Gareth Malone, the choirmaster and broadcaster, has said the whirlwind of celebrity that followed his Christmas No 1 taught him that personal achievement was never the central thing in his life.
Speaking to the Guardian’s Flashback series in an interview published on Sunday, Malone, 51, recalled being thrust into a new level of fame after the Military Wives choir — one of the groups he formed for television — reached No 1 with the single Wherever You Are.
“I was suddenly thrown into a new level of celebrity: I was meeting Simon Cowell, having tea with Gary Barlow and dinner with Andrew Lloyd Webber,” he said, according to the Guardian. “When you have a Christmas No 1, it’s like you’ve joined a weird club with people like Noddy from Slade and Shakin’ Stevens.”
Malone said the attention never pulled him away from the reason he entered the industry two decades ago, which he described as his passion for music and the importance of art in people’s lives.
He spoke of the loss of a friend earlier this year, recounting words that he found “brutal”: “We never did go for that pint.” Malone described the missed meeting as a simple thing that had felt impossible while both men were absorbed in their careers.
“The telly, the degrees — all of those achievements are wonderful. It’s the foundation upon which a lot of my happiness is at rest,” he said. “But it’s not the main thing. People and community are.”
Malone, who was born in London in 1975, began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra before making his television debut in 2006 with The Choir. He has since built choirs with Leicester schoolboys and Aylesbury prisoners in addition to the Military Wives.
He is currently touring the UK this autumn with a new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At The Movies, and lives in London with his wife and three children.
Reflecting on the photograph that accompanied the interview, taken when he was 15 at a party at his parents’ house in Bournemouth, Malone said he was “just coming into my own with my confidence”, as evidenced by his double denim and his pose. He said he appeared to be playing B flat major, and suspected the song was Hey Jude, played while he was not topping up guests’ drinks.
The years before that had been difficult, he said. His family moved from a leafy part of Wimbledon to Bournemouth when he was 10, and until then he had friends who were both girls and boys. Attending an all-boys grammar school in a new area he described as “an aggressive gear shift”, and he struggled to make friends.
“There was no physical bullying, but it was a sustained period of ostracisation that went on for the first three years of secondary school and dribbled on into year 10,” he said. The matter was never discussed, he added, and there was no offer of help from the school. He believed his parents probably knew because he never brought friends home.
Instead, he learned to handle his own problems through music and theatre, which he called his saving grace. He credited the school music studio with giving him a place to be expressive “in a sea of business studies and maths”, and said playing the synthesisers began a lifelong passion for production. There was also a piano at home where he would sit making sounds for what felt like hours.
His mother worked for Abbey Life Assurance and for the civil service, while his father worked for a bank, and he said neither was particularly career-minded, enjoying their life, family and house. His grandparents were also very important to him.
Growing up as an only child, Malone said, made him comfortable in his own company, though it meant he lacked some of the physical vocabulary other boys had. He recalled overreacting when other children played up, and preferring conversation and the company of girls at school, who he found “a bit more sensible”.
In his teens he became heavily interested in Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and sang in bands, but was also captivated by Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, prompting him to study drama at the University of East Anglia, where he has fond memories of pretending to be a pig and doing clowning and mask work. He went on to study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London, a transition he found hard as he realised he was “fairly average” compared with his peers.
After graduating he returned to Bournemouth and sold ice cream while sending out CVs. A friend spotted an advertisement for youth work in Poole and suggested he apply. The role involved working with local children living on an estate with a high level of deprivation, in a small music room with a couple of ropey instruments he tried to teach them to play. He traced his passion for giving everyone opportunities — a safe space and music — to that period.
He also learned that earning trust required being himself. Coming from “a totally different side of the tracks” and being wide-eyed and naive, he said the children could detect his middle-classness, so any pretence of being cool and aloof would not work. “I had to be rigorously myself.”
Malone, whose work is to give others confidence, said he has gone on a journey with his own self-esteem, particularly in front of the camera. He was working with the London Symphony Orchestra and running a choir when producers of The Choir got in touch after noticing the group’s high Google rating. The show followed him starting a choir at Northolt high school in Middlesex, and he applied the same method of authenticity on camera that he had learned with the youth group.
He described being given an amazing job he had never done before and learning to do it on national television while being filmed constantly. The director told him: “I want you when you’re angry, I want you when you’re upset, I want you when you’re happy. I won’t make you look like an idiot.” Malone said the director kept his word, but that he remembered being nervous, trying to look in control and “dithering quite a lot”.
On being recognised, he said it could be a great gift but a burden when, for example, taking out the bins.
Looking back to his ambitions at 15, Malone said he had a clear vision of adult life involving a music studio full of instruments. He said his teenage self would be overjoyed to know that a little den at the end of his garden now holds a piano, drums, shakers, maracas, guitars, bongos, synthesisers, a computer and speakers, and that there is never a day when he is not doing music — half of it tinkering alone and the rest making music with others. His younger self would probably be confused by the amount of hot yoga he now does, he added, but glad to know he still likes a denim shirt.
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