Alfie Page 17
He introduced me to Mick Cater, a manager who was interested in looking after me. Mick was very supportive but couldn’t really do much and he didn’t officially take me on but said he’d get into things once I’d got a deal. Mick used to manage Bob Marley and The Wailers. He told me this story about a time Marley was playing in Africa. The concert venue didn’t have a big enough power supply, so Mick went and got authorisation from the electricity board to reroute power from a village to the gig. Well, authorisation might not be the right word, but he paid the guy. And he stood on top of a hill and saw this village fall into complete darkness as the gig started up. He was a character Mick, he used to look after Robert Palmer. Nothing really ended up happening between me and him. I met Sony, BMG, Warner Bros and EMI, all to no avail; a chap at Sony said the world didn’t need another tenor. Really? OK. That’s it now, we have all the tenors we need for the time being. Sorry, folks.
I came back to the UK to meet Universal Classics and Jazz. I sang for Mark Wilkinson, the General Manager, and Dickon Stainer, the Managing Director, at the Royal College, and they were great, took me for a drink after. They asked me what album ideas I had, and I basically outlined everything I’ve ended up doing and still want to do – a traditional opera album, the Italian Neapolitan repertoire, some Lehár, rock, pop, blues. I told them I wanted to do it all. It all blends for me – when you listen to an Ozzy Osbourne song you can hear a symphonic reference in it, it stands up next to an adagio. They were interested but they were focusing on Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson, wanted to pool their resources into promoting them. That classical repertoire that I would have been doing for them is kind of limited – there are only so many versions of ‘Nessun Dorma’ you can throw at the public. You know, that one’s been recorded by everybody from Pavarotti to Kermit the Frog. So it didn’t go any further, and I was at a bit of a loss. By this time I’d been singing to record companies for 12 years, since I started in the D’Oyly Carte, and failing to get anywhere was really discouraging. I was getting opportunities, making opportunities, to get seen in front of people, to sing for them, and I just didn’t know how I was going to break in. It seemed impossible. I was frustrated, James and Juliette were frustrated, all of us desperately trying to make it work and just not hitting it.
And then in 2005 Darren Henley from Classic FM approached me. I’d known him for some time through an old college friend who worked for them, and Classic FM, who up to that point had just put out compilations, had an idea for an album series with Sony called Classic FM Presents, and were looking for an artist to launch it. So I sang for Classic FM and one of the Sony BMG bigwigs, in the basement of the Royal Albert Hall; they were doing their Classical Spectacular performance that night so got me in there for a bit. A boiler room, no less. Freddy Krueger’s digs. I sang a Neapolitan song, an operatic aria, and Pink Floyd’s ‘On the Turning Away’. They liked the first two, but Darren had a problem with the Pink Floyd song, he said it wasn’t the sort of thing I should be singing. It’s a wonderful song and I still want to record it one day, but fine. It all fell apart anyway because Sony pulled out of the partnership to some extent – their guy didn’t have any balls, he didn’t want to take any risks – and the Classic FM series looked like it might not be happening.
So I was unsure about everything. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know if I wanted to properly get back into opera, I didn’t know if they’d even have me back after Broadway and the Big Band stuff and everything else I’d been doing. But I was getting job offers, ENO were offering me work, and I went off to Strasbourg for a few months to do Così fan tutte for Strasbourg Opera, working with David McVicar again. That was a really cool job, although David was hard work on that one. He’s a phenomenal director, very naturalistic, and incredibly passionate about what he does, he tends to get consumed by it. If things don’t go his way he freaks out a bit. And he’s very flamboyant, he sometimes gets carried away with all the operatic grandeur, he can be kind of volatile. But he’s been very good to me over the years, he’s given me a lot of work, a lot of great opportunities. And that production was great. I skived off rehearsals one night for a Bob Dylan concert. I wanted to treat Sarah to something for her 26th birthday and we saw a poster for this gig. We’re both big Dylan fans – he really got me into folk music. I bought tickets before realising it was actually in a place called Amneville, a two-hour drive from Strasbourg. We didn’t have a clue where it was. David had planned a rehearsal for that evening, which I needed to wriggle out of, so I said, ‘You know I’m trying to get an album deal. Well there’s a guy coming into this town who’s connected to the music industry, and this is the only opportunity I can get to meet him, is there a chance I could be released from the rehearsal?’ Don’t know if you’d call that a white lie or just an out-and-out lie, but it worked for me, and David let me go. So we rented a car and drove to this gig and it was great. He did Sarah’s favourite, ‘Shelter from the Storm’, and a blinding encore, finished on ‘All Along the Watchtower’. Worth bunking off for.
