Also by Gareth Malone:

Music for the People

Contents

Just as the Sun Was Rising

If They Only Learn

I’ll Sing You a Song

When You’re Weary

How Foolish, Foolish Must You Be

Those Summer Days

The Night Has Come

Stand Up and Face the World

Really Care for Music

A Better Place to Play

Don’t It Feel Good?

Swear to Art

Someone Has to Believe

Probably Break Down and Cry

Keep Holding On

What Would Life Be?

Light up the Darkness

Home Again

Keep on Turning

Singing with a Swing

Coda: Make This Moment Last for Ever

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

About the Publisher

For my grandmother Patricia – wherever you are

Just as the Sun Was Rising

January 2012. Heathrow Airport

Ping. It’s my phone. My mother is texting: ‘Get a copy of the Mail’. I’m about to board a flight to America to shoot a pilot for USA Network, which is strange enough, really. But what I read in a free copy of the Daily Mail while I’m waiting by the gate at Terminal 5 makes me aware of just how far I have come since my days selling ice cream on Bournemouth beach.

It’s now the New Year. The Military Wives have their victory – their single was Christmas Number One – and I’m busy jotting down ideas for an album on the back of my boarding pass. The whole extraordinary news furore that surrounded the release of ‘Wherever You Are’ has gone as cold as the weather outside and yet out of the blue one man breathes life back into the story.

In black and white, one of the most famous men in the world is quoted describing me (a tweedy choirmaster with a penchant for the music of Schubert and a love of country rambles) as follows: ‘He is like a stealth missile, he has sort of crept up on everyone. He would be good for us. I wasn’t furious about the Army Wives single beating us, I had two copies of it on pre-order.’ This is Simon Cowell speaking, no less, and I realise that my life has been irrevocably changed.

••••

Mr Cowell was not the first Simon to change my life.

In November 2005 I had a party for my thirtieth birthday. Having moved to London four years earlier – like everyone else, trying to make it in the big city – I had got together with Becky, who is now my wife, and it was a chance for us both to celebrate with all of our friends.

I felt good that night: not only did I actually have the £200 I needed to put behind the bar (a revolutionary moment after living a student’s life for two years), but when people asked me, ‘What are you doing next?’ I was able to say, ‘Oh, I’m making a series for BBC Two.’ It was an exhilarating time. In fact, the very first day of filming on the first series of The Choir was on my actual birthday: 9 November 2005. Now that’s how to turn thirty.

A few months earlier, I had just finished a massive London Symphony Orchestra project assisting American conductor Marin Alsop with the chorus on a project she was doing with the London Symphony Orchestra. This job had been a significant step-up for me as only weeks before I’d finished studying. Sat there in our slightly shabby West Hampstead box-cum-flat on my first morning off, I dithered over my next move while drinking a third cup of viciously strong coffee. I was exhausted, so I’d decided to relax, take the Monday really easy and have a lazy duvet day where I could sit and watch This Morning and not think about classical music at all.

But first I elected to have a long shower. Returning to my desk an hour later I found a message on my mobile from Simon Wales, a colleague of mine at LSO St Luke’s, the London Symphony Orchestra’s education centre.

The message was short and to the point. ‘We’ve had a call from someone from a TV company called Twenty Twenty. Would you be interested in being on a television programme?’ Forget the duvet day; I was intrigued and spurred into action.

The first thing I did was go to the Twenty Twenty website and check out the programmes that they had already produced. What caught my eye was that they had made Brat Camp. A couple of years earlier I had been quite ill one Christmas so I had been lying in bed watching television when the ‘Where Are They Now?’ update version of the show came on. The one-hour special revisited the whole journey and interviewed the kids who had participated in it (and their parents), allowing them to reflect on the impact the experience had made on their lives. I don’t mind admitting that it reduced me to floods of tears (a running theme in this book).

Years later I worked with the directors of that original series of Brat Camp and discovered that they had filmed the programme the hard way: that they’d lived in the Arizona desert and stayed with those kids for months and months to capture the amazing transformation in their lives.

As a rule I didn’t take anybody to the desert for therapy sessions, but I had been working in music education, which I’d found to be powerfully life-changing for many people. I imagined that something with a similar structure to Brat Camp could be done with music education. This was how I approached the project, thinking I could do the job I had been doing all over London to bring music into different schools and communities. I’ve always been zealous in wanting to encourage others to make music.

