Thought Gareth Malone was just a big softie who tugs the nation's heartstrings with his inspirational workplace singsongs? Think again... as Britain's favourite choirmaster tells Event what he REALLY thinks of some of the biggest voices in pop
While Gareth Malone is used to reducing the nation's TV viewers to tears as he cajoles the most unlikely members of the public to sing, Britain's most beloved choirmaster is disarmingly old-school, endlessly patient and quietly spoken.
He is not a man who could ever be considered controversial. Or so I thought until we met to discuss his new TV show and Christmas album.
Choirmaster Gareth Malone has something to get off his chest – it involves some of the biggest names in the music business
But before we begin to talk about his latest search for the best choirs in Britain, Malone has something to get off his chest – it involves some of the biggest names in the music business.
And the choirmaster is not holding back, as he is worried. Very worried.
'I am seriously concerned about Adele,' he says. 'The way she sings is wrecking her voice, and her voice is her instrument.'
The award-winning choirmaster was alarmed to witness her disastrous appearance at this year's Grammys, when she sang her hit from the massive-selling 25 album, All I Ask, sounding powerless and flat.
Afterwards, she took to Twitter to blame her equipment, saying: 'The piano mics fell on to the piano strings, that's what the guitar sound was. It made it sound out of tune. S*** happens.'
Malone shakes his head in disbelief. When it comes to singing, he is not a man who can be fobbed off – even by the world's most successful female artist.
Malone is a man who doesn't pull his punches. This can be traced back to his childhood when he was bullied at his all-boys school in Bournemouth for being different
'She's damaged her voice,' he says. 'The way she sings – and the way Sam Smith, Jess Glynne and Ellie Goulding sing, too – is just very bad for the voice. Adele lets in too much air, which irritates the throat and the vocal cords, and she pushes her voice with too much force. It gives it emotion, but it's a style of singing that can only work in a recording studio.
'If you go out and try to perform like that on a tour, then you are going to end up in trouble, like Adele did at the Grammys. You just cannot sustain a voice like that. You can't push it like that every night. Look at Led Zep's Robert Plant. He can't sing like he did when he was younger because when he sang in his 20s he was just wrecking his voice.'
He pauses, furrows his brow and takes a sip from his filtered white coffee.
'I absolutely know Adele understands what happened that night, which is why she had a blackout day the following day. She just wanted to hide under a blanket. It's mortifying. I actually felt sorry for her.
'It makes me worry about who is looking after her, why such little care is taken about the instrument that her whole career is based on. Record companies don't really care about the health of their artists, which is why so many performers have issues with their throats and their ears.
'Poor Phil Collins is practically deaf, as are so many of those older artists. Ears get ripped to shreds because music is played too loud.
'There are exceptions like Mick Jagger. His voice isn't perfect but it's distinctly his and you can tell he really looks after it [Jagger famously goes for weeks without speaking to protect his voice, and regularly sees voice specialists].
Malone was alarmed to witness Adele's disastrous appearance at this year's Grammys, when she sang her hit from the massive-selling 25 album, All I Ask, sounding powerless and flat
The guy lives like an athlete, which is what you need to do if you want to be in your 70s and still touring like you are 20. He is incredible. But he's a one-off.
'It's a lesson. If I saw Adele I would say something to her. She's had surgery on her vocal cords, as has Sam Smith. They are in trouble. They need to look after their voices.'
Malone is a man who doesn't pull his punches. This can be traced back to his childhood when he was bullied at his all-boys school in Bournemouth for being different.
He didn't like football, he loved classical music and he also had curly ginger hair and pipe-cleaner-skinny legs.
An only child, he kept his daily torment a secret from his bank manager father, James, and his mother, Sian, who worked in the civil service.
'I can't say it wasn't horrendous,' he says. 'But I didn't let it break me.'
Rather than making him try to fit in, the bullying made him go his own way, do his own thing – drama, choral music, Saturday nights in with his grandparents.
As an adult, Malone remains happy to ride against the tide. He's fearless in his opinions, and his lack of awe in the face of the gods of rock leads to some surprisingly spiky outbursts.
Last year he was invited to the Brit Awards [he took his schoolteacher wife, Becky, who is the mother of their two young children, Esther, five and Gilbert, three] and he still hasn't recovered from watching Kanye West perform the expletive-ridden All Day.
Gareth Malone conducting in full flow. He was discovered by production company 20/20 a decade ago when he was running the youth choir for the London Symphony Orchestra
'I was just boiling with rage as I watched him,' he says. 'I was looking around the room thinking, "Are people actually enjoying this absolute rubbish?"
'He said that the song was a tribute to the London riots. Anyone with any intelligence would know they weren't something to be celebrated. It made me livid.'
Malone is respected and rather feared in the music industry. Simon Cowell has taken him out for coffee ('We just had a nice chat, he was very complimentary') and Kimberley Walsh from Girls Aloud actually shook when he gave her a critique of her West End singing.
And as for The Voice judge and Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson… 'He told me he was absolutely terrified about singing for me,' says Malone. 'He came to my house to sing a song I'd written. He was due at ten in the morning. I looked out of the window 15 minutes beforehand and he was standing outside with a set of headphones on, practising. I thought that was rather sweet.'
Malone never set out to have a career in television. He was discovered by production company 20/20 a decade ago when he was running the youth choir for the London Symphony Orchestra and became an instant star with the Bafta-winning BBC2 series The Choir.
The first show spawned a cottage industry of Gareth Malone singing shows (The Naked Choir, The Big Performance) and No 1 hits for the Military Wives and Gareth's All Star Choir with their version of Avicii's Wake Me Up for Children In Need.
