Gareth Malone

Speaker 40:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:14

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:37

My castaway this Christmas Day is the choir master, Gareth Malone. He has got Britain singing again, making music and T V that unites disparate and sometimes even desperate people through the power of song. His professional credentials are clearly tip-top, but there's charm and a dash of cunning, too. He's coaxed everyone from gobby adolescents to hard nosed boxers into opening their minds, their mouths, and their hearts in pursuit of music. It makes for gripping and often inspiring T V. His military wives choir even had a number one Christmas single. Music is central not just to his professional success, but his very existence. His parents met through their mutual love of Gilbert and Sullivan, and his own pretty tricky teenage years were transformed by song. He says being bullied probably gave me a different sort of attitude, which is an up yours thing about being exactly who I am. I like what I like, I do what I do. I'd rather stick out than blend in. So welcome, Gareth Malone, to the island. What do you think it is about singing, about communal singing, that has a very unique and special quality for human beings?

Gareth Malone1:44

It certainly captured me very early on. I always wanted to be in the choir. I was drawn to those events. You know, when we all gathered in the school hall when I was very young and sang, stand up, clap hands, shout Thank you, Lord

Gareth Malone1:57

I used to really enjoy it, and I vigorously join in. Well, it's fine with speech, I have to kind of.

Gareth Malone2:03

Work to define something, whereas when you're singing it's and you've learnt a song, it's very pure.

Presenter2:08

This is a time of year, Christmastime, when most people might be singing for the one and only time in the year, whether it's at school or whether they go to a midnight uh service.

Gareth Malone2:16

I feel so sorry for those people. Do you? Yes, because people who limit their singing because of an idea of

Presenter2:18

D

Gareth Malone2:22

Not being good enough. If you only get the car out of the garage once a year, it's not going to do well. You don't spin your hard drive often enough, it's going to crash. So you need to use the instrument, you need to learn to breathe properly. Actually, we instinctively know how to make a noise. You know, if there's a fire, you know how to shout fire and you know how to do it loudly enough to be heard. And singing is part of that very visceral communication. It's not something to fear, it's something to embrace. How on earth?

Presenter2:51

Have you managed?

Gareth Malone2:53

Yeah.

Presenter2:53

To choose eight single pieces of music, given how much music is your world and how much you love it.

Gareth Malone2:59

It all happened in about the space of an hour. Because there's so much music that is related to a particular point in my life that only has very you know, if I listen to a pop song that's very immediate, I might like it for two weeks and then never want to hear it again. And these are not those pieces, these are the pieces that uh define me to myself, I suppose.

Presenter3:18

So Gareth Malone, let's start unwrapping your little musical Christmas gifts to the nation. Tell us about your first one. What are we going to hear?

Gareth Malone3:22

And tell us

Gareth Malone3:24

The first choice please would be Shostakovich Symphony No. 5. Because well, when I was at university, I was directing a play, an Alan Bennett play that was set in Russia, and I was looking for some Russian music, and I took myself off to the Virgin Records store in Norwich, which was where I was at university, and I thumbed through and I knew the names, you know, Vrinsky Korsakov and Tchaikovsky and various other composers, but I didn't know much about Shostakovich other than that he was 20th century. And then I started to read about Shostakovich and how he sort of encoded these secret messages in the piece and he was writing under the regime. And that really appealed to me, that there could be within this music that if you were tuned into it, you could hear the man behind all these hidden signals.

Presenter5:06

That was part of the second movement from Shostrakovich's Symphony No. Five, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Mr Slav Rostropovich. There is a sort of wholesome, old-fashioned quality to choirs themselves, and that's something you seem to embody in so far as I know you at all, but when I've seen you on television, what do you think makes for a good choir master?

Gareth Malone5:26

What do you think?

Gareth Malone5:28

My mother-in-law once described me as a young fogey. And I suppose, you know, liking music like Shostakovich, but also liking the modern world and technology and modern music, as I've always sort of been had a foot in both camps, I guess. I think that's important in running a choir because you're asking people to come with you, so you need an outstretched hand and a friendly disposition, but equally you need to have faith and interests in the music of the past and the tradition. You're a custodian of these gems from the past, and you you feel a sort of responsibility to get that right.