Music is part of my life: I have always sung. I remember my mother singing proper lullabies to me at bedtime. The sound of her voice was a very soothing presence when I was a young child. She would often sing an English folk song called ‘Early One Morning’, or ‘I Knew an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’; simple songs for us adults but so absorbing when you are a child. I would join in on songs like ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, and become very involved in the story, visualising the spider clambering up the drainpipe. It’s lovely to sing these songs to my own daughter, rather like passing on the baton.

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 seemed like the perfect combination: a posh, baby-faced choirmaster who nobody would think could win a bunch of rough kids over, with the passion and the skills to actually do it.’

So it was that, armed with a little Sony PD150 camera, a girl called Dee from Twenty Twenty who knew how to focus the thing came over to St Luke’s and did some filming of a rehearsal of my children’s choir. I gave it my all. Things went quiet again for a while. I had an agonising wait for any news about the series over that summer. Even though I was thrilled by the prospect, I didn’t want to alert too many people by telling them that I had been approached to be in the series, just in case it all came to nothing.

Life went on. I graduated from my post-graduate course in vocal studies at the Royal Academy of Music in June. Afterwards, at lunch with my parents in Getti’s Italian restaurant on Marylebone High Street, with me wearing all my finery and clutching my certificate from the Academy, I told them: ‘Oh, I’ve had a phone call about this possible television project, but it probably won’t amount to anything because I don’t think they’ve got a broadcaster involved. It is all very early days.’

To my parents it didn’t seem that improbable that the TV job might happen. They had become used to the idea of me working, not just for the LSO but also with English National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House on various education projects. However, I had begun other projects that had then fallen through, so in a very British way we were all quite reserved about the idea. But secretly I was really bloody excited.

It was important to me that my parents knew, because they had always been supportive of my musical ventures. My mother was, and is, a very good singer, who had studied as a child. She has a very pretty soprano voice, and loves opera. In fact, she had first met my father at the Gilbert & Sullivan Society in Tooting.

My father is also very musical, with wide-ranging tastes. His is a completely amateur enthusiasm, but he knows a huge amount about music, has an encyclopaedic memory for the Great American Songbook or anything twentieth-century, and rock and pop music up to circa 1972.

My maternal grandmother came from Mountain Ash in the valleys of South Wales, hence me being called Gareth. My grandfather was part of a theatrical family full of musical comedians, actors and actresses, so there was a huge amount of performance on my mother’s side of the family. I definitely think the humour and the clowning I often resort to comes directly from this – there is music and performance in my veins.

Over that summer of 2005 nothing much happened. I think it was heading towards the end of September when I got a call from Twenty Twenty, who had been busy pulling the series pitch together. At the end of an insane afternoon’s session for English National Opera, in a children’s centre working with about fifty toddlers, I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was Ana. She very simply said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it, it’s been commissioned.’ I asked, ‘What does that mean?’ ‘It means you are making a television programme.’

Click. It was one of those life-defining moments where I thought, ‘This could change absolutely everything but then again it could change absolutely nothing.’ At that stage I had the feeling that the series might just get put on at 11.30pm and ten of my parents’ friends would watch it. I worried that it would be like so many TV programmes: utterly forgettable.

But I did consider what might happen if people liked the series. One night in our flat in West Hampstead I had a seminal conversation with Becky. It was getting late and as we got up from the sofa to go to bed, I said, ‘If we say yes to this series, it could completely change our lives. We have got to consider that. What if it goes to five or six series?’ That seemed like a total pipe dream at the time, but when you are signing up for something like this, you just don’t know. It’s like being at the top of a rollercoaster waiting for it to begin – sickening but thrilling.

My gut told me that this could be a good thing, that it would use all my skills to good effect. That gave me confidence about it. But I didn’t want to dither about whether I was going to take the plunge or not. That evening Becky and I both agreed, ‘Yep, we’re prepared. Let’s do this.’ To be honest we had no idea what we were getting into. We were two students. What did we know?

What I did know was that I enjoyed talking, and that was going to come in handy if I was featuring in a television programme. I am an only child so I have never wanted for attention. As a boy I had had loads of adult company. I was always spoken to as an adult, and talked, a lot, at a very early age. I always say I could talk for England.

