Alan Franks writes about the Crouch End Festival Chorus. This article first appeared in The Times Saturday Magazine on 13 December 2008.

Crouch End Festival Chorus. At first hearing, this is a strange assembly of words: North London suburb with mildly comic name, coupled with the pledge of high musical endeavour. But titter ye not, as Frankie Howerd used to say. The choir’s story is a serious epic of oaks from acorns. It has sung with the BBC Symphony Chorus on Radio 3, recorded a soundtrack for Disney’s new Narnia film Prince Caspian and worked under the batons of the world’s greatest conductors, including Thomas Adès and Valery Gergiev. But it has also done Glastonbury, recorded the music for Dr Who, got into the US Billboard Top Ten with its movie-soundtrack work, gigged with Oasis and the chief Kink, Ray Davies, who is one of the choir’s patrons. When you learn that the others include the Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel and the celebrated film composer Ennio Morricone, the picture does not exactly sharpen, but becomes yet more intriguing.
The CEFC celebrates its 25th anniversary next year, although it remains the newest philharmonic choir in the country. It started life through leaflets handed out at a local supermarket asking for singers for the Verdi Requiem. Today it has 150 on its books, and their lives are as various as the choir’s engagements: teachers and lecturers; marketing manager; actors; medical researcher; postman; voice coach; TV producers; bus driver and cranial therapist (the same man).
I had heard the choir’s name years ago, but lazily assumed it to be ironic, perhaps along the lines of the stridently amateur Portsmouth Sinfonietta. Then, when I was interviewing the classical and crossover star Katherine Jenkins and asked her who was doing the choral backing on her new recordings, she said she had got this great local choir. As she is from Neath in South Wales, it was not a surprising answer, until she added that she was now living in Crouch End. And there they are, embellishing her mezzo with ethereal sound on the recently released Sacred Arias album.
Most of the singers are from the area, although a few commute from outside London. Like the choir, the place is not as square as its name might suggest. The relentless march of the London housing market has made it cool. Past and present residents include David Tennant, Gillian Anderson and Tamzin Outhwaite. Marcel Duchamp came here to visit his fellow artist Richard Hamilton. The American horror writer Stephen King visited and wrote a short story called Crouch End. A famous urban legend has Bob Dylan mistakenly turning up at the house of a plumber called Dave and being invited in to wait for him by his wife. The singer was on his way to see his friend Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics at his house on Crouch Hill, but was dropped off by the taxi at Crouch End Hill instead.
The question is, how has the Crouch End Festival Chorus achieved its eminence? No disrespect to the singers, but it would sit in the corner like the proverbial elephant if the figure of the founder, David Temple, did not now stride into the rehearsal hall and mount the podium. His authority is instant. If he has the air of an enthusiastic teacher, that is because he was one before he became the full-time musical director of the CEFC 22 years ago. There was no music in his family, who lived in the North East of England, near Middlesbrough. The son of a Methodist minister, he could not read a note until he was in his twenties, and still plays no instrument. Whenever he has applied to run more conventional choirs, he has been turned down and suspects this lack of formal literacy is responsible. He has no desire to move on, and says he wants only to be respected as an interpreter. He is married to the children’s book illustrator Jane Ray and they live in Crouch End with their three teenage children.
During a break in rehearsals, he leans forward to make a confession. “This is the most embarrassing thing I have ever said,” he begins, and looks truly anxious that someone might overhear him. “I’m 54 now, and this was in 1965, when I was 11. I heard Julie Andrews and thought it was just the most beautiful voice I had ever heard.” It’s out now. There have been more shaming confessions, but this one is probably not the most common from a choirmaster. He goes on to talk about working with Oasis, using some unexpected words, such as polite and dependable, and praising the Gallagher brothers’ “beautiful melody lines”. The CEFC backed the rock band at a BBC Electric Proms concert last year at the Roundhouse in North London, and Temple says it was probably the easiest engagement of his career. “Noel was in charge. He was definitely the boss, taking control of all the songs. But he would also allow me to speak to the choir and see if we could get a better sound. In a way he was doing my job for me. They didn’t really need me there, but I wanted to be. It was fun and I felt important. We didn’t see much of Liam. He was there on the day for a sound check.