Presenter6:02

You've been on our television screens now for ten years. You've been making these, all of them, choir-based programmes, and your first one.

Presenter6:10

It won a BAFTA.

Presenter6:11

How have you calibrated your expectations since? You know, you went a BAFTA with your first ever TV series.

Gareth Malone6:12

The caliber

Presenter6:16

That's going south

Gareth Malone6:17

That's a dreadful thing to do really in a way. Well we we won a batter for the first one and then I was so determined with the second one we w we won a second one and since then it's been it's been largely downhill. But I think that all of that feels like noise in a way and it's lovely and it's gratifying but it's not what I'm in it for I don't think. I don't I'm certainly not in it for fame.

Presenter6:18

thing to do.

Gareth Malone6:41

Fundamentally I'm passionate about music and I'm passionate about encouraging other people to be passionate about music.

Presenter6:47

Samuel Barber's Annius Day is not a piece that's made it into your list of eight, but it was the piece that you chose to introduce to a bunch of I mean, to call them novices is rather to overstate the case. These were people who hadn't picked up a a song sheet in their lives before, and you decided in one of your television programmes, just to be clear, it's a six-minute piece of chordal music with eight-part harmonies, and it's in Latin. Yeah, why did you do that?

Gareth Malone7:09

Because I think if you always do something that is safe and easy, I think people smell that. You know, if you say, right, we're going to do this thing, it might not be possible, it might be dangerous, it might be exciting. I think there's a real imperative for people to want to be involved. And I think that's been a hallmark of everything I've done. I've always tried to challenge. Tell me about your next piece, Gallus Malone. What are we going to hear? My grandmother, who is a huge classical music fan and a great fan of the human voice, is very, very close to my grandmother. She died in 2008. But when I was at university, she used to send me clippings and cuttings. And she gave me a book of A.E. Houseman's poetry. And she sent me a clipping, a review of Bryn Tervelle's The Vagabond. And she said, I'll buy this for you if you want. Well, she sent me, you know, £10 in the post. And I took myself off to probably the same record. So I bought this. And the final track on this album is called Is My Team Plowing. It's a ghost singing to an old friend and he's asking after his sweetheart. And the man who's alive is trying to sort of quieten this voice because he's now actually with the sweetheart. It's a very chilling but a very evocative song for me.

Speaker 48:23

That's why I thought

Speaker 18:24

Yeah.

Speaker 48:29

Wonder if

Speaker 48:44

She lies down lightly.

Speaker 48:47

She lies not down to wait.

Speaker 48:52

Your girl is well contented.

Speaker 48:59

Be still, my land, and sleep.

Presenter9:07

is My Team Ploughing from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad performed there by Bryn Terville with Malcolm Martineau on piano. And you said, Gareth Malone, that one of the reasons you'd chosen that was for your grandmother. She'd given you that book of poetry. She died in two thousand eight. You sang at her funeral.

Gareth Malone9:24

Oh f yeah. Um

Gareth Malone9:28

Yes, I did. I tried. And the constriction in my throat that I'm feeling even now, just thinking about it, is what I think a lot of people that I'm.

Speaker 19:38

Yeah.

Gareth Malone9:39

I'm talking to and encouraging to see what they go through, and I've never had a more powerful experience of that actual pain.

Gareth Malone9:47

and inability to sing and uh it was a very moving moment because my dad then joined in and and that that ma that sort of made it worse and then my old singing teacher who was also there, she joined in and and then then the moment passed and I managed to croak out the rest of the song.

Presenter10:01

Can you tell me more about your mum and dad? It it's true that they met through music. That was the beginning of your small family. You were an only child and and your mum and dad met because

Gareth Malone10:03

It's true.

Gareth Malone10:06

If you

Gareth Malone10:08

Yeah

Gareth Malone10:10

Well, they joined amateur dramatic societies. I think their eyes met across the stage. My mum says that she went home and told her friend that she'd met the man she was going to marry and she was only 19. Scandal, 19. But they connected through music and that's been at the heart of everything my family's been about really. Always singing at home, going to concerts, listening to music. If I performed in a concert, even if it was when I was age five, it would be discussed, it would be reviewed, critiqued by my grandmother, who was always very honest and direct.