One way and another I was confident that I could perform on television, but I did not realise the size of the challenge that Ana had dreamt up for me: ‘Do you think you could take a group of children who’ve never sung before and get them ready for the World Choir Games in China?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I sucked in some air. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

The prospect of taking a school choir to the World Choir Games in China the following summer sounded like a good focus for the whole adventure. How naïve I was. I had no idea of the difficulty involved. But for time being I put fear and dread aside, sipped the first of too many pints of London Pride and got on with my thirtieth birthday party.

If They Only Learn

My first taste of this new reality was walking into Northolt High School. Northolt had been chosen for the first series of The Choir because it was in an area of ‘relative deprivation’ as the headmaster put it: that was the phrase everyone bandied about. The TV company weren’t going to send me to Eton after all – they wanted a place that screamed, ‘There is no choir here.’ That suited me fine.

Northolt wasn’t a place I knew much about, other than its location off the A40 heading west out of London and that it had a tube station somewhere along the far reaches of the Central Line. I discovered as I arrived in Northolt that it had a nice little duck pond in an almost villagey centre. And there was also this huge and forbidding school.

When I saw the buildings they immediately reminded me of the school I had been to in Bournemouth. ‘Oh, it’s one of those schools,’ I said, on camera. I was thinking about the period of architecture, but that brief remark got me into a bit of trouble.

What I’d really meant but failed to get across was, ‘It’s one of those schools from that particular era of architecture, built in a hurry just after the war,’ exactly like some of my school’s prefab buildings. What rather a lot of people imagined I meant was, ‘Oh, it’s one of those schools,’ as if I’d been educated up the road in Harrow on the Hill. Quite a few people got really upset, and I had several letters of complaint (another running theme in this book). In fact, when the programme went out, I had a text from my cousin Keith immediately after that comment was aired saying, ‘You’ve just lost a million viewers.’ A little too late I realised that everything I said might be taken out of context. There was a lot for me to learn.

Northolt had 1,300 pupils and, like all large schools, there was constant activity and noise, with kids and staff swirling around on a typical morning. Spotting me arriving, one smart alec shouted, ‘It’s Harry Potter!’ out of the window when he should have been concentrating on maths. This led to me having the nickname among the production staff of ‘Gary Potter’. Thanks very much to that young gentleman.

I suspected the BBC thought I might not survive but that it would make jolly good telly. However, I felt fairly robust going in there and not unduly daunted. I’d spent years working in places like Hackney, Lambeth and Tower Hamlets in some pretty hot situations. I knew how to handle myself – oh yes – or I thought I did. On the day I’d started with the London Symphony Orchestra in 2001 I had found myself in a classroom full of 30 decidedly sweaty teenage boys in Hackney, left alone in charge of them with just a double bass player for moral support, as the teacher seemed to have disappeared. Now that definitely was intimidating. Surely Northolt would be a walk in the park?

What I didn’t feel all right about was being filmed; that was much more stomach-churning. Shortly before filming I’d sat down with the director of the series, Ludo Graham, in the Black Lion pub in Kilburn for a ‘getting to know you’ pint. Ludo, who is married to Kate Humble from Springwatch, was very experienced in this kind of television. Previously he had made Paddington Green, a documentary series in which he had followed characters from a small corner of London for a year or so. Over some London Pride and before I had fully signed up to the project, Ludo attempted to reassure me that making a TV programme would not finish my career if I trusted him.

Ludo spoke a little bit about Kate’s presenting career, and what he had observed about her experience of that. ‘Gareth,’ he told me, ‘I want you just to do your job, and for me to be there filming everything. When it goes well, I want to be right there knowing straight afterwards that it went well. Equally when it is bad, I want to see you pissed off at the end of the day and irritated. I want you to tell me that and believe that I will edit it fairly. Sometimes you might go too far, you’ll say something because you are emotional and tired, but you’ve got to trust me. It will be fair and balanced.’

His argument was that everyone lets off steam: you come home from a bad day at work and badmouth your boss to your wife, husband or whoever is around, and then you have a glass of wine and a sit-down and everything’s OK again. It’s part of the process of getting it out of your system. That was exactly what Ludo wanted. Ludo has a winning charm and I began to believe that it would be all right.

For a programme about music this was something of a leap of faith, because up until then in most documentaries about the arts that I had seen, everyone was on their best behaviour: ‘Well, when I worked with Sir so-and-so we got on very well, lovely chap, etc.’ You didn’t tend to see the rawness of the preparation and the ups and downs of the journey to get there. This was a chance to show the reality of struggling through difficulties to reach the final performance.

