Alfie Read online

  Sarah and I went to Salt Lake after Jonathan Miller’s La Bohème. I’d been dropped by EMI, didn’t know what to do about getting another record deal, was enjoying the operas but wanted to do something new somewhere else, make the jump. A few months earlier, just before Elektra, I went to Berlin a couple of times, sang to the Staats Opera and the Opéra National du Rhin, that came to nothing. We couldn’t afford to live in England so decided to make a go of it in America again. It seemed like a great opportunity. We’d saved up enough money for a house deposit, we thought we’d get something in New York and I’d try to start an operatic career up there. Sarah wanted to be nearer her family, she’d be able to settle there with Grace, and I would travel around the States working in different opera houses. That was the plan. I thought my time in Bohème there and everything I’d done here would count for something. So I went to see a number of agents, and basically got slapped in the face.

  A friend of mine recommended an agent, who I called, and he said, ‘I’m going to book a studio, and I want you to book a pianist, and I’ll come and see you sing two or three songs for me so I can get to know your voice.’ So I flew to New York with Sarah and her mum and Grace. They all went off to the zoo, I met the pianist I’d booked, and went and sat in this studio. And we waited, and waited, and waited . . . 45 minutes, no sign of the guy. I called up the agency, no answer on his phone. After it had been an hour I just lost it. I found out where his office was, marched in, went up to the receptionist, asked if he was in, and she said, ‘Yeah, he’s in his office round there, can you tell me what your name is please?’ I said, ‘That doesn’t matter,’ and I walked round to his office. Receptionists were following me asking me who I was, and I kicked open his door. He was just sat there, and he jumped.

  ‘Where were you? I’ve been waiting an hour.’

  ‘Alfie, yeah?’

  ‘YES, Alfie.’

  ‘I’m really sorry, I got stuck on the phone.’

  ‘You couldn’t bother to call me or call the studio?’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry. You know what mate, you fucking will be.’

  I turned around and walked out, got back to our hotel and kicked in an air vent. That was basically my state of mind. I was getting desperate. I couldn’t understand why agents weren’t giving me the time of day. I’d seen three or four with no success. I saw one in a big agency in New York. She said, ‘Come in on Saturday because I’ll be in the office anyway, and we’ll have a chat.’ So I went into the office and apologised for disturbing her weekend, said I could have met her in the week, and she said, ‘No, no, no, it’s fine, great to meet you.’ Very glamorous lady with her fur and rings. She asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to try to break into the American opera market and play some of the American houses. She said, ‘I think these houses are far too big for you.’ I asked if I could work up to them, or audition for any at least, just to see what work I could get. I asked her if she’d consider taking me on, and she said, ‘Can I show you a list of who we represent?’ And she handed me a list, pushed it across the desk to me. ‘Those are the sort of people we represent.’ Ian Bostridge, Tom Allen, José Cura, big names. And I looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t. She just expected me to look at that list and realise I wasn’t worthy of being at her agency. ‘I’m not worthy of being on this list among these people, I’m really sorry for embarrassing myself and being here in your presence, and now I shall leave.’ I guess that’s what she wanted to hear. So I left. And then she phoned up my agent and complained that I’d gone to see her on a Saturday. I was thinking, ‘What makes these people tick? Why are these people like this? Why am I in this business? What’s it all about? I just want to sing! I just want to sing, to work.’ I was losing a lot of heart.

  We decided on Salt Lake City, and bought a lovely house in a lovely neighbourhood, an infinitely bigger and better place than anything we could have afforded in England. I had some shows to do in Ireland, and Sarah put on a yard sale in Woodstock – the first yard sale Woodstock had ever seen – got rid of a lot of our junk, made about £500, which was a godsend, and we moved. It made sense. After years of being on the road, with little stability, we had Grace now and needed to settle. It was tough for Sarah, bringing up a baby in Woodstock while I was away in operas all the time – that place has a very specific demographic. The next youngest person on our street was 80. She was really missing her family, and the sort of life she could have out there. My career had ground to a halt, I wasn’t getting anywhere, and was beginning to think I was wasting my time with it all. So I wanted a new life too, and it’s hard to argue with that one. The house we bought was 15 minutes down the canyon from the ski resorts, it had a back garden, we could hike, we could go into the mountains at the weekends. You can see them from the house, it’s unbeatable. You don’t get that in Kilburn.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  FRENCH CONVICTS, AMERICAN COWBOYS

  Of course, as soon as we’d decided to settle in Salt Lake, everything changed. We just didn’t know it yet. Just after we bought that house, Cameron Mackintosh’s producer Trevor Jackson called Jilly, Neil’s co-manager and wife, and asked if I’d be interested in playing Jean Valjean for Les Misérables’ 25th Anniversary concert.

