Читать книгу Choir: Gareth Malone - Gareth Malone - Страница 8

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 Northolt most of the kids had this very particular and inexplicable accent – part Estuary, part Asian, part Jamaican, part Ali G. It was a really strange mix to my ears. Perhaps I’m just getting old.

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 of the school through the music curriculum and then concentrate on those who’d elected to study music at GSCE and beyond. But she didn’t realise the lengths I was prepared to go to. Part of my sales pitch to the boys was, ‘We have some nice girls … We might be going to China … We also have biscuits.’ I can be extremely persuasive.

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.