Sarah found an amazing flat with a great open-plan kitchen. This lady basically gave it to her for nothing because she felt sorry for us, this newly married couple with not a lot of cash. She certainly gave us a great deal on the place. We were seven storeys up and overlooked the square in Strasbourg – it was something else. And we loved that flat, we had amazing dinners in that kitchen. There was another couple living there, a baritone, Franco Pomponi, and his wife, who’d been in the chorus of Baz’s La Bohème. Neither of them wore underwear. The kitchen table had bench seats, and every time we’d walk out of our room for breakfast we’d be greeted by these two builders’ bums. Good morning.
There was one incident in that flat that sends an awful fear shooting through my body whenever I remember it. We were having a party and one of the actors from the opera brought a couple of crates of beer up – really strong French beer, I might add – and we didn’t have enough room in the fridge for it all, so because it was the middle of winter, we thought we’d put the crates on the ledge outside the living room window to keep them cool. And as I was lowering a crate onto the ledge it slipped out of my hands. Seven storeys up, top of the building. And it happened to be the switching on of the Christmas tree in the square, so there were hundreds of tourists below, all gathered around the tree, and the crate toppled off. I went, ‘NO!’ and heard a huge smash and immediately thought, ‘I’ve killed somebody.’ I bombed it downstairs and ran out to the square and the beers were everywhere – they were tinned bottles, so they weren’t really damaged – and there were loads of homeless people pointing up to the sky, cracking open these beers and drinking them, shouting, ‘Joyeux Noël! Joyeux Noël!’ Pointing up to the sky like the beers had come from Heaven.
There was a bit of a void after that. We spent the next six months unemployed and disheartened in New York. I was with a theatre, TV and film agency called Hartig Hilepo, but nothing was coming through and I was getting sick of not having money, of not getting any work, not knowing where things were going. Sarah wasn’t getting acting work either; it was very difficult for her upping sticks all the time – Strasbourg, Brussels, London – we just weren’t settled, and my agent said I had to be in New York to stand a chance of anything happening, so we’d made the move. It took us four days to drive there from Salt Lake in a U-Haul van, sleeping in motels. We had Guinness, our dog, with us, and $1500 in our pockets – that was everything. We were only just married and still getting to know each other really – it was all new to us both. We didn’t know what was going on, we were really worried about everything, wondering what the hell we were doing, we were fighting a lot. A day away from New York, there was an awful snowstorm and we both had a meltdown, massive fight, and Sarah got out and just walked off into the storm. I grabbed Guinness and walked after her, trundling after my wife through the snow, the dog in my arms.
And that was about as good as it got. My agent still didn’t manage to get me anything. Les Misérables wa
s being revived on Broadway, and I pleaded with them to get me an audition to play Valjean, but the guy said they didn’t think Les Misérables was right for me, that the part wasn’t suited to me. Even spun me something about them going down an ethnic route with the character, which was nonsense. I would have loved to have had a go, but they wouldn’t even get me an audition. The irony. I got one gig, a Phantom of the Opera concert in an embassy. That was my only gig in six months, a three-day job. I think I got $800 for it, which was nothing to sniff at back then. We were living in an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Sarah got herself a job as a restaurant hostess.