Presenter10:45

And the first ten years of your life was spent in London, and then you moved the family moved to Bournemouth and you moved to schools. How did you get on? It was

Gareth Malone10:52

A tricky age to move actually for me. I moved when I was ten and I left a lot of friends behind. But I suddenly felt much closer to a musical society because in London we'd been in the suburbs and it had always been a big trip up to town to go and see a concert, whereas suddenly we were we were right by there was this wonderful music hall, the Winter Gardens, which is sadly no longer there. There was the Bournemouth Sinfieta, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the Bournemouth Bar Choir, the Grange Choral Society, the Gliamici della Musica, this youth choir. There was just music everywhere in Bournemouth. It seemed a very musical town at the time.

Presenter11:27

How was that young fogie, that developing young fogie, treated at school? Because these are not typical things that a teenage boy in Bournemouth in the eighties would necessarily be interested in.

Gareth Malone11:36

No, and I think I mean I look back at a lot of my

Gareth Malone11:40

contemporaries and I think well no wonder I seemed odd.

Gareth Malone11:44

I mean maybe I was a little bit part Lord Fontleroy, just a little bit sheltered maybe. It's not what a lot of the boys at school thought was safely male, liking the music teacher. That was deeply suspicious. I absolutely loved my music teacher, Stephen Carlston. I was in his thrall really, you know, as you are. I think when you're in a choir, it's like you're an occult. You know, and I experienced that with people who come to me and say, you know, you don't know what you've done for me. And I think, well, actually, I do. And it's not me, it's being in a choir. And I think that for me, he was the person I most wanted to be like at school. And frankly, the other boys who didn't want me to be like that, I think fundamentally, even if you'd asked me at the time, did I want to be like them? I think if you've got me in the right mood, I'd have said no, I'd rather be like Mr. Carlston. Tell me

Presenter12:33

How about your third?

Gareth Malone12:34

What are we gonna hear?

Gareth Malone12:35

I mean, I think we need cheering up after all the gloom. I would like to sit on my desert island and think about death. And, you know, I'm quite comfortable in a dark space and thinking about mortality. But this is a choice that takes me back to very happy times when I was living in London. And my dad had this great CD of the Clancy brothers, and they were all dressed in Aaron sweaters, Aaron jumpers. And I have very strong memories of singing this what I called Darramaduda, and I would just dance.

Presenter12:38

I mean I

Speaker 113:01

Aaron jumpers.

Speaker 113:12

One New Year's Eve in Glasgow town When all we had was half a crown A bunch of us thought we'd prowl around And find some fun in Rozio We wandered out victorious late We didn't care much for snow or slate And at half past two with agon feet We found ourselves in Rozio And Derrima Doo a dummy day Derrimadoo a dad and go Derrimadoo a dumb a day The night we went to Rozio

Gareth Malone13:12

We have seen it.

Presenter13:37

That was the Clancy brothers and Tommy Macam unfairly maligning the boarding houses of Rothsio there at Gareth Malone chosen because it was in your dance record collection.

Presenter13:46

Your teenage band was called Silence is Purple.

Gareth Malone13:49

That was one one incarnation. Many bands.

Presenter13:52

Many bands.

Gareth Malone13:53

Oh, many bands, many projects. Always a pro there's always a musical project on the go with me. And I think that started when I was about to.

Presenter14:00

How did y how did you look?

Presenter14:02

As a young teenage musician.

Gareth Malone14:02

As a young teacher,

Gareth Malone14:03

I mean, I had very bad hair because I wanted it to grow long and flowing like the rock gods of old, but it sort of grew out sideways, so I ended up looking like a sort of Ementile triangular cheese.

Presenter14:17

It was not good. And you studied drama at university. Did you have you had designs at that stage of of making a professional life for yourself as an actor, did you?

Gareth Malone14:26

of sorts. I don't think I really knew at that age and I don't think there was anyone who could really counsel me. I think I just had to work it out. You know, I was hungry for the the arts generally and what they meant to me and the narrowing has come later as I've sort of finessed and realized what's actually deeply important to me.

Presenter14:45

And when you came out of university, your first job was as a youth worker in Bournemouth. You found that deeply traumatic, were your words. Tell me why.

