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.
This was the beginning of an on-going connection with music, from stress-inducing competitions and piano exams to the excitement of duet lessons with a fellow pupil called Helen (with whom I was deeply in love when I was nine).
At ten years old I had my first taste of professional music-making. My school music teacher, David Naylor, came into the school orchestra rehearsal full of excitement to tell us that Andrew Lloyd Webber was seeking children to be part of the touring production of Evita. I was determined to get into the show. Andrew Lloyd Webber was sending someone to our school to run the auditions.
Michael Stuckey was the man he sent to find some stage-ready kids. Michael was to have the biggest influence on my life of anyone I ever met. He dazzled me with a combination of keyboard mastery and an easy manner with young people. He did not patronise me; he expected the very best. I met him for all of 20 minutes but they were 20 minutes I have never forgotten. I got into the choir and was sent a cassette with Michael’s voice teaching me the part. I had it on loop for a month. And I can still sing every note: ‘Please gentle Eva, will you bless a little child? For I love you …’. I fell in love with the stage during 16 wonderful performances of what I consider to be a very fine musical. Should the call come, I’m ready to play any of the parts. From memory. (Just in case you’re reading this, Andrew.)
Years passed, and when I came to work with young people I realised that I wanted to do it just like Michael Stuckey. I wanted to change people’s lives in the same way he had changed mine. I sought him out in 1999 through a new and exciting website called Google, and was sorry to hear that he had died unexpectedly years before. No doubt he’s whipped the celestial children’s choir into shape by now.
After that pivotal experience I began performing whenever and wherever possible. If there was a musical opportunity I was there: singing Christmas carol concerts, playing in the orchestra, learning percussion, piano lessons, doing music theory. At home I made up songs based around what was happening in my life. I wrote my first publicly performed piece of music (which, now that I think of it, was heavily derivative of the ITV Miss Marple music) for a school play in the first year of secondary school.
In my teens I started several rock/pop combos, the first of which was called Silence Is Purple. A later band was Little Nicola; we played a few gigs around the Bournemouth area in which I screeched my way with far too much vocal effort through some self-penned songs influenced by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd – all very retro. Choirs. Orchestras. Jazz bands. It didn’t matter what the music was, I wanted to be involved.
All of this experience gave me a conviction that I could use music as a tool for self-discovery and that I could get any young person interested, given the right chance. A TV programme could be just that opportunity.
I arranged to meet up with Ana DeMoraes, now the head of development at Twenty Twenty, but then a more lowly member of the development department. It was Ana who had had the original idea to do something with choirs. Ana is a fascinating and unusual product of Brazilian and Japanese parentage, but since she has lived in the UK for over ten years she is also a passionate Anglophile. She is quiet and thoughtful, with an impeccable sense of what is fashionable in footwear. She’s also the most creative person I’ve ever met.
I later found out how Ana had tracked me down. At that time if you Googled the words ‘community choir’, mine was the first name to come up, because there was a brief CV and a photo of me on the London Symphony Orchestra’s website and the LSO had a high Google rating. Ana had looked at that and thought, ‘Oh, he might be half-presentable.’ There was a short clip of me singing a song with some kids and talking about what I was doing with the community choir, so Ana realised that I could string a couple of sentences together. Simultaneously she had contacted the LSO and asked them for some recommendations, and they’d said, ‘Oh yes, we’ve got the perfect person, Gareth Malone,’ so – thank you, LSO – they had put her straight on to me.
Ana’s voice is chirpy and she delivers her body blows in a silk glove. Her first audacious idea sounded almost impossible: ‘Could you go into a community and get it singing? In about nine weeks?’ ‘I could,’ I said, ‘but, to be honest, to make it a real and lasting project, you would need an enormous amount of time because it is very difficult to get a whole community onside.’
I had first-hand experience of this because I had been doing precisely that for the London Symphony Orchestra, working with local people just north of the Barbican. It is a very mixed area, with a strong Turkish enclave and a white working-class community, but there are also plenty of affluent people who live in the Barbican flats.
For a couple of years I had been trying to create a community choir by bringing all the different groups in the neighbourhood together: there was a little old lady who lived over the road from the church, one guy from down at the Barbican Centre and some kids from the local school. At that stage I had about 35 singers in the choir, but I was finding it really hard to get a sense of the choir as representing that whole community. Ana DeMoraes was suggesting repeating the experience in a matter of weeks. It was impossible.
I hastily warned Ana off that particular idea for the time being (although it would re-emerge three years later as Unsung Town), and suggested that we should try to create a choir in a school instead. I had also done a lot of work in schools and knew that the experience would be much more contained and controllable. It would give me the opportunity to work with a small group every single week, which is far more manageable.
Ana was intrigued and came down to one of the children’s choir rehearsals at St Luke’s, a beautiful Hawksmoor church where the LSO has been based since 2003. She says that the first thing she thought when she met me was, ‘He looks like one of the kids!’ But although in her eyes I looked so young: ‘The minute the rehearsal started, you were in control. I could tell the kids absolutely adored you. They wanted to please you. It reminded me of what I was like with my favourite teachers at school. And that had to be a good thing.’ She also thought that the warm-up exercises I started the rehearsal with ‘would make good telly’.
Apparently happy with what she had seen, Ana went away to do some more work on the concept. At that point the idea for the series was one of a social experiment. What would happen if we sent a genteel choirmaster into the lions’ den of a secondary school? Would he be ripped apart? Would it be gladiatorial? Would there be blood? I’m sure that someone at the BBC relished the prospect of a few chunks being taken out of me. Ana certainly saw some potential. ‘It