Alfie Boe
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2011
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer Alfie Boe.
He is one of our most popular tenors and, highly unusually, is a sell-out success in both opera houses and musical theatre. The youngest of nine children, he left school to work as a mechanic - before being plucked off the shop-floor for stardom. However, while he's at home on the stage, you won't necessarily find him in the stalls: "I like good singers, I don't necessarily like one genre of music, I just like good singers, good voices and good songs," he says, adding: "I never go to the opera.... it's just not my world."
Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. The My cast away this week is the singer Alfie Bow. The power and purity of his |
| 0:40.4 | voice has been enjoyed by audiences from the Royal Opera House to Broadway and of his |
| 0:45.0 | next voice has been enjoyed by audiences from the Royal Opera House to Broadway. |
| 0:44.0 | And if Cameron McIntosh is looking for a good tale for his next West End smash, |
| 0:49.0 | he'd look no further than the story of my castaway's life to date. One of nine children born in |
| 0:55.0 | Blackpool he left school at 15, worked as a mechanic before being talent spotted by a |
| 1:00.1 | big-time director who whisked him away to perform Love O. M. in New York, where he fell in love. |
| 1:06.6 | Since then, hit records and sellout concerts have been the order of the day, but he says, |
| 1:11.5 | you've got to remember to keep a sense of proportion about the whole thing |
| 1:14.8 | we're just singing songs we're not going to change the world well maybe not |
| 1:18.3 | alphibo but certainly your world has changed a lot I'm wondering that when you sing as you often do the impossible dream |
| 1:23.9 | it must hold a special resonance for you. It does. I mean singing is such a |
| 1:29.1 | wonderful gift to have and when I first started to sing at the age of 14 I didn't think that it was really anything |
| 1:36.8 | I could make a living at you know growing up as a kid in Lancashire you're told to either become a fisherman or join the army or something |
| 1:46.5 | like that you know and and so you don't really have the options of studying music or using |
| 1:51.8 | an ability using a talent. |
| 1:53.0 | No, I do look every day at what I'm doing and think I'm so lucky. |
| 1:58.0 | One of the very distinctive things about your working life, as I said just a moment ago is that, you know, to sing at the Great Opera Houses, |
| 2:06.1 | the Royal Opera House and so on, English National Opera, |
... |
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