Gareth Malone14:52

Sword.

Gareth Malone14:54

I think I was, you know, middle-class boy from a very caring, loving family. And I just remember seeing a lot of these kids and just thinking, my goodness, you've got absolutely no chance of we certainly don't have the chances that I had. I remember coming home about 10 o'clock at night and I'd be out with my parents till midnight talking about these kids. In youth work, it's very much about them leading you and you have to be there waiting for them to be ready to make music. And I knew that that wasn't for me. I wanted to be more active. I wanted to persuade people and be an evangelist for music.

Presenter15:30

Let's have some more music from you, Gerdas Malone. What's next?

Gareth Malone15:32

This is from Schumann's Dichte Lieber, a piece that I came to in my twenties and it was when I first started to study singing classically. It's just this simple picture of a young man, he's in love and it's not going right and the the flowers are singing to him and he's just lost in grief. I mean it's just perfection.

Speaker 416:10

Very just nature unclean.

Speaker 416:17

The sight delivers were zong Zoo feminine grosss are spring

Speaker 416:31

Fun field of shelters and rock

Speaker 416:39

First ripless scene.

Speaker 416:46

Inorftsur warders him.

Speaker 416:53

For trust is your finger.

Presenter17:01

Schumann's I Hear the Little Song Sounding from Diech de Lieber, a Poet's Love, performed by Fritz Bundelich, accompanied there by Hubert Giesen. I talk to a wonderfully wide selection of professionals here on Desert Island Disc, but I have to say it's the first time ever that I've spoken to someone who once held the position of Edward Heath Assistant Animateur at the London Symphony Orchestra. What on earth is that?

Gareth Malone17:23

It's a very grand title for the guy who makes the tea. I spent two years as an apprentice, really, in music education. And an animateur is somebody who goes into any musical situation and just enlivens it and enriches it. Toddlers would come in, elders of the community, schools, you name it, and they'd have to meet the orchestra. And what a treat. You know, I was working alongside these musical heroes. I remember my very first day at work, being introduced to everyone and shaking this guy by the hand, and it was Maurice Murphy, who's this trumpet player. And I realized shortly after that this was the man who played the opening bars of Star Wars. Unbelievable. I bounded into work. My heart palpitated with excitement. I remember thinking, I've got to calm down. I can't actually. I'm so excited about going to work.

Presenter18:15

And your name came up then when, in twenty twenty, a television production company had this idea that they'd like to make a programme about choirs. It was two thousand five. Can you remember the moment?

Gareth Malone18:25

Yes. I mean, I remember very clearly the phone call from a a girl called Amy Higgs. She said, Oh, are you interested in this this T V thing? And I jumped on it. And then within a few weeks, I I suddenly found myself in front of a camera.

Presenter18:41

Apart from, of course, being a great opportunity, it also is quite a decision to think if you were in a world that you were already loving, you had graduated with distinction, you were somebody who had a different sort of musical career or the possibility of such in front of you, to then go into television. It was a wrench.

Gareth Malone18:47

Face it with

Gareth Malone18:52

Hmm.

Gareth Malone18:53

If such

Gareth Malone18:56

It was a it was a wrench. It was a wrench. And I remember being at a friend's wedding some years later, about five years later, and a lot of my colleagues at college had were there and they had continued down that path, the classical singing path, and they were all doing well. And I remember having real pangs and real

Gareth Malone19:14

Difficulty with it actually. And I think I'm.

Presenter19:16

The difficulty being what you felt you'd compromised or you felt

Gareth Malone19:18

Not con no, comp compromise isn't it, it's just that I badly missed it. I don't think that ultimately it would have satisfied me to be a solo singer or a or a choral singer. I need to be in charge and I need I need to be running my own projects, I need to be creatively stimulated and T V has been that outlet for me. So I just I now and again I have a moment of thinking I wish I was in Berlin with Sir John Elliott Gardner singing Bach.

Presenter19:47

Yes, that's the grass is always greener cinder when we all get

Gareth Malone19:49

It probably is. And then when I speak to my friends who are actually doing it, it's really hard work and they don't get paid very much.

Presenter19:54

Speaking of really hard work, the Military Wives Choir was one of your most high-profile successes.