  Up to that point, Neil and Jilly and I had been very careful about what jobs we were taking on. To an extent I still felt like I was breaking back into opera and classical music, and we didn’t want to take on work that would endanger that. I needed the classical world to view me as a legitimate classical artist. There’s no going back after crossing that line into musical theatre. In terms of my opera career, it was a huge risk to take a gamble on. And Neil sympathised with my concerns but said he thought it could really put us on the map. I gave it a couple of days and said to Sarah, ‘This could really cause me problems with the opera houses, it could stop me getting work.’ She said, ‘But it could also do lots of other things for you. There’s a chance it could shut that door, but it could open others.’ She said the music in Les Misérables was beautiful and suggested we sit and listen to it, because I didn’t know it well at all. I’d sung the one line from ‘Do You Hear the People Sing’ back at Lottie Dawson’s when I was 14, I’d done ‘Bring Him Home’ at the Festival of Remembrance, that was about it. So Sarah got a CD and we sat and played it. First listen, I thought, ‘I can rock this like crazy.’ I could really hear myself singing it.

  I was coming round to it. Not completely sold, still unsure about the risk – those old voices in my head were telling me this wasn’t the sort of thing I should be singing. But I was looking for my next big project and I was feeling buzzy about it, excited about what it could bring. Cameron Mackintosh and the show’s composer Claude-Michel Schönberg wanted to meet me, to hear me sing, so I went to Cameron’s office in London one afternoon. He wasn’t there at the initial audition, it was Trevor Jackson, Claude-Michel and Stephen Brooker, the Musical Supervisor. Now Claude-Michel was by no means sold on me. He was a bit reserved about using an opera singer to play the role at all, because he’d worked with Plácido Domingo and the experience wasn’t what he’d expected. I sang the ‘Prologue Soliloquy’ and the ‘Epilogue’, which he liked, but it all hinged on ‘Bring Him Home’. They’re strong, powerful songs, but ‘Bring Him Home’ is one of the show’s pinnacle moments, it’s difficult to sing, so that’s the one that really has to be right when you audition. As I sang it, Claude-Michel was sort of frowning at me. I finished, and he said, ‘Can you do it one more time?’ and he stood literally 2ft in front of me and conducted me. And as I sang, his frown turned into a smile, and by the end he had a tear in his eye. And he threw his arms around me, it was really touching. And from that day on I knew I’d made one hell of a friend. I’ve got so much respect for Claude-Michel. He’s a great man.

  Singing those songs for him at that audition felt so right. Despite my misgivings, it was the most natural thing. It was a strange experience, it f
elt like that music had been lying dormant in my body, waiting for me. Other than ‘Bring Him Home’ I hadn’t done any work on it before, and I just felt it sitting there, it was like it had been released from a box. I connected to the character. And I thought, this is it. This is what I’d been waiting for. I thought, I’m gonna sing whatever I damn well want to sing now. I’m not going to try to convince people if they’re not already convinced about me, I’m not going to fight any more, I’m just gonna sing bloody good music. I thought it could open the door for opportunities for other repertoire, different avenues, giving me the chance to do what I always wanted to do, to combine genres: rock, pop, jazz, blues. And I said to Neil, ‘I’ll do it.’

  However, at that point the event was very much an unknown quantity. As enthusiastic as I was for the material and the opportunities it could give me, we assumed it would be a one-off event, a celebratory evening. We didn’t know how seismic it would be. They wanted it to be at the O2, but that was very far from being confirmed. There was no glamorous fanfare about it, no real sense of what it would bring, and it was a year-and-a-half away. Neil meanwhile had been talking to a small record company in Scotland about getting me into the studio again. Let’s just do it, make an album again, something personal, something we have control over, on our own terms. Neil was a fan of Linn, a high-end stereo manufacturer in Glasgow who have an accompanying record label, and they are absolute sound fascists. They record staggeringly beautiful albums, mostly classical, and had just won a Brit Award for a Mozart album with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, wiped the floor with it. They’re very cool. They were thinking of doing a Bernstein or Sondheim album with me, but having recently done The Merry Widow, I suggested Lehár. It’s lush, romantic 1920s music and it brings back so many memories for me, of my childhood, my father and his Richard Tauber records. And they went for it.

