We flew out to China and arrived in Xiamen via Hong Kong. It was everyone’s first time there, me included. I got off the plane, so jet-lagged, so tired. I went into my hotel room, lay down on the bed and even then sobbed into my pillow, already feeling the pressure. It was a nightmare.
China is about as alien as it’s possible to get without leaving the planet. The signs are incomprehensible even when in English. The ‘Chinglish’ breakfast menu was a real treat: ‘Com of Cream Soup’, ‘Five Precious Ingredient Gruel’, ‘Its its juice’ and ‘Baked Frog’ delighted us all. I was thrilled to be welcomed at one venue by a sign declaring, ‘Classical comfortable pursuequatity enjoylife travelledevery where of senda specialty attitude enjoyment joviality’. I knew this was somewhere where the rules were different.
We only had one day to adjust before we found ourselves at the grand opening of the event. This was held in a conference centre that made the O2 arena look like a garden shed. It was absolutely enormous; a vast space with thousands of people and a procession of national flags. Every country in the world seemed to have a choir there. There were only two choirs from Great Britain, us and Farnham Youth Choir. When the Union Jack came out, something cataclysmic happened.
Here I was with all this group of kids from Northolt, many of whom were children of immigrant families (first, second and third generations) who I think had never identified that strongly with being British because of their other cultural links. Suddenly, out there in China, in an alien environment, they were being photographed and feted as representatives of Great Britain. They had a powerful sense of being British. When the Union Jack emerged they screamed as one at the top of their voices. I looked at them all yelling as loud as they could, and thought, ‘Oh, no, they’re going to wreck their voices for the competition’ – we were due to be performing at 8.45 the next morning. I screamed down the line, ‘Stop shouting!’ They took no notice and continued to blow their gaskets.
The next morning my lead tenor, Kodi Bramble, with whom I had had so many ups and downs, came up to me at breakfast to croak, ‘I can’t sing, I’ve got no voice.’ This was the day of the competition, so this was not good news, but I told him that he must at least come with us to sing. Who knows? His voice might have come back by then.
Grim-faced, we set out for the venue. As the air-conditioned bus shuddered to a halt, the soupy morning air of the Chinese monsoon season poured in through the open door. The time had arrived. Up sprang Rhonda to deliver her impromptu speech, worthy of Henry V. ‘We know our parts perfectly,’ she told the others. ‘We have gone from nothing to something really, really beautiful. Do it for England, Northolt, Gareth, our families, our friends. But most of all let’s do it for ourselves.’ The first of many tears that day threatened to break my equilibrium.
Rhonda’s pride was clear and she still recalls the performance with affection: ‘It was seeing how far we had come from a group of ultimately mismatched personalities, and we were united.’ But this was no time for sentiment. There was singing to be done.
Alas, the bravado she stirred in the choir was fragile. Not long afterwards we were standing backstage at the competition venue just about to go on to perform. The choir who were on before us gave this almighty bang with their feet on the floor and let rip a ‘hah!’ as if they were doing the Haka before singing something very red-blooded and exotic, not at all in the English choral tradition. The kids looked round in absolute horror. I could see them thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what have we got ourselves into? We are hopelessly out of our depth.’
It hit me as well. Back at the beginning of the whole process when I had been asked whether I could create a choir good enough to compete in the World Choir Games I had brazenly said, ‘I can try. I don’t know exactly what that is going to mean or how far we can get, but I will give it my best shot.’ Now, just like the kids, when I heard the quality of the other choir I realised exactly what we had got ourselves into. It was a daunting moment for us all.
Jerry Cleary was the linchpin. He was one of the later influx of sixth-formers who had brought a new maturity to the sound (and the behaviour!) of the choir. Even the spirited Rhonda couldn’t bring them together in the face of this fearsome opposition. But she remembers everyone looking to Jerry at this critical moment. ‘He took on a very fatherly role, he was geeing people up and saying, “We can do this, it doesn’t matter, we’ll do it ourselves, we will do it our own way.”’
The now voiceless Kodi was an essential part of the difficult Fauré piece, ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’, so needless to say that particular song was not nearly as good as it had sounded in rehearsal, although he wasn’t alone in not being up to par. It is often the case with inexperienced singers that however powerful in emotional terms a final performance is, the moments where they really achieve their best are in rehearsal. Looking back, those are the moments that I cherish. Under the pressure of live performance the technical side can suffer in comparison.
So the competition performance in China was not our best: pressure, time, exhaustion, and a group of very inexperienced performers were all factors. But it was precisely because of all those circumstances that I felt inordinately proud of every single one of the Phoenix Choir. I had thrown them to the lions, I really had, and they had risen to the challenge and performed as well as they possibly could on the day.
Months later I watched the footage back and saw that, unbeknown to me, Jerry had also cried on that final evening. He said this beautiful thing: ‘If you have the bottle and the right sort of teacher, you can basically do anything.’ I have to report that upon watching it, I broke down in tears again.
Only then did I understand the value of the choir to the kids. Finally, they had realised that I, and everyone else, believed in them enough to say, ‘I reckon you could go and do this incredible thing. You might not succeed, you might not win a medal, but you can at least go there and say you did it. You deserve to be pushed as hard as possible and to be made to sing to the best of your ability.’ I had an opportunity to challenge them. That was a privilege.
It’s an experience that changed us all. Not only do many of them still listen to the ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’ on their iPods, they emerged taller and, I believe, richer as people. I’ve just put the Cantique on in my office and it’s the first time I’ve listened to it since 2006. I simply couldn’t face it until now. I had to stop typing to listen to it. What a stunning piece of music, and even now it transports me back to a wonderful, brave time in a shabby school hall in Middlesex where a group of secondary school kids overcame the odds and entirely failed to win a medal. I know that this piece is with them forever as it is with me. I hold the experience in my heart.
Having never been part of a television series before I wasn’t sure what to expect next. During the months when the editing was under way I had not seen very much, just the bit that is shown at the beginning of each programme where there is a very fast sequence of scenes. When I first watched one of those it was exactly like what they say happens when you drown: your life flashes before you. And every moment that flickered past actually triggered a whole other set of experiences and memories; click, click, click, an incredibly intense feeling of sensory overload.
When the final version of the series was ready I picked up the DVDs early one afternoon, raced home, sat down and watched the entire thing back to back on my own. All I was focused on was whether or not I looked like a complete and utter idiot. That was all I could think. Had I said anything that I was going to regret and were the classical music police going to come round with their sirens wailing, and grab me because I had made a stupid slip and said that Fauré was German rather than French?
What were other choirmasters and conductors going to think?