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Also by Gareth Malone:
Music for the People
Contents
How Foolish, Foolish Must You Be
Coda: Make This Moment Last for Ever
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