Gareth Malone19:54

Uh

Gareth Malone19:59

Thumbs up.

Speaker 120:00

Yeah.

Presenter20:00

And an intense experience for everybody involved for very obvious reasons that we saw on television. And you decanted.

Speaker 120:03

Yeah.

Presenter20:06

your wife and new baby to Devon to make the programme.

Gareth Malone20:09

Yeah.

Speaker 120:09

Uh

Gareth Malone20:09

To make

Presenter20:10

That doesn't sound like a

Presenter20:12

An easy situation.

Gareth Malone20:13

Yeah.

Presenter20:13

Yeah.

Gareth Malone20:13

It was very difficult.

Gareth Malone20:14

It was partly a deliberate choice to engage in a project that was going to be grown up and tough. I felt ready for that challenge. Our daughter was very, very young, so when I signed up to it, I didn't realise really what I was getting myself into. It was very tough. It was very hard on my wife. But that was very much the experience that those women were going through. So I think that ultimately it really helped me to understand them and them to trust me. That I had made this huge commitment to actually be near them. I wasn't just floating in from London every 10 minutes. I was actually there. I was experiencing their life firsthand.

Gareth Malone20:50

Tell me about your next piece of music then. This is your fifth.

Presenter20:52

Uh

Gareth Malone20:52

When I came to consider what the military-wise might sing, that was a very difficult choice. What piece of music could possibly sum up a woman's feeling for her husband who was in a war zone? And that's very, very difficult. So I had met Paul Miele, who'd come to my attention as the royal composer who wrote a piece for the royal wedding. And before Paul Miele changed the words to make it more appropriate for a royal wedding, there was this version, and he told me about this: Now Sleeps a Crimson Petal, and he sent me a version of it. And it wasn't the piece that we ended up doing. It wasn't Wherever You Are, because we felt that actually it would be better to write a piece of music that came from the women. But this is the piece where I thought: here is a man of substance.

Speaker 421:41

The world has fallen.

Speaker 421:50

And sing for the boss of all the

Speaker 422:01

So for thyself I did as thou art sing

Presenter22:37

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, composed by Paul Miller and performed by the Tennebrae Choir, conducted by Nigel Short. I mentioned in the introduction this sort of up yours mentality that you think you have, and you always seem on camera at least to be conciliatory, to be even tempered. Has there ever been a point in film

Gareth Malone22:56

Phil I've got a temper.

Presenter22:57

Have you? Yeah, good. Good. Tell me about that.

Gareth Malone22:57

Yeah, good.

Gareth Malone23:00

I won't show it to you right now. No, I get it. When do you show it? When does it flash?

Presenter23:03

When's he

Gareth Malone23:07

When people don't care as much as me about something that I think is very important, I I get very upset about that. I think I get very angry about that. You know, I have sort of professional pride and I I work hard to give people a positive experience. And if I get a sort of negative experience from them for some reason, I I find that very irritating.

Presenter23:26

There is a very particular sort of Gareth Malone fan, and you will know her, and I think mostly it is her, very, very well, and she is a woman of a certain age, whose eyes get all misty when they talk about you. It's that kind of oh

Presenter23:39

See, Gareth, he's lovely, isn't he? Oh, that have you met him? He's lovely. You're forty-one now. Yes. Do you get a little bit sick of that?

Gareth Malone23:42

Definitely.

Presenter23:48

Little bit. I mean it's

Gareth Malone23:50

It's quite strange. It is quite strange. Because I always think, you know, they don't really know who you are. And I will often sense a disappointment when people say, oh, hello, in the street. And I say, hello. I don't actually know you. And I sense their disappointment. Because I am seen to be helpful and helping people. I don't do that all the time. I'm not always in that mood. And I think that's a disappointment to people. Let's have some time to be more generous, really.

Presenter24:17

Let's have some time. You should be more generous, really. You should, yes. You can meditate on that during the next piece of music. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear now?

Gareth Malone24:19

Yeah.

Gareth Malone24:21

Next piece of

Gareth Malone24:23

This is a choice that is based for two reasons. One of my first choirs I made them sing this, um w we somehow got through it. But fundamentally I've chosen this because one of my first dates with my wife was to go and see uh Cozy Fantutu.