  We recorded it in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and although we did it for next to nothing I tried to do the material justice, and we did a great job. That album has a real sentimental feel for me – vocally and emotionally and even technically, I think everybody was emotionally connected, even the orchestra. It was a really warm experience. I was working with a great conductor, Mike Rosewell, who was one of my teachers from college. And it was a beautiful environment, I stood right in the middle of the orchestra to sing, which I loved. I’m not a massive fan of recording in vocal booths, which is usually the set-up. It’s magic to be able to sing surrounded by the orchestra, you really soak up the vibes like that, you’re part of the music, you feel it. And singing those songs did bring back a lot of memories for me, it was lovely, and one of my favourite albums I’ve done, certainly the most personal. I hold it close to my heart, I dedicated it to my dad. We didn’t do it for the money – it was a tiny little deal – but that wasn’t the point. We knew it probably wouldn’t break the charts, and indeed it didn’t sell many, but it really wasn’t about that. It was actually freeing to know we wouldn’t change the world with it, and to be satisfied with that. I didn’t expect it to rocket me to stardom, I just knew we’d made a really good-quality album and, there and then, that was all I was concerned about. No politics, no arguments, just great music, everybody on the same page. Doesn’t happen very often.

  After that I didn’t know what to do. I was beginning to feel I might be done with opera. ENO were providing me with a lot of work. I was doing two or three shows with them every season, but I just felt like I was chugging along, and I was having a crisis of confidence. Didn’t know where to start. Should we make another little record with Linn? Try to do one ourselves? I started panicking. I didn’t know what we were doing or where we were going, and I was questioning everything. I couldn’t get work in Germany, I couldn’t get work in America – it had got to the point where the only place I was regularly working was The Coliseum for the ENO. Why couldn’t I get work anywhere else? What was I doing wrong? Was I not sounding right? Did my face not fit? I was getting really frustrated, I really felt like I was wasting my time, and I was frightened.

  I went home to Salt Lake for June. Sarah’s father, and my brother-in-law, and one of his friends and his dad were going off to the family log cabin in Idaho one weekend for a bit of fly-fishing, and Sarah told me to go with them, get away for a bit. I didn’t really fancy it, I wanted to stay at home with her and Grace, but I’d never fly-fished before – I’d fished from shore and from a boat, but never fly-fished, so why not? My brother-in-law’s friend’s dad is a very good fly-fisher, and he tried to teach us. I couldn’t get a grasp of it at all, I was there with the rod and the line and the flies but I just couldn’t figure it out. The only thing I was catching was the hook in the back of my head, it was pathetic. And I just got so sick and tired of this hook getting stuck in my head, and my line getting tangled, and just not getting a bite, I slammed my rod down and said, ‘I’m going. I’m off. I’ll see you later, here’s another rod for you, David.’ And I stropped off, and went to Sarah’s uncle’s house.

  Pierre’s a bit of a cowboy. He sounds like one, real cool drawl. He’s a good guy, we’d grown really close through hiking together, been out on treks. We just clicked. Brothers from another mother. We took epic day trips. We’d trekked in Elephant’s Perch in Idaho, caught the boat across the lake, hit the trail and hiked for hours. We once sat overlooking this Alpine lake, he’d scattered his brother’s ashes around there, and it was one of the most peaceful and idyllic moments in my life sitting there with Pierre, eating smoked oysters and cheese. On the way down I was so hot I stripped down to my underwear and threw myself into this pool. He’s a bit of an old rocker, big Rolling Stones fan, loves his music. He used to follow the Stones, went to a load of their gigs in the ’60s and ’70s and took great photos of them – he gave me an amazing photo of Keith Richards on stage, really up close, fag hanging out his mouth.

