Even with Jason Grizzle and a few of the other sixth-formers on board, however, the lower end of the voices was still very fragile. I had plenty of good sopranos – Mariza, Lacey and Keecia in particular – and altos, including Marcus, Gemma and Laura, but the foundations beneath them were as rocky as the pole I had climbed up on that team-building day. And I was now starting to push them harder with far more demanding classical works.
Around Easter time I decided that we should do a performance in a school assembly to get the choir ready for China. As we entered the fray it was like a bear pit, the smell of aggression was ripe in the air and feral Year 11s circled like a pack of wolves waiting for the kill. The piece I had chosen for us to sing was Vivaldi’s Gloria.
We survived the day to moderate applause. The truth was that the tenors and basses had started to sing the tune rather than their harmony line. Afterwards one of the girls who had been listening, said, so sweetly, ‘Oh yes, they should win. They sound like a professional choir.’ I doubt she’d heard many professional choirs …
In the back of my mind I knew that as part of the choral programme I was planning for the choir to sing in China there was a piece by Fauré, ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’, that was not only in French, but significantly harder to sing than any of the other pieces. The next few months were not going to be easy. Time was seriously running out.
Nonetheless the choir was starting to make an impact in the school and Rhonda, the choir’s motivational centre of gravity, recalls that a few students who hadn’t auditioned started to regret it: ‘I think a lot of people were very jealous. There were a few snide comments.’
By now the choir had become an all-consuming project. It was dominating my every waking hour, because although I did have other work to do during the nine months I was working with the choir at Northolt, I put nearly all of it on hold to make sure that I had time for the choir. I was spending any days off doing preparation work for my visits to Northolt and thinking about what I was going to do and how I was going to overcome the challenge of getting this still pretty much scratch choir ready to appear in the world’s biggest international choir competition.
Emotionally it was intensive. I would build myself up to a main rehearsal each Thursday, which was intended to be the high point of the week, but which often turned out to be a low point because of the problems it threw up. Each week I would start out thinking to myself, ‘I have got to get this right, we must learn this much music this week or else we are not going to be in good shape for China, always assuming we’re selected.’
Then in rehearsal I’d find that something always got in the way, that one of my key tenors hadn’t turned up for rehearsal or that everyone had gone down with the lurgy. Another week went by with the choir no closer to learning the pieces; I was feeling pressured. With hindsight, I think I could have cut myself a little bit of slack: it wasn’t an easy task I’d been set.
I felt very much on my own. It was alarming. I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about what I was doing. The only confidantes I had were the camera, and the director. And Becky, of course. She lived and breathed the whole experience with me despite having pneumonia during the filming (thanks, Becky – it was a tough year).
The day was drawing closer when we would board the plane to China. Shortly before we were due to travel, we gave a performance of the pieces to the school and the parents. Becky came to watch and was fairly silent afterwards, which I took to be a bad sign. On the train heading back home she turned to me and said quietly, ‘They’re not good.’ I was absolutely gutted. I had been working on the project for nine months by then and I knew what they had sounded like back at the beginning of the process. But in fact it was a real help that Becky had been so frank; it gave me the kick I needed. I went back to the remaining few rehearsals and drilled the choir harder than ever, and the standard of their singing went up considerably.
In June 2006 I felt a weight of expectation to get through the first round of the Choir Games in China. I needed to prove myself, and at that stage it was going to be about musical achievement, not about what it would mean to the kids. In subsequent series working with the other choirs, I changed my tack – not least because of the experience in Northolt – towards how singing in a choir can change your life, how it could change attitudes. I set myself more nuanced ambitions, whereas working with the Phoenix Choir was at times entirely about musical achievement. We rehearsed those songs until we were almost sick of them
My focus was to get the choir, by hook or by crook, to as high a standard as they could reach. I had asked each of those kids to trust me that I would make them sound good. It was time to deliver on my promise.
When You’re Weary
I am not ashamed to admit that on the night after the Northolt Phoenix Choir performed at the World Choir Games in China, I ended up crying my eyes out. I’m a crier, don’t get me wrong, but this was different. I blubbed. Sobbed. All the pressure, all the tension, all the responsibility I had been carrying for nine months flooded out of me like a dam bursting.
We had done our competition performance early that morning. Bearing in mind that there was eight hours’ time difference, I don’t think any of us even knew what day it was. The results of the first round were due out later that evening. I had spent a lot of the intervening time marching up and down a huge flight of steps in front of the Xiamen People’s Hall for some shots that the film crew needed, so I was feeling physically exhausted.
I hadn’t had any dinner, and, believe me, I’m not good when I haven’t eaten any dinner. By the time the results came out it was a quarter to ten. It came up on a plasma screen inside this edifice to communism. I shrugged and thought about my stomach.
We hadn’t got through. I felt quite sanguine about it; I didn’t think we deserved it. We weren’t as good as the others, but the choir had genuinely given it their very best shot and I loved them for that, because so many of them had worked harder on this than anything else in their lives. I know I had.
I went back to the hotel where all the kids were waiting to hear whether we had made it through to the second round. I didn’t beat about the bush: I let them know as simply and straightforwardly as I could that we were out of the competition and going home with a certificate. They were also totally fine about it: I had prepared them well for the possibility. And then a few of the kids, Rhonda, Laura and Jerry, came up to me and said, ‘We don’t want you to go. We want you to stay.’
And those few words did it. I was absolutely broken by them. I started to cry. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t crying because we hadn’t made it through. It was because of a whole collection of different emotions.
I had grown fond of the choir and I knew that this was a finite project. Even though I had arranged for the school’s choir to continue, I felt like I was leaving them and that was something I was really ambivalent about. On top of all that was a major dose of jetlag, as well as the release of all the tension, and sheer relief at having got to the end of this journey with the pressure of all the scrutiny I had been under, with television cameras observing me close up for nine months.
I was also going to be leaving the TV crew I had got to know so well: Ludo the director, Sam the sound guy, Dave the cameraman; these great guys I had spent so much time with. I had no idea if I would ever shoot another day of TV again.
And I was sobbing because I was thinking, ‘Look what these kids achieved, look how much they are transformed by this, look how they feel about being in a choir now.’ And in that moment I felt angry too. Angry that more young people didn’t have this kind of life-changing opportunity. It was a seminal moment that would change the course of my career and my life. There is no word for the emotion I felt that evening: a mixture of pride, relief and loss but above all happiness that it had worked. I was happy for these kids.
As I sat there bawling my eyes out, the indefatigable soundman Sam Mathewson