Saturday interview: Gareth Malone

For him, singing is just an extension of speaking. “There is voice and communication and singing is just part of a continuum. People say rap isn’t singing, but it’s still performative, it’s still using the same instruments, the lungs and the larynx. Some people feel scared of crossing the line between singing and speaking. You can help them improve and give them confidence.”

There were no auditions for the Military Wives Choir that featured in his BBC Two show last year. Instead, the presenter toured Armed Forces estates in Plymouth putting flyers through doors to recruit members. “There are a couple who are not world-class singers by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a question of balance. You don’t want your less confident singers singing louder than everyone else. Sometimes you have to say, ‘Just tone it down a little bit’.”

After the recent death of six British soldiers in Afghanistan, which took the tally of fatalities to above 400, he says there is a cathartic property to music. “The entire purpose is therapeutic. At the moment we’re in the middle of a media bubble. I spoke to one of the wives, who said, ‘I’ve been up to London on a coach 64 times. My husband’s getting fed up of babysitting and the hullabaloo’.

“What’s really rewarding is the rehearsals and being together as a group. When the news is coming back from Afghanistan and that horrible shock wave goes around a whole camp, that’s when you want to have a fun rehearsal, be singing a song and clapping your hands.”

He got the idea for a military choir when he received a letter from a wife whose husband was on tour abroad. “I’m very puzzled as to why the military don’t use singing as a tool for bringing the troops together. I think masculinity is at the heart of it. There’s a zipped-up Britishness about the military’s reaction to singing. When I was at Downing Street we were singing to troops who had just been out in Libya. One guy came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been in the military for 25 years and I’ve never cried at anything and I just teared up’. It lances a boil.”

Last year he moved his family to the West Country during filming of the television series, The Choir. Having become part of the military community, he says it’s time to acknowledge the immense pressure felt by the families left at home when the troops are posted abroad. “The women don’t get recognition as military wives — the reputation was that they’re all just out on the lash while their husbands are away. But it’s quietly heroic, what they’re doing. Their support is very important — the letters and love that are sent out enable the troops to get on and do their job.” Even in the saddest of circumstances, he says, there is a role for singing. “Life has to go on. These are women with children and jobs. They’ve got to get on with it even when one of them has suffered.”

There is, in his view, a correlation between the choir’s success and Britain’s involvement in successive conflicts. “Would it be fair to say there’s a collective guilt about Afghanistan and Iraq? Our feelings towards the Forces and what they do are unresolved. We’re proud of them but we’re also unsure about their reason for being there. We distrust all the messages we’re getting. Sometimes you’ll be told a good news story and you’ll think, ‘That’s just propaganda’, but actually it probably is true that a school has been built, water has been connected. There’s often too much of a focus on the negative side of things. I think that’s why it was fertile soil.”

He was, however, astonished when the Military Wives Choir beat the X Factor winners, Little Mix, to the Christmas No1 spot. “I look at those girls on The X Factor and I think, ‘Actually, how different are you from the military wives?’ They’re a nice group of kids who are looking for something to take them out of their lives.”

Perhaps he should become an X Factor judge. “Part of me likes the thought of being really savage. The work I’ve done so far has been very much about building people up. Part of me rather fantasises about saying, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not good enough’. I’m not that nice really. But the call hasn’t come.” In the end he thinks the celebrity culture would wear him down. “I like being with choirs. I prefer the rehearsals to the performances. I view the television aspect as a necessary irritation. The X Factor is all about celebrity, my thing is all about community. And I think people have responded to that — it’s bleak economic times, you want to come together with your neighbours.”

The rise of the talentless superstar, famous for being famous, disturbs him. “There’s a ridiculous focus on celebrity, our fascination not on great craftsmen or women but on people who’ve got good legs. There are a lot of musicians around who are not world-class. When I was a child, Dolly Parton was pretty famous but she could actually sing.”

His wife, Becky, is a teacher and he sees a social role for singing in schools. “Music is a very good tool for selfimprovement and self-discovery. It’s about giving people terrifying experiences that they triumph at. As a child I relished concerts, the adrenalin and the excitement and the feeling of victory and joy afterwards. It’s not like Tibetan chanting bells that calm you down, it’s about the challenge.”

Participation is the key. “It doesn’t do much good to just stick on a CD of Mozart and say, ‘We do classical music’ — any more than reading ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ makes you a better or more intellectual person. Doing it yourself is a big part of education. Challenge has a stiffening effect. It’s a great model for how an exam works. I think the reason I liked exams was because I’m a performer.”

Music shouldn’t just be the preserve of the middle classes who can afford private violin and clarinet lessons. “Singing is incredibly cheap. To get a thousand children all together in a room teaches them a huge amount. It would be lovely if everyone was playing the tuba, but that’s expensive.”

He hates the idea of tiger mothers who push their children into practising four hours a day. “You can go too far. I crammed on a Sunday morning before my piano lesson for half an hour and my poor mother dragged me to the keyboard two or three times a week in between. Then I started to get into it and it changed. Now my ideal day off is just to play the piano.”

Being a classical musician rather than a sporting hero at his boys’ grammar school in Bournemouth meant that he was bullied. “Any weakness you had was amplified in that very male environment. Things that were esteemed were being in the rugby team, being a footballer or being in the Combined Cadet Force, none of which I was any good at. I was in the music room playing synthesisers every lunch time, singing in a choir in the morning. I was a soft arty type who didn’t fight back until I’d really had enough.”

He flirted with the idea of being a rock star — “that was more about attracting the attention of the girls” — but he never had the desire to be an opera singer. “I’m not sure I have the application or single-mindedness. You need to do it to the exclusion of everything else in your life, you have to love Bach and Mozart and Strauss more than you love yourself. I’m too much of a jack of all trades.”

He is not a musical snob — “I like pop, but for me it has a very limited shelf life. I became obsessed with Fight For This Love by Cheryl Cole for about a week because I’m fascinated by melody. For me those are bite-sized morsels that you devour voraciously but don’t last.” His latest passion is Adele — “dangerous singer, such an interesting voice. You can hear the vocal problems coming, it’s raw, guttural, gutsy.” He hopes that his one-year-old daughter will be musical like him. “I should think she will do piano, but it’s early days. I sing to her all the time. I can’t help it, it just pours out of me.”

He is making a pilot programme for an American television series, and has 20 messages a day from people in Britain saying that they have just joined a choir. “When I first appeared on screens people said, ‘He’s the Jamie Oliver of music’, then they said, ‘Oh, he’s Gareth Malone’. Now I’ve seen other people described as ‘the Gareth Malone of X’, so I feel like I’ve arrived. Bless Jamie for giving me the leg-up.”

Curriculum vitae

Born: November 9, 1975

Educated: Bournemouth School; studied drama at the University of East Anglia; Royal Academy of Music

Career: Worked for the London Symphony Orchestra, running the youth and community choir from 2001-09.
TV career began in 2007 with the reality series The Choir. Presented children’s programme The Big Performance in 2010. Fronted The Choir: Military Wives in November. The resulting single became the Christmas No 1

Family: Married to Becky. One daughter

Quick fire

Adele or Lady Gaga? Adele

Sound Of Music or Saturday Night Fever? Saturday Night Fever — although I love Edelweiss

Violin or piano? Piano, the violin is rubbish

Choir or solo? Choir

Yeats or T. S. Eliot? T. S. Eliot

Glee or Fame? Fame

Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson? Nigella Lawson

Johann Sebastian Bach or the Black Eyed Peas? Bach

The X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing? The X Factor

Hockney or Lucian Freud? Lucian Freud