Perhaps because I had watched Brat Camp, I had seen how engagingly human that emotionally frank style of TV could turn out to be, and that it was important to have those peaks and troughs. The chat with Ludo had a big influence on me: it set me up for the way I approached the making of The Choir, which has been very, dare I say, organic, very much about following me setting up each of the choirs, on the good days and the bad: I am doing my job, making the decisions, dealing with the challenges, all under constant scrutiny. It’s been seven years now, so I have learnt to adjust to the pressure, but back in 2005 it was a very different story.

I was apprehensive about handing my life over to that degree. What made me feel a little more comfortable was that I was not handing my personal life over. This wasn’t going to be like The Osbournes. But I was handing my professional life over. And I didn’t even feel like it was the part of my professional life at which I was best. At the time I felt I was just getting good at singing. I was having lessons at a high level. That side of my life was going well, so what on earth was I doing trying to tackle a bunch of teenage kids and persuade them to start singing for me? I didn’t even consider myself to be a conductor.

One plus point was that I wasn’t living too far away from Northolt. Becky and I were renting a flat just off West End Lane in West Hampstead. During the series Ludo used an exterior shot of the outside of the building, which was a typical London town house. The building had four floors, was semi-detached and looked as though Gwyneth Paltrow or Nigella Lawson might live inside it.

In reality, the space had been carved up into small flats. We were living in two tiny rooms with the kitchen squeezed into one corner. We had all of our stuff crammed in. My office, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen and my rehearsal room were basically all the same space. On television it appeared as if we owned the whole house and people assumed I was this highfalutin choral director, which was a very long way from the truth. Every week I would catch the bus to Northolt. Heady days.

On that first day at Northolt High School what became clear to me was that music was not at the heart of the school’s activities. It was a foundation school that specialised in technology: indeed, I was given a tour round the brand-new information technology block. We weren’t actually going to be filming in there, but I could see that the head teacher, Chris Modi, was really proud of the new building. So we dutifully walked round, admiring the advanced network capabilities and smelling the new paint. I had a feeling at the time that this might not make it into the final documentary.

What I really wanted to know was what musical opportunities there were within the school. Because of the strong focus on technology, music just wasn’t a central part of the school ethos at the time. As Chris Modi himself put it, this was ‘fertile but unploughed ground’. This is not uncommon in schools where the head teacher is not particularly interested in music. It’s not that they are failing in their obligations to teach music, but there is a sense that they aren’t going the extra mile.

Against this background I needed to find some secret element of alchemy that would allow me to locate undiscovered talent and convert that, in an environment where singing was not really on the agenda, into a choir the whole school could support and be proud of. No mean feat. Without a large existing pool of singers to draw on there was nothing for it: I needed to get stuck into the auditioning process.

From early on, staff at the school had issues with the whole idea of auditioning: they hated the fact that we were going to be auditioning children on TV. They were terribly worried about it turning into something like The X Factor, and that we would humiliate the kids who weren’t good at singing. It was a fair concern. That was absolutely not what I wanted to do, but I did have to select the singers who would have the aptitude and commitment for this huge task. Creating a choir that could be selected for the World Choir Games in China was going to be a serious business. And besides, there were only 25 places on the plane.

Bournemouth School, where I was educated, was a selective grammar school. Everyone who was there had won a place by passing an exam. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the system, it had got me used to the idea of selection. Being auditioned seemed a perfectly normal thing to me: I’d been going to auditions since I was ten. I’d learnt early on that sometimes you didn’t get the part, that there was always the possibility of being rejected. At school I had missed out on being Romeo in Romeo and Juliet – a boy in the year below me got it. OK, that still rankles. But in general the idea of rejection was fine for me because I’ve got the resilience to bounce back and try again.

My school also had an atmosphere where achievement was really valued by the students and striving was cool. If you had the best result in the test, you got respect for it. You wanted to do well. I wanted to achieve. My school had both offered possibilities and fostered ambition: they encouraged you to go off and start your own projects and do whatever you wanted. It gave me a level of self-belief that has stayed with me ever since.

From many of the kids who auditioned I detected much less overt ambition. Like most teenagers they were content with the styles of music they knew and certainly would have seen little personal benefit in attempting to tackle the choral classics. Choral singing was not exactly the prevailing musical interest at Northolt High School when I turned up in 2005. Choir was not cool.