Speaker 424:46

Uh

Speaker 425:06

In Lord is Lord.

Speaker 425:15

Whose

Presenter25:42

Suave sia ilvento, Sweet as the wind, from Mozart's Cosivantuti, performed there by Anne Murray, Fruccio Furlanetto, and Curita Canawa, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, and you said, Geras Malone, that one of the reasons you'd chosen that was it was one of your first dates with your wife. Were they often musical?

Gareth Malone25:59

They were very often cultural outings, yeah. Some successful, some not successful. Yeah, we often went to the theatre. Tell me about an unsuccessful one. I took her to see my beloved London Symphony Orchestra with Pierre Boulez, and he was conducting The Rite of Spring, one of my favourite pieces, and it was just brutally loud, and we were very near the front, and she had to put her fingers in her ears'cause it hurt so much. That one didn't go down so well, I'm afraid.

Presenter26:07

Yeah.

Presenter26:23

You now have two young children, and so looking ahead and looking towards you know, you've just had ten years, the next ten years, is it more and more of the same? Do you think it will be?

Gareth Malone26:33

I don't know. It's a question that perplexes me all the time. I'm about to take six months off to consider what it is I want to do next. I think as your children get older, they become more demanding and you know, and they they they need more from you. But it's more about the level of intensity that I've been working at and the drain on my emotional resources. You think, I'm absolutely exhausted. I mean, this year in particular, I went from doing Invictus early in the year to doing um

Presenter26:58

And this was a choir made up of people who were taking part in the Invictus game. That's right.

Gareth Malone27:01

That's right. So these were service men who had been injured. Yeah, so those men and women who were profoundly affected by their experiences. And that was very difficult for me, you know. And you always take on a bit of the well, I do, I always take on a bit of whatever they're feeling I feel as well. I'm empathetic. You can't help it, really. That's very tough. And it's tough for my family then when I come home from one of those and you've given everything to music and you don't want to hear any music and then.

Presenter27:26

Yeah.

Gareth Malone27:26

Yeah.

Presenter27:26

Yeah.

Gareth Malone27:26

The kids wanna sing or do Vanim practice or whatever.

Presenter27:29

You used a very interesting phrase a couple of discs ago. You said I'm I'm somebody who's quite comfortable in a dark space. And I'm wondering so much of your life is spent with communities of people, groups of people.

Presenter27:40

The idea of being alone, you know, the idea of the islands, but more than that, the idea of being alone. Oh, yeah. How do you think you would occupy that?

Gareth Malone27:42

Yeah.

Gareth Malone27:47

I can't wait. Really? When do we go? Really? Really? Oh, I love it. I love being on my own. I'm an only child and just playing with Lego on my own in my room or or listening to music on my own. Absolutely no problem being on my own. And when the phone rings and I have to come out of that personal space and I have to speak, I always find this a bit of a wrench.

Presenter28:11

Are you happiest on your own?

Gareth Malone28:12

Um

Gareth Malone28:14

Be honest.

Gareth Malone28:17

Yes and no. I think I just need a mi I need a mix. I need that time. I need that space. I've always needed duvet days. I feel like sometimes the part of my brain that is responsible for articulating my thoughts gets bruised and overused and I just need to be silent and I need to listen to the music or play the piano or just be quiet.

Presenter28:38

Let's hear your next disc gets your seventh.

Gareth Malone28:40

This song I remember as a kid loving. I tried to play the introduction and couldn't work out what the chords were. And then when I came to choose a song for my first series of the choir, I was in

Gareth Malone28:52

Chapels on Bond Street and I was looking through these song sheets and this came out and it was just an instant. This one.

Speaker 429:04

Feeling small

Speaker 429:08

When tears are in your eyes

Speaker 429:15

I will drive them.

Speaker 429:23

I'm on your side.

Presenter29:26

BRIDGE OVER TRUBBLED WATER, SIMON AND GARFONCEL. Gareth Malone, I have this vision, and please tell me it's true, of your Christmas, which means that it's you and the little Malone's and the extended family round a piano and you're singing and music is part of it. Is that true?

