Gareth Malone
There’s nothing like an uplifting TV show to get the nation motivated. Strictly had us booking ballroom dancing lessons, Bake Off inspired us to get our hands floury, and The Choir – thanks entirely to its affable host, Gareth Malone – pulled off the unlikely feat of making choral singing cool.
Armed with dollops of boyish enthusiasm, Malone spent more than a decade transforming everyone from growling teenagers to bemused work colleagues into accomplished choral groups for the hit BBC series, tugging firmly on our heartstrings along the way.
Now the 42-year-old is about to go on tour – but although he’s known first and foremost as a conductor of choirs, the live show doesn’t just feature the back of Malone’s head. Alongside close-harmony group The Swingles, he’ll be playing piano, guitar and bass, as well as singing. All by himself.
‘Part of the mission of the show is to persuade people that I’m not just the guy that gets people who’ve never sung before to sing,’ says Malone. ‘After my first tour I had one letter of complaint, saying ‘I was expecting the Military Wives! Where were they?’ And although I do sometimes still work with the Military Wives, that’s not all I do.’
It certainly isn’t. A gifted tenor in his own right – Malone was awarded a distinction for his post-graduate singing degree at the Royal Academy of Music – he’s also long been a composer, although he’s rather shy about it. ‘I’ve got a little studio in my back garden, and I invite people in and go “I’ve written a song”,’ he says, with a comedy wince.
He recalls playing one of the compositions for the show, a song about charity called Restless, to a singer friend, ‘and I felt sick. I played it to her thinking she should sing it, and she very sweetly said “You can’t let anyone else sing that, you’ve got to sing it”.’ And so he does.
Is he bothered about being typecast as Mr Choir? ‘No, that’s the way television goes, isn’t it? Jamie Oliver is always going to be the chef, even though I’m sure he does other things. I didn’t set out in life to be a choirmaster, so I suppose I’m trying to say look, I’m a musician. I’m an all-rounder.’
Malone, whose parents met at their local Gilbert & Sullivan society, fell for music at an early age. ‘I absolutely loved doing those mass sing-alongs with other schools. I liked the rehearsals. I remember being really interested when somebody explained what a diphthong was.’
But being an ardent choir member at his Bournemouth secondary school had an unfortunate side-effect – bullying. He found himself ostracised in the classroom, ‘and there were a few kids who were frankly a pain in the backside to me. I was very outgoing and very confident, and then suddenly I wasn’t. I sort of lost all my sparkle, and I think my parents were quite worried about me.
‘Then there was a moment where I just thought “Hang on a minute, who are you anyway?”, and I found my feet, really through doing music. So I suppose that’s where that evangelical zeal comes from: for me, music was something quite transformative at a really pivotal age.’
After studying drama at the University of East Anglia, Malone toyed with pursuing a career in theatre, but landing a job as a youth worker with disadvantaged teenagers changed everything. ‘There was a piano in the room, and I sat down and said “I can write a song if you like”, and from that day I never left the piano. The path was there, and I just followed it.’
He went on to run the youth and community choirs at the London Symphony Orchestra, and in 2006 was headhunted by a BBC producer who wanted to make a documentary about starting a school choir from scratch. The result was The Choir, the first of several inspirational and downright emotional series that saw Malone nurturing non-singing ducklings into angelic choral swans.
Perhaps his most famous ensemble was the Military Wives, whose 2011 song Wherever You Are – featuring lyrics taken from letters to their partners serving in Afghanistan – became a tear-jerking Christmas Number One. But for Malone, bringing wounded ex-service personnel together to form the Invictus Choir in 2016 was the project that almost finished him.
‘It was the most emotional thing I’ve ever done; more emotional than Military Wives by a country mile,’ he says. ‘A lot of them were very unwell, and not coping, and having moments of real struggle – and I went through what they went through with them. It felt really great to do it, but it was hard work, and it took me a while to let that ebb away.’
The Invictus choir is still up and running, and Malone is still in touch. ‘It feels really good,’ he admits. ‘With the exception of about one choir that I’ve started, they’ve all continued.’
Many more have sprung up, too. Last year, a study by singing organisation Voices Now puts the number of UK choirs at more than 40,000, with a staggering 2.1 million of us regularly taking part. Could this be The Malone Effect? ‘If you put things on television and get it right, it can be a very powerful medium,’ he says. ‘But you’ve got to get it right, you’ve got to tell the story, and that story about what a choir can do for you just wasn't in people’s minds.’
So what can it do for you? ‘It gives you a sense of community. You’re going through a shared experience that feels very enriching and challenging, but actually it’s just a song – it’s not the end of the world if it goes wrong. And it’s an important part of life, isn’t it? To have challenge, and to have community. When you walk out of that rehearsal, you feel lighter.’
The quest to take choral singing out of the fusty confines of church and into everyday life has been rewarded, winning him two BAFTAs, an Emmy and an OBE for his trouble. But since judging BBC singing competition Pitch Battle last summer, Malone, who lives in London with his wife Becky and children Esther, 7, and Gilbert, nearly 5, has taken a break from TV. For now he’s concentrating on touring (‘It’s really good show, and without question my favourite thing to do’), although he admits he has the urge to do ‘something with teeth’ again.
‘What I really like to do is go into situations where I don’t now what the answer is. I’m hankering after floundering in the dark again and bumbling my way through, because when you get it right, it’s all the more rewarding for it.
‘And when people in the street say “I loved it when...” or “You made me cry when...”, you think actually yes, you’ve been there with me. I didn’t know you were there, but you were there. It’s a privilege, really.’
Gareth Malone tours the UK in May and June. Visit faneproductions.com/malone2018 for details.
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2018. (c) Waitrose