When he started out, his ridiculously boyish looks were contrasted with a penchant for smart suits and bow ties.
Today, aged 40 and with greying hair, he is dressed, perhaps rather belatedly, in ripped jeans and a T-shirt.
'I've binned the bow ties,' he says.
What made Malone TV gold was the way he interacted with his performers. Never veering from his school-masterly character, he stuck with seeming vocal no-hopers, coaxing incredible results from the unlikeliest performers (think tattooed Military Wife Sam and difficult teenager Chloe).
He also showed a tremendous ability to divine the real talent (often the quietest person in the room) in the face of huge personalities.
A typically tear-jerking moment in The Choir: Sing While You Work came at the Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service.
Malone spotted that the firefighters saw themselves as top dogs over the support staff. Turning the tables, he then pushed forward call operator Helen as the solo singer, coaxing her to sing flanked by two strapping firemen.
Their version of the Bruce Springsteen song The Rising (written to honour the firefighters involved in 9/11) produced an awestruck silence followed by rapturous applause.
'I think every choir I've worked with has been incredibly special,' says Malone. 'But it's the individuals like Helen and Sam and Chloe people remember. It makes the music personal, and music is personal.'
He confesses to being stunned about being a TV star, with an OBE to boot and the home phone numbers of celebrity friends including Miranda Hart and Mel Giedroyc from Bake Off.
How would he feel, then, if the production company took The Choir format elsewhere, as has happened with Bake Off? He sighs: 'That is a tough one. I would stay with the BBC, not just because I feel loyalty to them but because I feel an affinity with the spirit of the BBC.
'The Choir shows are completely true to BBC2 and that audience. But I would hate to be put in that position, which was why I felt so bad for Mel and all of them. I understand why Paul chose to go. It's a big payday.'
Malone lives in a sizeable home in north London, with the means to enjoy good holidays and buy the occasional instrument, although he claims not to be a multi-millionaire (he can't afford a £90,000 Steinway grand piano and has instead bought a £5,000 Yamaha upright).
His heart lies with choirs, watching Veep and Monty Don gardening shows, visiting family and the occasional indulgence of a glass of Islay single malt (without ice – 'I'm not a barbarian').
Malone with his Choir of Military Wives
He's aware of the absurdities of his fame. At the Queen's Jubilee party he found himself standing eye to eye with Paul McCartney. 'He said, "I've been watching you." I just blurted out, "And I've been listening to you".'
In his new TV series, The Choir: Gareth's Best In Britain, Malone travels the length and breadth of the country to find the best choirs to compete for the title of Best Choir.
The show is a charmingly winning combo of Malone, quirky members of the singing public and stunning shots of the wilds of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall.
Due to his ever increasing popularity – and the commercial pressures to produce a new idea each year – Malone is also bringing out his first Christmas album.
Called A Great British Christmas, it features festive classics as well as that song he wrote for Ricky Wilson, Paradise Road, and his first-ever singing performances on a version of Yazoo's Only You.
There is also a soporific version of John Lennon's Happy Christmas (War Is Over) sung by the Belfast Community Gospel Choir and Perran-Ar-Worthal Hand Bell Ringers.
I tell Malone it is a song that only works when delivered with Lennon's uniquely harsh, nasal tones and to Lennon fans, what he has done borders on the criminal.
He shakes his head: 'I don't see that song as a holy cow. I can see why others do but to me it's all about interpretation. It's a song about war when we are surrounded by war. The Belfast Community Gospel Choir is made up of all faiths and it is based in the heart of the previous Troubles, when there was endless fighting. It's a song about war in very bleak times but with some message of hope.'
Is there any Christmas classic Malone wouldn't touch? 'Fairytale Of New York,' he says. 'It can only be sung by Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan. And that is a case where an imperfect voice makes a song perfect.'
As a child, Malone's father introduced him to Bob Dylan and he would make his mother laugh by doing terrible impersonations. He winces at the memory.
'Oh, God… do we really have to go there?' Malone shrugs when asked about Dylan's recent Nobel Prize for Literature: 'That really should be about literature and I can't see how his songs are strictly that. He's a better songwriter than a singer but I don't care about his work as much as I care about Bach's. To me, it doesn't compare.'
Gareth with wife Becky
Dylan will get the chance to give his verdict on Malone's vocal talents this Christmas when Malone sings on two of the songs on his new album, an experience that left him 'feeling horribly naked and very, very vulnerable.'
He says: 'I wanted to put my own voice out there after years and years of telling other people how to sing. But it was a very difficult experience. I felt stripped naked and when I sang I piped [cried] because I got very emotional about it. It taught me about what people go through when I make them sing.
'In singing, you are exposing yourself entirely, putting your voice, your emotions out there, and that is never an easy thing to do.'
Despite his fears about performing, Malone says he didn't resort to using Auto-Tune, technology that has the ability to turn any offkey singer into a pitch-perfect performer.
He's not totally against its use, though.
'I call it the Taylor Swift button,' he says. 'I think it's brilliant because singers are like anyone else – they can have off days.'
As we prepare to leave, I ask Malone what he thinks about stars like Justin Bieber who mime on stage.
The choirmaster raises an eyebrow and cannot stop himself skewering one more pop star before he leaves.
'Not great, but then do people really go to a Justin Bieber concert to listen to the music? I don't think so.'
'The Choir: Gareth's Best In Britain' starts on Tuesday on BB2. His new album, 'A Great British Christmas' will be released by Decca on December 2
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