Gareth Malone29:41

What's the moment and what do you sing? I've got this wonderful book, the the real book, Jazz Standards, I've got The Greatest Hits of Whitney Houston, I've got The Beatles, I've got Carols.

Presenter29:56

And do you have to be leading it? You said a moment ago you like to be in charge.

Gareth Malone29:59

No, not there. No, well, I mean, I'll sit at the piano and then hopefully someone will just stand alongside me. I'm certainly my dad'll be straight in there. We've got a book of old uh Scottish folk songs so that we're sort of slowly working through over twenty years.

Presenter30:11

When you look at all the many, many choirs that have sprung up in the last ten years, you know, people who've watched you and watched it on the telly and thought, I fancy a bit of that. Do you feel your part in that, a sort of national shift towards a different and more community based activity?

Speaker 130:19

Uh

Gareth Malone30:19

Yeah.

Gareth Malone30:26

Yeah, I think yes. I mean, without being what's the word, false modesty. Being on TV and having that platform is amazing because you have this opportunity for lots of people to connect with what you're doing. Can you pick.

Presenter30:37

Pick a stand-out moment of performance when you have been there leading a choir and you've thought.

Presenter30:43

I am almost literally overcome by this thing we've created. Very rarely.

Gareth Malone30:49

Very rarely.

Presenter30:51

Because you've got your critical ear working

Gareth Malone30:52

Yeah, it's so much I mean that's the aim isn't it? You're constantly striving for that wonderful moment of epiphany or transformation, something spiritual. You wish it was like that and you're trying to make it look like it's like that and there are glimmers of it but then in the next moment you'll realize that your trousers are too tight or that one of the lights is glaring in your eyes. So you're never off from that. Honestly one of the most moving moments for the audience was the military wives wherever you are. I was furious through that performance because the intro had been slightly the wrong tempo and we'd missed the orchestra who were miles away. The monitoring system was a disaster and I was crossed through the whole thing.

Gareth Malone31:38

But by the end I thought oh actually no this is this is now going all right but

Presenter31:41

Just so as you know everybody else was crying.

Gareth Malone31:43

Yeah, they w yeah, and that's exactly as it should be. I have my emotion privately, I have it with the choir in advance. You as a performer don't need to feel it, you need to make the audience feel it, that's the job. Um so it doesn't really matter whether I feel it, I need to have connected with it myself at some point, but that's usually a private business.

Presenter32:05

Let's get on to the final business then of your eighth disc. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear?

Gareth Malone32:09

I could not imagine a desert island without Bach. I remember in my twenties hearing the voice of Antony Rolf Johnson, who features elsewhere on the recording that we're going to hear, and thinking if I could make somebody feel like he's just made me feel, then my life would have meaning. And I think that's informed a lot of what I've done subsequently.

Presenter33:32

The twenty first movement from Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Glory be to God in the highest, performed by the Monteverde Choir, the London Oratory Junior Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists, all directed by John Elliott Gardner. It's time, then, Gerris, for me to give you the books. We give every castaway the Bible, the complete works of Shakspere, and you get to take

Gareth Malone33:47

Do we the

Gareth Malone33:49

And you get to take another book. What will yours be? A book that teaches me either French or Italian, or ideally both. Even though if I never spoke it, that would keep me occupied.

Presenter33:58

I think I'm going to make you choose one language. French, right. You may have that book. And a luxury too.

Gareth Malone34:00

Quite French.

Gareth Malone34:03

It's a piano. Is it okay if it can be kept at a a reasonable temperature? Yes. some sort of hermetically sealed box. It'll need to be dry and

Presenter34:11

I'm sure that exists.

Gareth Malone34:12

Okay, and can I also please then have some music to play on it? Oh, you're chancing your luck now.

Presenter34:17

I think we'll allow you the piano, and if it happens to arrive with a few sheets scanned.

Gareth Malone34:20

Fine. Okay. I'm happy to swim out a little bit to rescue the odd book that's passing by.

Presenter34:25

All right, that's yours. And which of these one eight discs would you save if you had to?

Gareth Malone34:30

Um I'm going to have to go with Bach.

Presenter34:32

It's yours. Gareth Malone, happy Christmas, and thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Happy Christmas.

Presenter35:18

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Gareth Malone35:50

This is the BBC.