Alfie Page 22

  So if you watch that on the DVD, when everybody’s singing ‘Drink with Me’, I’m behind the barricade on my knees. Focusing. I had my eyes shut. And I felt this completely overwhelming warmth. A real connection, a protection. Like I’d been put in a bubble. The same bubble I was in when I took that walk with Mum on the beach in Fleetwood just before Dad died. It was really, really weird to have that same feeling again there at the O2, because I felt like Dad was with me. I know that sounds melodramatic, I know this sounds like some imaginative thing I’ve concocted, but this was genuinely how I felt. I felt lighter, stronger, and braver. And then instinctively I just stood up and turned onto the stage. I didn’t see anybody, and I walked up to that microphone and started singing, in an almost meditative state. I just focused out – it was like someone else was singing. I’d never experienced that before. And I can get in that state now. It doesn’t take away the nerves, or the edge, you still have that jittery energy, but you’re in control. And at the end of the song, I didn’t hear applause. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t hear anything. I stood there looking out, and this enormous room with 19,000 people in it felt small. It felt like everybody there in the distance, everybody around, everybody at the top, it felt like they were all there next to me. Like everybody was with me on stage, and we were praying together. I felt like I’d brought the entire audience with me into my little bubble, and they were all miniature, and I was singing to them.

  It was very strange for me to watch that weeks later on the DVD, to see myself in that state. I’ve never liked watching or hearing myself sing, but on that DVD I can feel the emotion. At the time, I didn’t hear them applaud or cheer, I didn’t even clock them being on their feet. For a good 30 seconds. And then all of a sudden – it was like somebody was turning up the volume on the radio, this huge noise faded up. I looked around and saw 19,000 people on their feet. And then it died down, and I was really touched, it was really sweet, and then it started up again, another wave. It was so overwhelming. And it was the first time in the show I properly came out of character, I acknowledged the applause, because I’d sort of woken from my trance and realised what was happening. And it settled, and I felt this all-consuming, warming joy. I knew that I’d reached my goal. This was the beginning, the start, we’d done something. We’ve done it. That little voice inside of me that was always there telling me something would happen? Now it was saying, ‘Well done, Alf.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  RUFFLING FEATHERS

  I walked down the stairs after the song, and everybody was stood at the bottom applauding, the crew, the staff, the cast. Matt came running up to me and threw his arms around me and said, ‘Tonight, a star is born.’ For a split-second, I thought, ‘Who?’ and I looked around to see who he was talking about. But then Nick Jonas came up and said, ‘That was something special. Your career’s made.’ And it all dawned on me. What a feeling.

  Sarah and her father and Gracie had come to London to see the show. Sarah was in the audience, David was at the hotel we were staying in, babysitting Gracie. And at the end of that performance I came off stage, walked down the corridor to my dressing room, and in the hallway were all these people and celebs, and all I saw through the throng was my daughter. David had brought her with him to surprise me. I saw her and just cried. That was when the emotion hit me. I’d been holding it all in to get me through the thing, channelling it into the character. But the minute I saw my little girl it just exploded. It was out, and I was Alf again. My little girl!

  The day after that I just collapsed. My body finally got some rest and I got sick, got every bug under the sun. Back to reality. Meanwhile Neil was pounding on the door of Universal Classics and Jazz, now Decca. Mark Wilkinson and Dickon Stainer, the same two guys I’d sung for when I was trying to get a deal in 2003. Neil is relentless. He’s the Terminator, he absolutely will not stop. ‘Fellas, I have something for you.’ After having had Neil bang on their door for years, they didn’t jump for joy when he told them he wanted to talk about Alfie Boe again, but he’d managed to get a couple of minutes of the ‘Bring Him Home’ footage, showed it to them on his laptop, and they offered us a deal. And I felt absolutely out of this world, because they were the company I’d wanted to be with since day one.

