensitively suggesting that he sing more quietly because his ‘powerful voice’ was cutting through or some other way of sugaring the pill. So do I regret asking Raul to pipe down? Yes.

To his immeasurable credit Raul bowed out of the take and we got something down that was passably in tune. In retrospect, most of the singers were shouting, but they had very little experience of singing, a lack which was matched only by my own inexperience of the situation.

This was a moment that I reflected on for months and which I believe gave rise to my working method for series two: Boys Don’t Sing … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

After we had finished singing, we went into the control booth to listen to the playback. This is always an amazing moment. Ashley, one of the younger girls who had a feisty attitude and a neat turn of phrase, turned to me with a look of shock on her face and said, ‘You can hear everything …’. She was horrified because she had thought, as many people do, that there was ‘studio magic’ that would suddenly make them sound good.

It was their first experience of hearing themselves singing. They were quite shocked that all the sections that were rough around the edges could be heard. They had had enough rehearsals to know the music and wanted to get it right, so they were alarmed when it didn’t sound absolutely perfect.

I don’t think they were all that impressed with the CD (I know I wasn’t), although Rhonda played it to her mum, who cried buckets when she heard it. Bless her for that. For Rhonda the recording studio was the moment that changed things. ‘We hadn’t really bonded with anyone else in the group. We knew people, but it was still, “Oh, hi.” But at the studio we had a chance to go, “This is actually serious. Let’s do it and enjoy it”, and we started talking.’

The choir members might have been starting to bond more, but I was really only just getting to know them. Because the Northolt High School badge had a phoenix emblazoned on it we had by now decided to call ourselves the Phoenix Choir. We were hoping to set the competition on fire or something like that. Or at least that’s what we said at the time. Fighting talk.

The truth was that it was very early days. By Christmas I had merely done a few warm-up rehearsals with the choir and just about got them through learning one song. I certainly hadn’t taught them to sing at that point. We had a seriously long way to go. I had the triple pressure of pleasing the school, creating a choir for the World Choir Games and making something worthy of BBC Two. And so the sleepless nights began.

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