Gareth Malone is back on tour and heading for Surrey, but at Christmas he won’t be on song. Rosanna Greenstreet hears the score
The nation’s favourite choirmaster isn’t bothered about presents this year. In fact, when I catch up with Gareth Malone just before he sets off on a gruelling 19-date UK tour, he confesses to a decidedly modest festive aim: to “lie down in a darkened room!”
And who can blame him? Following his hugely successful nationwide tour in 2014, Gareth is embarking upon an even bigger one this winter with his choir, Voices. From November 24 his tour bus will be criss-crossing the country, visiting Edinburgh and Cardiff and taking in Bournemouth, Birmingham and Manchester on consecutive nights. On November 30 the choir performs in London at the Royal Festival Hall, and on December 16 it arrives in Surrey to play Guildford’s G Live.
Most interviews with Gareth, who is 39, make reference to his Bournemouth childhood. Less trumpeted, however, is the fact that he is originally from Merton Park, near Wimbledon, within the ancient boundaries of Surrey.
“I was born and brought up there and went to Wimbledon Chase School,” he reveals. “Surrey played a big part in my early life; we used to go shopping and for days out in Guildford. My dad’s actually Glaswegian, but my mum was brought up in Morden. They lived for a while around Balham and then moved out to the suburbs when they had a kid, as lots of people do. My dad worked for Chase bank and, at the end of the 80s, when people realised that they could work remotely with computers and didn’t need to be in London, Chase was very quick to move out. So, when I was 10, we went to Bournemouth. I was quite sad about leaving.”
An only child, Gareth always loved music, but he initially dreamt of becoming the next Kenneth Branagh. To this end, he studied drama at the University of East Anglia, but abandoned the theatre when he realised that “I wasn’t quite as good as I thought I was.” A postgraduate course in vocal studies followed at the Royal Academy of Music. Having passed with distinction, Gareth joined the London Symphony Orchestra to run its youth and community choir.
It was in 2006 that his TV career began, when he was asked to start a school choir from scratch and get it ready to compete in the World Choir Games in China. The resulting BAFTA award-winning BBC2 series, The Choir, was an instant hit and catapulted Gareth – and his trademark bow tie – into our living rooms, where he has been a permanent fixture ever since. The tie, he says, was inspired by his banking father.
“When I was a kid he used to wear a bow tie to work. I think he thought he was a young Robin Day. He used to say: ‘I got lots of comments on the bow tie today.’ He is one of those people who like to stand out and, as I grew older, I realised that I was the same.”
Gareth’s legion of female fans often send him bow ties, but his favourite is a ‘Gunners’ (Royal Artillery) tie that was given to him by Military Wives, the choir from his 2011 series who landed that year’s Christmas number one with their song Wherever You Are, a love letter to their husbands fighting in Afghanistan.
Voices, the 17-strong outfit on Gareth’s new tour, offers fare of a somewhat different order from the amateurs generally associated with his TV work.
“A lot of people turn up expecting one of the choirs from my series, or that kind of musical level, but in fact they’re a fantastic group of professional singers. It’s not really a choir, actually. Yes, we sing a couple of choral pieces and some classics, but we are also doing a cappella versions of pop songs, like James Blake’s Retrograde. It’s an entertaining music variety show with lots of different styles, sounds and tones, and we get people up from the audience.”
Gareth is also introducing some of his own original material.
“I’m testing out a couple of songs to see what people think,” he explains. “I’ve been writing since I was 11 – but it’s the first time in a while that I’ve sung my own songs in public.”
Moreover, as well as singing, he is playing the ukulele, keyboard and guitar. The Mail on Sunday recently made much of the fact that he had treated himself to a Martin acoustic guitar at a cost, they said, of £800.
“I don’t know where they got £800,” he laughs. “It was more than that! And actually, I just bought a bass guitar this morning – and that was substantially more than £800 too!”
Gareth has described his life as being just about “as perfect as it can get”. And certainly, with his enviable career and happy family life with his secondary school teacher wife Becky and their two children – Esther, four and Gilbert, two – he does seem to have it all. Unsurprisingly, straight after his final gig in Gateshead, on December 20, he will be hotfooting it back home to North London for a restful festive season.
“When you come off tour it’s quite strange, as you’ve had months on the road with catering and everything taken care of. Then you’re back to being dad, which is a really good thing. We are having Christmas at home this year, a nice quiet family one. On Christmas Eve I’ll be sitting on the sofa with the kids watching Carols from King’s. It wouldn’t be Christmas without that.”
Will the family be singing carols round the piano?
“I think people imagine that I go: ‘Right everyone, it’s time for the traditional Malone singsong.’ But I have enough of that in the rest of my life. I’m having a day off!”
And presents? Just what does one buy the celebrity choirmaster whose life is a chorus of dreams?
“For me, what’s key is just being together and eating and watching a great movie. I don’t want a pair of socks, or a corkscrew or a drill. I don’t need them. I’ll have been on the road for the whole of December, so I just want a good glass of wine and a nice bit of goose or turkey.”
Sounds good to me.
Check dates and locations on Gareth's website