An audition process for me seemed the only way to tell who was serious and who just fancied being on TV. About 160 kids turned up. Something about the chance to go to China and to be on television caught their imagination and for some it kick-started a determination to succeed. Aiming high is so important in life. Why aim for the middle? I wanted to show these kids that you could do something truly adventurous.

Rhonda Pownall was one of the singers whose voice I liked a lot. She says that she was shocked by some of the kids who turned up to the auditions. She had thought it would be ‘the same faces who did singing. Asking people at high school to go and sing in front of a camera that was going to be broadcast nationwide was like asking them to perform star jumps in their vests in assembly.’

The auditioning took two full, very long days, with me sitting at the upright piano and the kids walking in one after another. I didn’t have long to assess their singing, but over the years I have become quite good at recognising who has potential. I usually know about three notes in. So I asked each of them to sing me a song, cold and unaccompanied, which told me masses. If they were singing something where I could discern a tune, even if was a song I didn’t know, that was always a very good sign.

Sometimes, however, it was hard to tell. A lot of the kids sang their own version of R&B songs with what appeared to be no discernable note, merely a collection of groans and squeaks. My brain was genuinely struggling to recognise the contours of what they were singing. If I couldn’t recognise a tune I’d say, ‘Right, sing me “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star”,’ because pretty much everyone in every culture knows that song. It’s also a good tune for testing singers: there’s a tricky interval, a fifth, in the melody, and if somebody couldn’t manage that, then I knew that they would struggle in the choir.

I had my bellyful of Mariah Carey-style R&B singing. That style of singing uses a tone that I have worked hard to avoid both in my own singing and when working with young people. I feel it is all too often the facsimile of emotion, a sham, effectively saying, ‘Listen to me, everybody, look how emotional I’m feeling.’ Ghastly. From a vocal point of view the auditionees were using their noses as a kind of resonator and had a collection of vocal tics and burps that were carried off with considerably more panache by Whitney Houston (RIP). This style works for Mariah Carey because when it comes to the big notes, she can deliver; there is muscular support there, there’s an actual sound. But when it is adopted by 13- and 14-year olds, it can sound like foxes mating.

I followed that up with an ear test, playing them a few notes for them to sing back to me. This instantly sorted the wheat from the chaff. Unsurprisingly, some of the students found this to be impossible. I managed to contain my exasperation as many of them valiantly, but ultimately unsuccessfully, tackled some tricky intervals. I gave each of them a score out of ten, and if they were below a seven, there was no way I could have them in the choir. Full stop. It came down to ability.

Sometimes it was a small difference, a dab of performance skill, that helped. Rhonda did a little dance while she sang ‘Tainted Love’ and that made her stand out for me when I was looking back through the 160 faces as ‘the girl who did the dance’. She remembers the audition as nerve-wracking. ‘I was terrified. I was shaking. You were laughing a bit, you did the note test, and then I went outside and had a quick panic attack.’

When I came out of the auditions I was worried about the boys, many of whom were struggling with the trauma of their voices changing (I much prefer ‘changing’ to ‘breaking – they don’t break, they just grow), and the fact that I didn’t have a single sixth-former out of a fairly reasonably-sized sixth form: not one. I don’t know whether that was my fault or their fault, but we struggled to reach that age group. On the other hand I was very confident about the quality of the girls’ voices. There was some real talent there. Clarion-voiced Lisa was a real turn-up and in a superb example of nominative determinism(had her parents had an inkling?), Melody Chege turned out to have a lovely melodic voice. Even so, in my selected 30 for the choir of 25 plus 5 reserves, I only had 19 definites and 11 maybes.

Quite soon after gathering the choir together to start work (it was my Fame moment: ‘This is where the real audition begins!’), I hit a problem. I wanted to include a girl called Chelsea Campbell in the choir, but she was in the middle of what they call in educational circles a ‘managed move’, which meant she was being relocated to another school. Nobody would say why but I assume she’d been in trouble of some kind. Although I had not spent more than five minutes with her, the moment when the head told me she couldn’t be in the choir was included in the documentary.

