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.
I’ll Sing You a Song
I am not good with heights. I don’t like them at all. So when I found myself teetering rather precariously on the top of a pole at some dizzying height above the ground, I really started questioning the wisdom of agreeing that a high-ropes session would be a wonderful way to do some team-building with the Phoenix Choir. It had seemed like a necessary step, though, since the choir was coming apart.
Slammed doors, cross words and lost time in rehearsals were threatening to derail the choir. I needed to take action. It was only when I was strapped into a harness and craned my neck to see where I was meant to climb that the fear kicked in.
I struggled to get up that pole. I was genuinely frightened. There was no doubt that, for me, this was a major challenge, but despite the terror, I relished the chance to lead by example. I wanted the kids to see me conquer my fear of heights and really push myself, because that was exactly what I was asking for from them. On the high ropes the big issue is learning to trust your harness, to know that if you lose your footing your harness will save you from falling. In the same way the kids in the choir had to learn to trust me, and trust each other.
Our team-building exercise came towards the end of the year and after I’d pushed myself up that pole we all realised that we’d come a long way together, not just literally, but as people. There was a lot of laughter and it was lovely not to be struggling with harmonies in rehearsal for once.
At the end of the day, we pitched a few tents in the field and got a campfire going. I’d brought along my trusty guitar, which has been a loyal companion since my teens, and in the dusk we all sang the Beatles’ ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’. It was a lovely moment where I think they felt a growing sense that singing was now a part of their lives and not something weird. They were all completely happy to sit around and sing a song with absolutely no fear, in front of a load of cameras and, more importantly, in front of each other. That was rather nice. It wasn’t pressured: it was just a normal thing to do.
There had been one moment that day when a couple of the kids joined me at the top of my pole and the three of us stood up there together, literally clinging on to each other, before jumping off. Very weird: you don’t normally expect to do that with your choristers.
In that whole team-building day, Chloe Sullivan (one of the students who climbed up the pole to join me), was the biggest surprise. I suddenly began to understand her. Chloe had been having a hard time: her dad had died when she was in her first year at Northolt. ‘It happened when I just started at high school and my mum re-married the same year. It threw everything up in the air.’ Up until then she had apparently been an outgoing, sparky kid – just like her mum, Fiona – but she had evidently lost quite a lot of the sparkle. At school she was very withdrawn, not enjoying the experience at all.
Yet, in what for me was an incredibly challenging situation, Chloe was taking the team-building day totally in her stride. She had done gymnastics when she was younger, so she was running along these poles with absolutely no fear. I found that really impressive, which gave me a new insight into her character. I had a renewed interest in her as a member of the choir, and a sense of, ‘OK, this experience is doing you good. Even if it’s something that it seems I am forcing you to do.’
I remember an extraordinary change in Chloe during the last few months of the choir. She was making friends within the choir; she was chatty and outgoing. ‘I remember thinking they were quite neeky at first,’ says Chloe down a crackly mobile line from west London. I’m not sure I’ve caught the word correctly. A neek? It’s a mixture of a nerd and a geek. ‘They wasn’t like my type of people. Not part of my social group.’ At first she had made no effort to become part of their group. Before she got to know Chloe better, Rhonda Pownall thought of her as someone who ‘never joined in. Seeing the people she hung around with she was someone I would not associate with. She was intimidated by that as well.’
‘It changed,’ says Chloe. ‘I was more open to different types of people.’ Ultimately it was this that she counts as the highlight of our year: ‘That feeling of togetherness. I hadn’t experienced it before at home or at school. I didn’t have very many close people around me.’
I’d called Chloe to ask her how she felt about the experience now that six years had elapsed since the Phoenix Choir’s trip to China. To my considerable surprise I caught her in the middle of writing an essay about plate tectonics for her BSc in International Studies. She was hoping to go on to find a job in sustainable development. Chloe has changed.
But I couldn’t understand what it was that had persuaded this reluctant scholar to audition in the first place. ‘It was quite a spur of the moment decision to go in for the choir because I wasn’t really involved with stuff that happened at school.’ Chloe is good at understatement; she was often entirely absent. ‘It was quite out of character for me to audition, but I thought on the last afternoon of the audition, “Right, I’m gonna do it.”’
When I agreed to be in the first series I’d thought I was going to be making a programme about choral singing. Having been working in music education introducing young people to classical music, that was my mindset: using popular songs as a way to draw them into the world of choirs. But the programme turned out to be about confidence, and the transformation of Chloe was the essence of that story. From a starting point of having very little self-belief she got to a point where she could stand on a stage and sing a solo.
The first time I had noticed some potential in Chloe Sullivan was quite early on when I took the choir to the Barbican Centre and asked for volunteers to stand up and sing a solo. Slightly to my surprise, Chloe had gone up and had a go, which took more nerve than I thought she had. As I listened to her, I thought, ‘Actually she’s got something, there is a voice there.’ I had a feeling that she would be able to handle a larger role, not just stand in the back of the choir.
That was quite a small decision for me among all the other decisions I was taking to shape the choir, but the effect of that on Chloe’s life was huge: as a teacher you don’t know how a decision you make will affect another person. You never can quite tell who is going to be transformed or how. But I had a sense that there was more to Chloe than she was letting on.
She now tells me that it was crucial for her that I refused to give up on her. ‘It helped that you were persistent instead of ruling me out.’ To be honest, I nearly did. She would have tried the patience of Job. But I could see that Chloe was on the fringes, never quite a part of the group, and I wanted her to be drawn into the choir.
Chloe was at a point in her life where she needed somebody to place their confidence in her. She had gone off the rails, dabbling in areas of life that weren’t helping her. The choir was the beginning of her turning this around. She came across as sullen, shy, reluctant. But I sensed that within Chloe there was something there to encourage, something to draw out. If the feisty Chelsea had stayed at the school and been in the choir, my job with her would have been all about containing her energy; with Chloe the task was to encourage her to let some energy out.
At the auditions, she had not shone particularly brightly. I marked her as ‘borderline’, just over a seven out of ten, my cut-off mark. When I asked her what song she was going to sing to me, she’d mumbled, almost incomprehensibly due to shyness, what sounded like, ‘I doan know ve name of it.’ And who sings it? ‘I doan know dat eeva.’ At