Gareth Malone - Choir - Gareth Malone

Also by Gareth Malone:

Music for the People

Just as the Sun Was Rising

If They Only Learn

I’ll Sing You a Song

When You’re Weary

How Foolish, Foolish Must You Be

Those Summer Days

The Night Has Come

Stand Up and Face the World

Really Care for Music

A Better Place to Play

Don’t It Feel Good?

Swear to Art

Someone Has to Believe

Probably Break Down and Cry

Keep Holding On

What Would Life Be?

Light up the Darkness

Home Again

Keep on Turning

Singing with a Swing

Coda: Make This Moment Last for Ever

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

About the Publisher

For my grandmother Patricia – wherever you are

January 2012. Heathrow Airport

Ping. It’s my phone. My mother is texting: ‘Get a copy of the Mail ’. I’m about to board a flight to America to shoot a pilot for USA Network, which is strange enough, really. But what I read in a free copy of the Daily Mail while I’m waiting by the gate at Terminal 5 makes me aware of just how far I have come since my days selling ice cream on Bournemouth beach.

It’s now the New Year. The Military Wives have their victory – their single was Christmas Number One – and I’m busy jotting down ideas for an album on the back of my boarding pass. The whole extraordinary news furore that surrounded the release of ‘Wherever You Are’ has gone as cold as the weather outside and yet out of the blue one man breathes life back into the story.

In black and white, one of the most famous men in the world is quoted describing me (a tweedy choirmaster with a penchant for the music of Schubert and a love of country rambles) as follows: ‘He is like a stealth missile, he has sort of crept up on everyone. He would be good for us. I wasn’t furious about the Army Wives single beating us, I had two copies of it on pre-order.’ This is Simon Cowell speaking, no less, and I realise that my life has been irrevocably changed.

••••

Mr Cowell was not the first Simon to change my life.

In November 2005 I had a party for my thirtieth birthday. Having moved to London four years earlier – like everyone else, trying to make it in the big city – I had got together with Becky, who is now my wife, and it was a chance for us both to celebrate with all of our friends.

I felt good that night: not only did I actually have the £200 I needed to put behind the bar (a revolutionary moment after living a student’s life for two years), but when people asked me, ‘What are you doing next?’ I was able to say, ‘Oh, I’m making a series for BBC Two.’ It was an exhilarating time. In fact, the very first day of filming on the first series of The Choir was on my actual birthday: 9 November 2005. Now that’s how to turn thirty.

A few months earlier, I had just finished a massive London Symphony Orchestra project assisting American conductor Marin Alsop with the chorus on a project she was doing with the London Symphony Orchestra. This job had been a significant step-up for me as only weeks before I’d finished studying. Sat there in our slightly shabby West Hampstead box-cum-flat on my first morning off, I dithered over my next move while drinking a third cup of viciously strong coffee. I was exhausted, so I’d decided to relax, take the Monday really easy and have a lazy duvet day where I could sit and watch This Morning and not think about classical music at all.

But first I elected to have a long shower. Returning to my desk an hour later I found a message on my mobile from Simon Wales, a colleague of mine at LSO St Luke’s, the London Symphony Orchestra’s education centre.

The message was short and to the point. ‘We’ve had a call from someone from a TV company called Twenty Twenty. Would you be interested in being on a television programme?’ Forget the duvet day; I was intrigued and spurred into action.

The first thing I did was go to the Twenty Twenty website and check out the programmes that they had already produced. What caught my eye was that they had made Brat Camp . A couple of years earlier I had been quite ill one Christmas so I had been lying in bed watching television when the ‘Where Are They Now?’ update version of the show came on. The one-hour special revisited the whole journey and interviewed the kids who had participated in it (and their parents), allowing them to reflect on the impact the experience had made on their lives. I don’t mind admitting that it reduced me to floods of tears (a running theme in this book).

Years later I worked with the directors of that original series of Brat Camp and discovered that they had filmed the programme the hard way: that they’d lived in the Arizona desert and stayed with those kids for months and months to capture the amazing transformation in their lives.

As a rule I didn’t take anybody to the desert for therapy sessions, but I had been working in music education, which I’d found to be powerfully life-changing for many people. I imagined that something with a similar structure to Brat Camp could be done with music education. This was how I approached the project, thinking I could do the job I had been doing all over London to bring music into different schools and communities. I’ve always been zealous in wanting to encourage others to make music.

Music is part of my life: I have always sung. I remember my mother singing proper lullabies to me at bedtime. The sound of her voice was a very soothing presence when I was a young child. She would often sing an English folk song called ‘Early One Morning’, or ‘I Knew an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’; simple songs for us adults but so absorbing when you are a child. I would join in on songs like ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, and become very involved in the story, visualising the spider clambering up the drainpipe. It’s lovely to sing these songs to my own daughter, rather like passing on the baton.

Even now whenever I hear the music and the words: ‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a young maid sing in the valley below’, I can see a house, a house that isn’t actually mentioned in the lyric, and a garden I invented for the maid to be singing in. Songs, and music generally, have always been very visual for me. I find music massively stimulating: I am sure that if you took a scan of my brain when I am conducting, singing or playing there would be a large amount of blood flowing towards my visual cortex. This is why I hate pubs and restaurants with background music. I can’t type, talk or concentrate when there is music on because I become absorbed in the sound.

Nowadays I start to see the way that a person is breathing or a violinist is bowing, but as a child it was much more about images and feelings. So those early songs were very powerful influences on me. I think that folk songs form the basis of your knowledge of harmony and your sense of what singing is for; ultimately, for me, it’s about communicating emotion

There was also one very particular moment when I was six or seven. I heard a Christmas carol which I remembered from the year before, and I felt a warm glow of recognition I had not experienced before. With hindsight I can see how powerful that was.