Gareth Malone

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2016

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gareth Malone is a choirmaster who has coaxed and cajoled people from nervous adults to reluctant teenagers to open their mouths and sing for the pure joy of it - in front of television cameras. Gareth's first two TV series, which charted his attempts to build successful choirs in schools with little or no tradition of singing together, both won major awards, and gripped and inspired viewers. He has since also worked widely on TV with adult groups from a wide range of backgrounds, and his Military Wives Choir even hit the top of the charts at Christmas. Once described as a human tuning fork, Gareth loved music from an early age - and as he recalls, his parents and grandmother took a strong interest in his own youthful performances, from his very first school concerts. As a teenager, he felt an outsider amongst his fellow pupils, because he found his music teacher so inspiring. After time spent as a youth worker, and as a music educator, Gareth's TV series have taken him all over the country becoming - in his words - "an evangelist for music.".

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.
0:05.0	Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.
0:09.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.
0:14.0	For more information about the program, please visit bbc.co.uk- Radio 4.
0:30.0	Music
0:37.0	My castaway this Christmas day is the choir master, Gareth Malone.
0:41.0	He has got Britain singing again, making music and TV that unites disparate and sometimes even disparate people through the power of song.
0:49.0	His professional credentials are clearly tip-top, but there is charm and a dash of cunning too.
0:55.0	He's coaxed everyone from goby adolescents to hard-nosed boxers into opening their minds, their mouths and their hearts in pursuit of music.
1:04.0	It makes for gripping and often inspiring TV.
1:07.0	His military wives choir even had a number one Christmas single.
1:11.0	Music is central not just to his professional success, but his very existence, his parents, met through their mutual love of Gilbert and Sullivan.
1:19.0	And his own pretty tricky teenage years were transformed by song.
1:23.0	He says, being bullied probably gave me a different sort of attitude, which is an up-you-ers thing about being exactly who I am.
1:30.0	I like what I like, I do what I do. I'd rather stick out and blend in.
1:35.0	So welcome, cast Malone to the island.
1:37.0	What do you think it is about singing, about communal singing that has a very unique and special quality for human beings?
1:44.0	It certainly captured me very early on. I always wanted to be in the choir.
1:48.0	I was drawn to those events, when we all gathered in the school hall when I was very young and sang, stand up, clap hands shout, thank you, Lord.
1:56.0	I used to really enjoy it and I vigorously joined in.
2:00.0	It was fun with speech, I have to kind of work to define something. Whereas when you're singing, it's a new learned song, it's very pure.
	...

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