What had Chloe made of me in those early days? ‘I thought that you were very posh. Strange. I’d never met somebody like you before.’ It seems we both had plenty to learn. It was a culture clash.
As far as the song went, I wasn’t sure about Chloe’s ear, her ability to sing in tune, which is odd in retrospect as she ended up being a soloist, but these were snap decisions based on short auditions. I was also put off because she had chosen an R&B song with lyrics that seemed really inappropriate and sexual – it was one of those awkward moments where a teenager is singing you a song and the basic message of the lyric is, ‘I love you, I want to do intimate stuff with you.’ That had happened a lot during the auditions: teenagers standing there singing all sorts of words to me as if that was normal and me not knowing quite where to look. ‘Thanks. That was … very interesting,’ I’d stutter. Despite Chloe’s uncertain, nervous audition, she had a pleasant voice and way of singing.
I’m amazed how far I was able to get her to progress, especially since she was very, very often a no-show at rehearsals. Chris Modi, the head teacher, had been concerned about her reliability and whether she would be able to commit. I’d phone her to try to track her down … but ‘answer came there none’. Often it turned out she was in detention – or earning another one. And when she did come along she’d be at the back, giving me ‘the face’.
This, of course, was frustrating for the other kids in the choir who turned up to every rehearsal. I am always fond of the good students, the ones who try hard all the time and who really deserve the reward.
One of the star sopranos at Northolt was Mariza De Souza: she was smart, she worked hard, she aimed high, she was at every rehearsal and brought the right sheet music along. Although in the end she did get a small solo when we performed in China, it seemed less prominent in the TV show because the change in her was less obvious, but no less dramatic. She had started off from a high point and continued to get better, but there was not that obvious degree of turnaround that someone like Chloe demonstrated. I didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I heard recently that Mariza is studying physics at Imperial College London. Watch out Brian Cox.
So all those others, like Mariza, deserve their moment of recognition. You cannot help but have those that you prefer, musically speaking, the ones within a choir or a class who are on time, do their homework, have learnt their notes. And then there are those who don’t make an effort. Of course I do not and will not give up on those other ones and always strive to turn them round, not always succeeding. But it is such a joy to have somebody like Mariza who not only worked hard but remembered to say, ‘Thank you!’
Rhonda Pownall was also really impressive, from day one. I dubbed her ‘Agincourt Girl’ because of the stirring speech she gave to the rest of the choir before the final performance. Yet even before the auditions, she had said she was going to go for it, even though she was sceptical at first: ‘The film crew swanned in with you. It felt a little bit like a low-budget X Factor.’
Not only was Rhonda always positive in rehearsal, but she was understanding and helpful to me. She had a lot of maturity and was great about coming to tell me if they were having any problems as a choir, and then reporting back my reaction to the rest of them and helping massage that through. Alongside Mariza and Rhonda there were many of these hard-working kids in the Phoenix Choir, like Lacey and Sophie. I spent a lot of time working with Keecia Ellis because she was a fantastic singer and had a great work ethic. Boys like Enock and Etienne, Marcus and Jerry did their very best and that’s really all you can ask for.
After the first round of auditions failed to turn up any decent basses I went out on a hunt for talent. Somewhere between the vending machine and the grimy sofas of the sixth form common room the gruff voice of Jason Grizzle entered my life. He was extremely unassuming and had a shock of wild Afro hair. Jason showed little early promise, but managed to get through a quick audition.
After the first rehearsal Jason remarked, ‘That is possibly the gayest thing I have ever done in my life.’ There was a bit of kerfuffle at the BBC about whether he was allowed to say that on air or not, because Chris Moyles had recently got into trouble for something similar on his radio show – which is entirely right, but then that was the phrase school kids were using in 2005. So it went in.
Of course, apart from an unpleasant twisting of the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘a bit crap’, this revealed what boys generally made of singing and summed it up rather pithily. Boys fear that singing will make you ‘gay’ or, to put it another way, they fear the feminising force of singing. It’s not really appropriate to ask boys to sing, is it? Shouldn’t they be out on the sports fields hurting each in shorts? This insight into the twenty-first-century ‘boy’ and his singing voice would set me up well for the second series of The Choir.
But enigmatic Jason Grizzle was to turn out to be a real surprise: this kid could really sing. He was one of the people who make me feel, ‘Hang on a minute. Here we have a really good singer.’ He had a great voice. He could remember pitch like no one else in the choir, even though he didn’t play an instrument and had never done any music at all, he had a good head on him and he had ability. And what shocked me was that nobody in the school knew this about him. How could this be the case for somebody in the sixth form?
When I met Jason I asked him whether he could sing: ‘Uh, I don’t know, I’ll try.’ He didn’t know because he had never done any singing, and had never been given the opportunity. Jason’s mate Shaheen encouraged him to come along to a rehearsal, and he turned out to be the absolute rock of the choir. He took the bass line, went home, learnt it and anchored the whole thing. Jason was extremely modest about this achievement.
This really made me question how someone could go through their school education and not have sung a single note from Year 7 to Year 13; it was only when some choirmaster came in and told him he had a good voice that he realised he might be able to sing. Up to that point Jason had had absolutely no idea. He genuinely did have a useful choral voice and it upset me at that time to think how much untapped potential there must be within schools.
I must be careful to acknowledge the pressure that teachers are under and the kind of difficulties they face. My wife is a secondary school teacher and I have seen at first hand the demands of the curriculum. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time over the last fifteen years in classrooms working with teachers. They are under constant scrutiny and assessment. This doesn’t always leave time for the niceties of extra-curricular music.
That said, I hadn’t been greatly impressed with what I’d seen of what Northolt were doing, musically speaking. In the term I arrived there the school play was a staff-written version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and this was for a school of teenagers up to the age of eighteen. I know that the staff weren’t pushing them in the direction that I wanted to go with the choir. Consequently there was a certain tension between me and the music staff there.
From what I could glean, in recent years there had been quite a high turnover of staff in the music department. To me that was a sign of where – at that time – music sat on the overall agenda of the school. The head of the music department was fairly newly qualified, and certainly had not been in her post for very long. I don’t think she was as old as I was, and I’d only just turned thirty. There was also one teacher in the middle of his qualifying period.
Enter Gareth Malone swanning about declaring experience with the London Symphony Orchestra and the English National Opera, blah, blah. They could be forgiven for being really quite irritated. Neither of them had had much chance to get to know the capabilities of the kids outside those who they taught. Neither did they have the resources and allure of a TV company and the time to invest in individuals. So although I tried very hard not to ride roughshod over what the music department was trying to do with limited resources, they would have been perfectly justified in resenting my presence in the school. I’m sure I would have felt the same if I’d been in their shoes.
The head of music wasn’t sure that I’d find anyone who could sing, though it wasn’t her job to look for them. Her contract was simply to get the first three years