  We went straight into the album. It made sense to go down the musical theatre route in the wake of the O2, although I think we kept it at the classical, classier end of the spectrum. The pressure to make that album was intense. Decca hired James Morgan and his wife Juliette to produce it, and from that point to the CDs being pressed in the factory was three weeks. We had a couple of days to record it. Flew out to Copenhagen, had a great recording session. I think I recorded all the vocals in nine hours. Then did lots of promo, loads of TV, did The Royal Variety Performance, I met Ray Davies. N-Dubz were there. Poor Dappy, walking around backstage with his shades on, as cool as he could, baseball cap at a jaunty angle. I was feeling slightly ridiculous, walking around in my Valjean convict rags, but then Dappy said, ‘Hey, how you doin’?’ then turned around and walked straight into a wall. That was great. And then my album went to Number 9. Top 10 album, in the proper charts! I’d only ever had albums in the classical charts before. Harvey Goldsmith knew what he was talking about. ‘Boy needs a song!’

  I was still performing in operas, did Roméo et Juliette for the Royal Opera House, a couple for the ENO in January, the La Bohème revival and then a revival of Jonathan Miller’s The Mikado, which I got told off for because of the way I was approaching my character, Nanki-Poo. It was cool to be doing Gilbert and Sullivan again and I was experimenting a bit, I was inspired by Stan Laurel and was pushing him in that direction, he’s a clown. But they wanted him more romantic, they basically asked me to play him exactly the same way that any other number of people have played him before. We’re supposed to bring something to these roles, to interpret them, but they weren’t giving me any freedom to play around. I said, ‘Why did you hire me then? Why didn’t you just hire the guy who played it last time?’ John Berry from the ENO phoned Neil, had a big shouty moan about me. But I got good reviews for what I did. I don’t know if people were maybe resentful of my O2 success. Some did start whinging about me. Desert Island Discs seemed to provoke people, but that wasn’t the intention – that conversation was all spontaneous, I didn’t go into that studio with a hit list. When you do that show, they play the music as you hear it, so you’re sitting in there listening to the songs you’ve chosen, which, certainly in my case, meant a lot to me and transported me back to specific periods in my life. Kirsty Young creates an incredibly intimate environment. I almost completely forgot that it was a radio interview with tons of people listening. I even forgot about the people behind us, on the other side of the window in the control room. I had my back to them – it just felt like it was me and Kirsty having a quiet chat. She’s a beautiful woman, very comforting, very disarming. I was nervous at first and I admitted it on air, but that soon went, and as I relaxed into it I gradually opened up more and more. I started talking about Dad, listening to the music I used to listen to with him. I wanted to talk about it, about his death, to share it. The girls in the control room were welling up, Neil was crying. I’d never been so open in an interview before, and it was the first time I’d spoken out about some of my more negative opera experiences. I just felt free to say what was on my mind as I listened to those songs. And what I said then got quoted in the press, and people had a snap at me. I don’t think they’d really listened to what I said, which was that when I go to the opera I feel very uncomfortable, that it’s not my world. I said, ‘When I’m up there doing it, that’s my world, that’s what I really enjoy. But sitting there watching it, I’m bored stiff.’ Which is true. I love the music, I listen to opera, but, as a performer, I’m just not a fan of sitting in the audience for five hours, I’d rather be singing it. And I didn’t think anything of it until the papers pounced on it and got quotes from people. Jonathan Miller’s response upset me a bit. He said
: ‘If Alfie Boe thinks opera is boring then it’s very odd that he’s in it at all. I’ve only worked with him once and he sings rather well but I know he comes from something other than opera. He was a car mechanic, I believe.’

  There’s a difference between what I said and people’s reductive interpretation of what I said. To be fair, Jonathan may not have heard the interview. I imagine a journalist said, ‘Alfie Boe said he finds opera boring, what do you say to that?’ But the car mechanic thing, come on. And he said it like he barely knew who I was. I’d actually been in two of his operas, La Bohème in 2009, and The Mikado revival, only a few months before Desert Island Discs. There was a bit of a political scrum going on with the latter; as the production’s original director 25 years earlier he was involved but was being kept at arm’s length to an extent, and I was always saying, ‘What would Jonathan want?’ when creative decisions had to be made. So I found his comments a little hurtful, and a little arrogant, certainly facetious. ‘He was a car mechanic, I believe.’ Yes. I was. And I played the lead in your opera a couple of years ago, I believe.