That was the first time I seriously considered packing it in, the singing. I started looking around for other careers because I was feeling so dejected about not making it, I thought I was wasting my time. The record thing had gone quiet, and I was really tired. I was thinking of going into catering school, becoming a chef, because I love cooking. I looked at a number of different catering schools in New York, had a few tours of facilities, some really lovely ones, looked into the training. I was really considering it. But it would have cost $100,000 for five years of catering school, and I didn’t know where I would have got that from, or if I could stomach going back to college for another five years. I wouldn’t have been happy and I knew it, but I just wanted to earn a living. Apart from the Phantom gig I hadn’t had any singing work for six months, I wasn’t getting anywhere. The only stability and security I found any comfort in was Sarah’s family in Salt Lake. We spent a month with them and it was really quite warming. Sarah’s family are a tight unit, and it was a godsend actually, having that solid American family home that we could always go back to, especially as I was so far from Fleetwood.
Thankfully the Classic FM situation spluttered back to life. Darren Henley got back in touch, back on track with the album idea, with Sony taking a lesser role, marketing and distributing for them. He wanted it to happen but said I really needed a manager, and asked if I was still in touch with Neil Ferris. I’d met Neil in Oxford a couple of years earlier; a friend had introduced us in a pub. He used to be Managing Director of EMI and has worked with David Bowie, Prince, Depeche Mode, The Rolling Stones, just a ridiculous roster of legends. We’d gone back to his house that night to hang out with him and his wife Jilly, who works alongside him, co-manages with him. And a very impressive house it was. Oliver Cromwell’s old hunting lodge, don’t you know. Helicopter pad in the back garden. Huge gym. Big room with all these gold discs on the wall and a huge snooker table. Me and Sarah were like, ‘Damn.’ Medieval art collection, including a painting of Henry V, painted on wood, that Henry V actually sat for. Neil had basically retired by that point, but we talked about music, I told him the sort of things I wanted to do and we seemed to connect, and stayed in touch. So when Darren mentioned Neil I called him, told him what had been going on with Classic FM, and we talked about him becoming my manager. He said, ‘I think this might work, Alfie. I always knew that there was somewhere we could go. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll make some phone calls.’ And he’s never stopped making phone calls. He fought for that deal, got me signed, he made it happen. We’re a great team. He’s been such a support, and such a lovely fella to have on my side. He knew from day one that he wanted to build up my career and look out for my interests, and I’m so grateful to him for that. The last night of the Bring Him Home tour in January, in Gateshead, I cajoled him into coming on stage with me and duetting on ‘The Impossible Dream’, which was hilarious, because by his own admission he’s tone deaf, but I wanted to publicly thank him, because he means the world to me.
I couldn’t wait to get back to the UK to get started on the Classic FM album, to start recording. It was good timing too, because it turned out the guy who sub-let us our flat in New York had dropped us in it. Everybody sub-lets in New York, and we thought it was all above board, we thought the super who looked after the building knew who we were. We wondered why he was always giving us sceptical looks, and this guy had apparently told him he’d sub-let the place to a little old lady. Not this young couple with a dog called Guinness. It was illegal for him to sub-let at all, we thought he owned the place. But by the time that all exploded we were ready to go, and we shifted.
Classic FM wanted an operatic arias album, and I chose ones that suited my voice at that time, some Donizetti, Bellini, bit of Puccini. Instead they went for all the opera pops, songs they thought would sell an album, which was a little frustrating, but fair enough. ‘La donna è mobile’, ‘Nessun Dorma’, ‘Vesti la giubba’ – the problem with a song like ‘Vesti la giubba’ is you’ve got to be 40, 50 years old before you can really do it justice; it’s a mature song to do, vocally. But I knew a lot of this rep and learnt it, and was flown over to Brno in the Czech Republic to record with their Philharmonic Orchestra, where we had literally two days to record the album, seven hours each day, which was a challenge. I’d have to sing each aria three or four times, and there are 14 songs on that album – 42 arias in two days. Really tough. ‘Jerusalem’ was problematic – they didn’t get the right arrangements or the right key for me, and there wasn’t time to change it, so I had to adapt to what they had. It wasn’t a lavish recording, cost a few grand, you can hear the shuffling of feet, chairs moving and creaking. You can hear a string player drop his bow at one point. The orchestra weren’t entirely used to the recording concept. But everybody in that band was really sweet, lovely musicians to work with, and very respectful of what we were doing. And it got the ball rolling. I got a bit of cash, rented a little flat, some gigs started to come in.
