{"id":627417,"date":"2026-10-11T15:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T15:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/627417\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T15:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T15:04:10","slug":"gareth-malone-looks-back-after-the-christmas-no-1-i-was-meeting-simon-cowell-having-tea-with-gary-barlow-and-dinner-with-andrew-lloyd-webber-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/627417\/","title":{"rendered":"Gareth Malone looks back: \u2018After the Christmas No 1, I was meeting Simon Cowell, having tea with Gary Barlow and dinner with Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019 | Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gareth Malone in 1990, and recreating the image in 2026<\/a>Gareth Malone in 1990 and 2026. Later photograph: P\u00e5l Hansen\/The Guardian. Grooming: Neusa Neves at Arlington Artists using Vieve. Archive image: courtesy of gareth malone<\/p>\n

Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone<\/a> is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006\u2019s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the\u00a0No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He\u00a0lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.<\/p>\n

I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents\u2019 house in Bournemouth. When I wasn\u2019t filling up guests\u2019 drinks, I\u2019d be playing some songs \u2013 it looks like I\u2019m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.<\/p>\n

For a few years prior to this, school had been difficult. We moved from a nice leafy part of Wimbledon to Bournemouth when I was 10, and until that point I had friends who were both girls and boys. Going to the all-boys grammar school in a new area was an aggressive gear shift and I struggled to\u00a0make friends. There was no physical bullying, but it was a sustained period of ostracisation that went on for the first three years of secondary school and dribbled on into year 10. It wasn\u2019t ever discussed. There was no \u201cyou\u2019re being bullied. If you have a problem with any other boys, come and talk to us,\u201d from the school. My parents probably knew because I wasn\u2019t bringing any friends over. Instead I\u00a0learned how to take care of my own problems, which was through music and theatre. My saving grace.<\/p>\n

I feel so lucky that I had the music studio at school \u2013 a place to be\u00a0expressive in a sea of business studies and maths. Playing the synthesisers started my lifelong passion for production and all-round music nerdery. We also had a piano at\u00a0home and I used to sit at it and make sounds for what felt like hours.<\/p>\n

Mum worked for Abbey Life Assurance and for the civil service. Dad worked for a bank. Neither of them were particularly career-minded \u2013 they enjoyed their life, their family and their house, hence friends often coming over. My grandparents were very important, too. Growing up as an only child made me very comfortable in my own company, but it did mean I\u00a0wasn\u2019t armed with some of the physical vocabulary that other boys had. I used to overreact when other kids were playing up. \u201cWhy are you speaking to me like that? No one speaks to me like that. Why are you behaving in this stupid way? No, I don\u2019t want to play rough, or go and play football, because that\u2019s what five-year-olds do.\u201d I was far happier to sit and have a\u00a0conversation. All of which is possibly why I gravitated towards the girls at school \u2013 they were a bit more sensible.<\/p>\n

In my teens I got very into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I was singing a lot in bands \u2013 but I was also obsessed with Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, so I decided to study drama at University of East Anglia. I have fond memories of pretending to be a pig, and doing lots of clowning and mask work. Once that was over, I went on to study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. It was a difficult transition for me \u2013 I went from that arrogant tweeny, liminal stage, as pictured, to realising that I was, actually, just fairly average compared with my peers.<\/p>\n

After graduating, I went back to Bournemouth. I was selling ice-cream to make some money while sending out CVs. A friend got in touch and said they had seen an advert for some youth work in Poole, and thought I\u2019d be good at it. They wanted someone young and musical to work with local children who lived on an estate with a high level of deprivation. They had a little music room with a couple of ropey instruments that I would try to teach them how to play. That\u2019s where my passion for giving everyone opportunities \u2013 a safe space and music \u2013 came from.<\/p>\n

I also realised that to get people to trust me, I had to be myself. I was from a totally different side of the tracks and I was wide-eyed, naive. The kids could smell the middle-classness on me, so any pretending to be cool and aloof wouldn\u2019t work. I had to be rigorously myself.<\/p>\n

My job is to give others confidence, but I\u2019ve definitely gone on a journey with my own self-esteem, especially when it comes to being in front of the camera. I was working with the London Symphony Orchestra and running a\u00a0choir when I first got the opportunity to be on TV. The producers of The Choir had seen that we had a high Google rating so they got in touch. The show was about starting a choir at\u00a0Northolt high school in Middlesex, and throughout, I tried to apply the same method of authenticity on camera that I\u2019d learned with the youth group. I had been given this amazing job that I\u2019d never done before, but I was learning to do it on national television. I was being filmed constantly. The director said: \u201cI want you when you\u2019re angry, I want you when you\u2019re upset, I want you when you\u2019re happy. I won\u2019t make you look like an idiot.\u201d He stuck to his word, but I remember being nervous, trying to look in control, and\u00a0dithering quite a lot.<\/p>\n

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When you\u2019re recognised it can be a\u00a0great gift, but a burden when you\u2019re, say, taking out your bins. When Military Wives got to No 1<\/a>, I was suddenly thrown into a new level of celebrity: I was meeting Simon\u00a0Cowell, having tea with Gary\u00a0Barlow and dinner with Andrew Lloyd Webber. My\u00a0memories of that time was that it was intense \u2013 when you have a\u00a0Christmas No 1, it\u2019s like you\u2019ve joined a weird club with people like Noddy from Slade and Shakin\u2019 Stevens. None\u00a0of the bells and whistles has ever distracted me from the reason I got into this industry in the first place 20\u00a0years ago, however. Focusing on my passion for music and the importance of art in people\u2019s lives. There\u2019s something so healing about music, and singing in a choir. When people come together, they are buoyed up by it. I lost a friend at the beginning of this year and before he died he said something deeply touching to me: \u201cWe\u00a0never did go for that pint.\u201d It was brutal. Such a simple thing that felt impossible as we were both absorbed in our careers. The telly, the\u00a0degrees \u2013 all of those achievements are wonderful. It\u2019s the foundation upon which a lot of my happiness is at\u00a0rest. But it\u2019s not the main thing. People and\u00a0community are.<\/p>\n

When I was 15 I had a clear vision of what I wanted with my adult\u00a0life. It involved a music studio with lots of instruments in it. The teenage me would be overjoyed to know that at the end of my garden is a little den with a piano, drums, shakers, maracas, guitars, bongos, synthesisers, a\u00a0computer and speakers \u2013 that there\u2019s never a day when I\u2019m not doing music, half of it tinkering alone, the rest making music with other people. He\u2019d probably be confused about the amount of hot yoga I\u00a0currently do. But glad to know I still like a denim shirt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gareth Malone in 1990, and recreating the image in 2026Gareth Malone in 1990 and 2026. Later photograph: P\u00e5l…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":627418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-627417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/627418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}