  The papers also dug up some other character from Opera Holland Park who said I was talking drivel and should be renamed Alfie Boellocks. I quite like that name. Maybe that’s what I should title my next album. I was enjoying all that stuff anyway, it entertains me when their feathers get ruffled. It doesn’t take much. I just like to be honest now, God knows I kept my mouth shut for long enough. And I’m going to get criticised regardless. Three weeks after the O2 concert I was slammed for it, when I played Tybalt in Roméo et Juliette at the Royal Opera House. At the end of the first performance, I stepped out to take my curtain call and got a bigger response than the guy who was playing Romeo, because a fair amount of Les Mis fans had come to see me, I guess. I wasn’t doing anything different, I wasn’t courting it. A lady reviewing it for the Opera Today website said that ‘adulation’ could be my undoing, and that that kind of audience isn’t into opera, just chasing celebrity. The nub of what she was insinuating was that some people enjoyed my performance in one thing, so they’d come to see me perform in another thing. And that’s bad? That I’d introduced people to opera, brought people with me? No thanks, close the doors. No room at the inn for you casuals. Says it all really.

  The casting director had a problem with me too, he shook everybody’s hand on the last performance, then when it was my turn, at the end of the line, he shunned me, turned around and walked away. I can’t say for sure why he did that, but I imagine it was related to my history with the place, my premature exit from the Vilar programme before going off to Broadway in 2002. Or maybe it was that audience I’d brought with me. I don’t know, but he’d obviously had his nose pushed out of joint somehow.

  I’d had such a lovely success with Les Misérables, and I was on a high. Then going into the Opera House and getting that review about the audience, and having the casting director blank me, I thought, why are they like this? Les Misérables had filled me with so much joy and reinstated my love for what I do, and I came back to an opera gig and got that. It really opened my eyes to the narrow-mindedness of the industry. And Les Misérables meant so much to me, Valjean means so much to me. He really resonates with people, some a little too much. The O2 concert plays on TV worldwide, and after Mikado, I’d gone to perform a few concerts in Idaho, and had an odd experience in Rexburg. I came off the stage in the interval and there was a woman in my dressing room. She said, ‘You are Valjean.’ She then gave me memorial cards from her daughter’s funeral, and a CD with the music that had been played at the funeral, cards they’d had at her wedding. Photos of her. Cards from her own wedding. Then these two girls who’d organised the concert appeared and got her out the room, they were embarrassed, they didn’t know how she’d got in. Colm Wilkinson, the original Valjean from 1985, had told me how much the character in the show touched people, and I was starting to experience some of that up close. One lady said to me, ‘When I die, I hope God looks like you.’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’d be too happy to hear that!’ But it freaked me out a bit. Some people talk about Valjean as if he was a real person, someone said to me, ‘Maybe your father is in Heaven now having a cup of tea with Jean Valjean.’ I said, ‘No . . . no.’

  But Valjean does get to people, and going back into Les Misérables to play him for that five-month run at the Queen’s Theatre was fantastic. I wondered if it would be as exciting and as fun as it was when I’d done it initially at the Queen’s and the O2 in October, but it was so much better. Five weeks of rehearsals flew by. I loved being in that theatre again, getting used to the revolving stage again, putting on my old costume. One night, with two weeks of rehearsals to go before I was due back on, Simon Bowman was ill, Jonny Williams, the understudy, was ill, and Cameron asked if I’d be willing to go on that night, because he had Russell Crowe in watching it as preparation for the movie – they’d cast him as Javert. So I did it, I hadn’t even rehearsed Act Two, hadn’t played it since the O2, but it all came back. Shoved on at the last minute, really threw myself into it, and loved it. Cameron of course came up to me afterwards with a big pile of notes about what I’d done wrong. Constructive notes though – Cameron’s a very clever man, he doesn’t do it frivolously, he knows what it’s about. And it works. It upsets you and it stresses you out, but you put it back into the role – you can transform that anger into whatever you’re doing on stage, and it bloody well works. Yeah I’ve wanted to thump Cameron half a dozen times and say, ‘Man, what are you DOING to me!’ But it comes across in the show I think, and I love him to pieces. He, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Herb Kretzmer, Trevor Nunn, John Caird – they’ve all given me the opportunity to change my life, and my respect for them will always be high. I can’t thank them enough. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. They’re a great bunch of people. That show will always remain in my heart, will always be a part of my life. It’s in my soul. It really is. Cameron laid into me a bit after my first night at The Queen’s, because we’d just found out that they’d decided to go with Hugh Jackman instead of me for the movie, and Cameron was upset about it. And yeah, I was disappointed too, but you can’t have it all. I had a two-hour audition with Tom Hooper, the director, and I really enjoyed it, I learnt a lot, how to play it down, subtler, smaller, for the cameras as opposed to people at the back of a theatre. And I did the 25th Anniversary concert, I did it at the Royal Variety Performance, I did five months in the West End. Hugh Jackman’s a great performer, a great singer and a great actor, and he’ll do it justice, it’s his turn. Jean Valjean does not just belong to me. There have been many Valjeans before me and there will be many more. But I have a very nice little piece of him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  MY LITTLE WORLD