That was the first time I ever had to do any TV promotion as well, which was mildly terrifying. Singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ on GMTV at 8am. I was a bit naïve about it all, didn’t know how to act, always ultra-polite, answering questions politically correctly, being a good boy. I thought that everything hinged on these moments for me. And that remained the case up until last year really, when I started to speak my mind a bit more. There was a TV interview I did in 2008 where they asked if I was encouraged at school, and I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, all my teachers were really supportive and told me to be a singer,’ which wasn’t the case in the slightest. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to play music. Then they asked Jeremy Irons, who was on the show too, if he was encouraged at school and he said, ‘Was I hell.’ That really hit me. After the show I said to Neil, ‘Why can’t I tell the truth like that?’ But I just didn’t, for years. I always said what I thought I should say. I think EMI, who I signed with after Classic FM, might have told me not to say anything controversial in interviews, and I still had stuff etched on my psyche from the Royal Opera House era, when both the Vilar people and Baz Luhrmann were telling me not to say anything negative. At that time I was so scared of saying things, the wrong things. Now I say what I want. More or less. That first round of promotion was fun though. I sang at the Blackpool Illuminations opening night, which was a cool little homecoming thing to do. Didn’t get to actually turn the lights on of course. They gave that honour to Dale Winton. I was supposed to do an album signing at HMV there too, but me and Neil got stuck on the M6 for six hours and missed it. There probably would have only been 10 people there anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Three
REQUIEM FOR A SQUEEZEBOX
A couple of weeks after the album came out Sarah and I flew off for a three-week ordeal in Macau, which was disgusting on many levels. I try not to think about it much today. Just revisiting it now gives me the heebie-jeebies.
A friend in New York was trying to start her own agency and said, ‘There’s a job going if you need some extra cash.’ And we really needed some extra cash. It was two weeks’ rehearsal and then four performances at a festival, run by a rather odd Chinese opera singer. He was incredibly self-important and seemed to be jealous of any other tenor on the programme. He wanted to be the star of the show and he wanted everyone to know it. I was playing Beppe, the second tenor role, in Pagliacci. Of course this guy gave himself the lead ro
le, to boost his own career and ego. In Macau. Well done.
The Chinese audiences were amazing, sitting deadly still throughout the whole piece then absolutely erupting at the end. But Macau itself: not so fun. It’s incredibly polluted and not wholly welcoming – the hotels have barbed wire along the top. Ours was called The Ritz, which I can only assume was the owner’s idea of a joke. Our window looked out onto a brick wall. We found the English TV channel, it showed a lot of Midsomer Murders, which ended up getting us through the month. That was all we watched. Three weeks of Midsomer Murders. It was a lifeline. Sarah wore a tank top one day and she got gawked at by everyone – you don’t see many women around there and she was really uncomfortable, as was I. We didn’t feel safe at all.
The food was largely inedible. We didn’t really eat for those three weeks, we stocked up on bread and fruit and cheese and lived on that. One night the guy running the festival took the cast to dinner. Sarah was feeling ill and I didn’t want to go anyway, so we went back to the hotel, probably to watch Midsomer Murders. And afterwards some of the cast told us how we’d had a lucky escape, having avoided a restaurant that had bowls on the sides of the tables to wash your cutlery in before you used it, and the guy had bought everybody fried pigeon heads as a starter.
We couldn’t wait to get out of Macau. I really wanted to get home to England, back to our life, back to the album. We looked so ill when we got back, Sarah’s mum got us a hotel room in Maida Vale just to recover for a couple of days, and we went to the doctor because Sarah was convinced she had bird flu. He said, ‘Were you around any farm animals in China?’ She said, ‘No but I have the bird flu!’ She was very insistent, she was convinced she had it, along with half of Britain.