After the programme aired I received a bunch of letters stating that it was unfair and that I should have fought harder with Chris Modi for her inclusion, but it wasn’t as if I was pre-warned, ‘Go in there and fight for Chelsea’ – Chris said no and I had to respect his decision. The letters all said ‘how wrong the school was’, but in fact as far as the school was concerned it was quite a minor administrative decision: she doesn’t go to this school any more, so she can’t be in the choir. Although it might have appeared unjust, that was the reality. Chelsea had a rough couple of years at Northolt and it was time for her to move on. Goodness knows what running the choir would have been like if she had stayed, because she was very feisty; she had it written all over her face. At least I had a choir. I can’t say I was leaping about with joy. I had some great singers and some concerns, but although the choir was imperfect, I could start rehearsals with them.

We began with a bump. From the very first scales I could hear some distinctly unpleasant noises akin to a vacuum cleaner being started up or the braying of a clearly unwell donkey. Nevertheless I was resolutely chirpy: I would make this group sing if it killed me.

In order to enter the World Choir Games each choir has to submit a recording as well as the repertoire for the final performance. I was taking a risk since the choir had been together for only a few weeks. Normally I would not have submitted a repertoire until I knew what they sounded like – how can you tell what an imaginary choir will be able to achieve? I certainly didn’t know what sound I would ultimately be able to draw from the Northolt High School choir. I hoped it wouldn’t be the sick donkey one. Also, I would never generally make a recording until the choir had been properly rehearsed, so we were ridiculously unprepared for what came next.

After only a few sessions with the choir, I took them down to a local recording studio in Chiswick to make a CD. We had a limited amount of time, about an hour or so, to record ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ from The Lion King. It was one of my first times in a recording studio, so I was learning the ins and outs of the technique while the kids thought they’d hit the big time and were buzzing about finding themselves in a studio.

Early in our development though this was, we didn’t have a choice because the submission had to go in around the Christmas holidays. I was spooked by this and so was really determined to make the recording as good as we possibly could despite time being against us. However, I couldn’t work miracles. Some of the singers hadn’t yet learnt the notes.

For me a particular low point was when I asked Raul, one of the less confident singers, not to sing on one of the takes. I was caught between wanting to create a recording that would get us into the World Choir Games and appearing heavy-handed and insensitive to a boy who was doubtless trying his best. The fact was that Raul was brilliantly keen and had positioned himself right in front of the microphone. He was bellowing. And it wasn’t sounding great. I knew it, the choir knew it and the recording engineer told me that it was obliterating the sound of the rest of the basses and tenors. I tried moving him back a little. That didn’t work (I could still hear him). I made a snap decision, which I regretted later: I asked him not to sing.

I learnt a valuable lesson from this moment. There is a balance to be struck between artistic ideals and educational motivation. I got it wrong that day. That is, of course, what I feared: that my mistakes would be highlighted on BBC Two and as I watched myself back months later I cursed the decision and hoped that the public and Raul would forgive me.

Would I do the same today? I hope I would have found a better way to ask him, perhaps more sensitively suggesting that he sing more quietly because his ‘powerful voice’ was cutting through or some other way of sugaring the pill. So do I regret asking Raul to pipe down? Yes.

To his immeasurable credit Raul bowed out of the take and we got something down that was passably in tune. In retrospect, most of the singers were shouting, but they had very little experience of singing, a lack which was matched only by my own inexperience of the situation.

This was a moment that I reflected on for months and which I believe gave rise to my working method for series two: Boys Don’t Sing … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

After we had finished singing, we went into the control booth to listen to the playback. This is always an amazing moment. Ashley, one of the younger girls who had a feisty attitude and a neat turn of phrase, turned to me with a look of shock on her face and said, ‘You can hear everything …’. She was horrified because she had thought, as many people do, that there was ‘studio magic’ that would suddenly make them sound good.

It was their first experience of hearing themselves singing. They were quite shocked that all the sections that were rough around the edges could be heard. They had had enough rehearsals to know the music and wanted to get it right, so they were alarmed when it didn’t sound absolutely perfect.

I don’t think they were all that impressed with the CD (I know I wasn’t), although Rhonda played it to her mum, who cried buckets when she heard it. Bless her for that. For Rhonda the recording studio was the moment that changed things. ‘We hadn’t really bonded with anyone else in the group. We knew people, but it was still, “Oh, hi.” But at the studio we had a chance to go, “This is actually serious. Let’s do it and enjoy it”, and we started talking.’

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.

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