  Whenever I’m up in Idaho I see Pierre. I could always rely on him for moral support, so I went to find him that day when I’d had enough of the fly-fishing. I got to his place and he said, in his cowboy drawl, ‘Hey, Alf, you look stressed.’ A little bit, mate. Tried to do some fly-fishing for ages and I just walked three miles to your house. He said, ‘Well, take a seat in the truck.’ We jumped in and he backed the truck up to the garage, took out a TV from the garage, shoved it in the back of the truck and said, ‘Let’s take the dogs for a walk.’ I didn’t know what the TV had to do with anything. The dogs jumped in the back with this TV, and we drove off into the mountains. We found a really secluded spot, took a little stroll up and back down a hill with the dogs, then he put them in the back, backed the truck up to a little mound of dirt and rested the TV on top of it. Then he backed the truck away, took out a 38mm Magnum and handed it to me. ‘OK, shoot the hell out of that.’ What? I’d never shot a handgun in my life. I shoved some bits of rolled up toilet paper in my ears to block the sound, aimed the gun at the TV, pulled the trigger, and shot right through the middle of the screen. And the TV exploded. It was great. And we shot for an hour and a half. Shot the TV, shot some cans . . . at one point one of the bullets ricocheted off a rock into a tree and snapped a branch off.

  While we were shooting, a mountain biker appeared out of nowhere, right in the line of fire. Pierre said, ‘OK, Alf, guns down.’ We pointed them at the floor, at which point, in some sort of nervous panic, I accidentally pulled the trigger and a bullet went right between my feet. Could have shot my foot off. The mountain biker said, ‘Hey how you doing. Carry on, guys, have a good day.’ Like it was no thing to see two guys there stood in the wilderness shooting all hell out of a TV. And we carried on shooting. It was thrilling, but it wasn’t about the empowerment of shooting a gun, it was, for me at least, about the accuracy. Yes, shooting a handgun is something else. An air-rifle or a rifle is one thing, but a handgun . . . they’re designed for defence, they’re not designed to go hunting with. To have a gun in your hand that’s designed to defend you against others is a weird feeling. But it soon became about the accuracy, how cl
ose I could get to the centre of the target, rather than how good it felt to shoot. We went shooting another time as well, just went off into the wilderness, he pulled out the Magnum again and handed it me, stuck up a load of tin cans on some rocks and we shot them. That time we were both drinking from a bottle of bourbon, which was probably not the best idea. For an hour and a half I was a compete redneck.

  Pierre’s a strong figure out there, he was a social worker. We grew really close, but unfortunately he hit some hard times and ended up in hospital, in a coma. And one night I was back in England, walking back from a show one night in Blackheath, back to my friend’s house where I was staying, and I said to myself, ‘I know you’re here, Pierre, I know you’re with me, man. I can feel you here. I hope you’re alright buddy. And I’m gonna turn around and I’m gonna see you.’ And I turned around, and about 10ft away from me was a fox, just stood there looking straight at me, eyes locked, for ages. I turned back around, carried on walking for a few seconds, turned around again and it had gone. And every night after that, that fox came to my back door and I fed it – there are photos somewhere of me feeding it. Then I got a message from the family in America saying Pierre had come out of his coma. When he woke from it, somebody said, ‘Where have you been, Pierre?’

  And he said, ‘I’ve been in London with Alf.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  VALJEAN TO THE RESCUE

  It was there in Salt Lake that summer, mulling things over amid the exploding televisions, that I considered becoming a personal trainer. It’s a great life over there, and with an uncertain future, settling with my family and raising my daughter among the mountains seemed like the way forward. Having thought about becoming a chef a few years earlier, I was now pretty hooked on the idea of getting people fit. I was in good shape myself, eating healthily and working out a lot in the gym because I had to get my kit off for Verdi’s La Traviata, which I’d be performing for Welsh National Opera that October. That was a first, and I was nervous about it. I wanted to look right, to look good. And working out was making me feel good, it gave me a release, something to focus on when I was away from my family. I threw myself into it, started discovering more about the body and muscles and nutrition and health. I started taking protein powders and energy boosters and muscle enhancers, just to look right on stage when I took my clothes off, and I got a little obsessed, was working out twice a day, two or three hours each time. I was really pushing myself. I got big. I look at photos of myself back then and my goodness had I bulked up. There wasn’t that much definition, but I put on a lot of weight, a lot of muscle. I went from 11½ to 14 stone. It even hurt to bend down, I’m a bit slack with my stretches.