  I really pushed it on my last night of Les Misérables. I punched the stage, bust my hand, I broke as many props as I possibly could. I didn’t plan it, I just got so caught up in the performance. Smashed some goblets, bent a candlestick. I didn’t want people to look upon that stage and see me. I wanted it to be like the clock had been turned back 200 years and they were seeing Jean Valjean. I ripped my shirt open in the scene where I reveal myself as Valjean and it wasn’t for effect, I felt it, deep down. If I could have ripped my chest open I would have done, that was what it was about. I took a few liberties. Especially for ‘Bring Him Home’; instead of sitting with Marius I stood at the front of the stage and sung it out to the audience. It was really emotional, leaving that role. I was tired, I was ready to call it a day and have a break, but I really felt it that night. And ripping the shirt, and ripping up the paper with my prisoner number on it – that was, subconsciously, like tearing off the role in a way, ripping it off.

  Playing in the West End is such an honour, it’s a great world, and these musical theatre singers, they’re the hardest working people in the business. Seriously. As my time was coming to an end at Les Mis, they were doing nine shows a week for three weeks including rehearsals for the guy who was t
aking my place. And that’s as well as all the other things they’ve got going on outside the show. And they go out drinking afterwards. They’re young and they can handle it, I can’t. I’ve got so much respect for them, because it’s so damn hard. They’re great people. And I made a fantastic friend in Matt, who made me and Sarah and Grace so welcome in his house for a few months, he’s so supportive, and so creative. We did The Kitchen Sessions there, me and him singing for YouTube. The first one, where I did ‘Nessun Dorma’, was fantastically spontaneous, we had a lot of fun.

  I went back to Prague to make the Alfie album. In a break before recording ‘When I Fall in Love’ I got an email from Sarah – a photograph of her pregnancy test, positive. I called her, I was in tears, and then had to sing. I think you can hear the emotion in my voice. I think I sound serene, blissfully serene on that song, because I was. I did it in one take. And I sang ‘In My Daughter’s Eyes’ for Grace.

  We recorded ‘Song to the Siren’ with Robert Plant in London. That was one of those moments in time for me that I can’t quite fathom, I still can’t get over it. That man means so much to me and Sarah. It’s so fitting that he should be on this album, the album named after our son – I said before how he’s basically soundtracked our relationship, how we listened to Led Zep when we first met, had our first dance at the wedding to ‘Rain Song’, how we met him together last year. There was no grand plan, it wasn’t as if I weighed all that up and said, ‘OK, we have to have Robert Plant on this album. Somebody sort it out.’ You can’t calculate that stuff. Leave it to the universe. We met him randomly. I wasn’t even going to go out that night, I wanted to stay in, get a takeout and watch TV. But some friends from America were in town, Sarah dragged me out and we ended up in the Soho Hotel for a drink to meet them. And while we were there this tall guy walked in, long blond hair, leather jacket, girl on his arm . . . my God, it’s Robert Plant. It was like the fog machine had just been fired up for his entrance into the bar. Whoooosshhhh. ‘Get all the fog going, Robert’s coming!’ Backlit, choir of angels circling him. He went over to the bar and practically lit it up. I thought, I am not leaving this bar until I’ve spoken to Robert Plant. I said, ‘I’m going up to talk to him,’ and Sarah went, ‘What?!’ And I went up to the bar with £20 in my hand, pretending I was waiting to get served, and said, ‘Hi, man, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan of your music. Love your new Band Of Joy album. We happen to be on the same record label actually.’ Really? ‘Yeah, I’ve recently signed to Decca. I’m making my second album for them.’ We started chatting and his girlfriend Sophia knew who I was, she knew Les Mis, which helped. And what I thought might be a two-minute conversation turned into an hour conversation about music.