He came up to me twice during it and twice during the performance to shake me very warmly by the hand. It felt generous and endearing.” The choir found itself backing the band because Noel Gallagher had seen them sing with Ennio Morricone. While its repertoire for the past 25 years has been made up of the established composers, members are selected on broader criteria. “When I choose singers,” explains Temple, “I am listening for a beautiful, natural sound. Unlike some conductors, I’m not an intellectual but an ordinary bloke, and I like the sounds that ordinary blokes like. There is this myth that there are singers and there are proper singers. Back then [in the Julie Andrews days], the only other voices I’d heard were pop voices, which I still love, and the big, wobbly, operatically trained ones, which I still don’t like.”
That style, he argues, was the sonic equivalent of Charles Atlas, the leading body-builder of the day. There was an idea that such a physique represented beauty, yet women seemed to be more attracted to wiry, pallid pop singers. His idols were the official enemies of classical values: there was Little Richard, whom most parents thought dangerously deranged, the geeky-looking Buddy Holly and the original roller-over of Beethoven, Chuck Berry. As Temple says, it’s all a matter of how you hear it; for him, Jerry Lee Lewis was, and is, “the Beethoven of rock’n’roll”.

He came to London when he was 18 and joined the choir at Westminster Central Hall, where the organist was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s father, Bill. He couldn’t read music, but they let him in on the sound of his voice. He describes his conversion to classical as Damascene – he devoured everything he could get his hands on, above all, Mahler, Elgar, Stravinsky, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Vaughan Williams and Britten. Pop went out of the window, but he argues that this had much to do with the state of the art; suddenly the scene was dominated by bands such as Sweet and Showaddywaddy and it was not until the mid-Seventies that punk burst in refreshingly.
“I would never be bold enough to say someone can or can’t sing,” he says. “I don’t have the confidence to say someone is good or bad, but I do have the confidence to say whether I like it or not.” The choir now has a waiting list, and existing members have to brace themselves for a vocal MoT test every three years. Last time round everyone got through, but this isn’t going to happen next year. He dreads having to let members go as much as they do, and agrees the experience can be traumatic. They pay to belong – £150 a year – as they would in a golf club. With his fees for recording work and another choir in Hertfordshire that he runs for two days a week, Temple earns an annual wage of about £50,000.
They rehearse on Fridays in a local school, undertake about 20 engagements, live or studio, per year, and turn down many more.
As the choir has grown and changed, it has also had a deep effect on its members’ lives. Bruce Boyd, for example, a former teacher, becomes visibly moved as he describes the experience. He sings bass and, after 23 years, is one of the longest-serving members. “It’s not just making the music that’s a joy,” he says, “but the belonging. It has helped me through some very difficult times.” Liz Sich – 18 years a member, demanding job as a publicist, 4 children – says it’s the last thing she feels like on a Friday evening, but always gets energised by it. Florian Fischer – German tutor, five and a half years – feared it was going to be all show tunes but then found himself holding a (minimalist US composer) John Adams score. Jon Bradfield – theatre marketing, 4 years – used to sing in the 12-voice choir his parents started in Wolverhampton, but stopped when he went to university and missed it badly.
The CEFC may be exceptional, but its fortunes are part of a wider phenomenon. UK choirs have not perished in the face of manufactured entertainment, as was predicted 20 years ago. Quite the opposite: programmes such as Radio 3’s Choir of the Year, and TV’s Last Choir Standing and The Singing Estate, have made more people want to sing. This in turn has increased the popularity of classical music. You might not like the sound they all make, but they do and that’s the point of it. There are now an estimated 25,000 choirs in the country. There is the Gasworks Choir in Bristol, the Filey Fishermen’s in Yorkshire, the A40 in Bucks, the Slough Philharmonic, the Vital Spark in Malvern, and on and on. They won’t all be doing the Bach B Minor Mass at the Barbican on the Saturday and then the Oasis Electric Prom at the Roundhouse on the Sunday, but you never know.




Crouch End Festival Chorus opens a programme of 25th-anniversary concerts next year with James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados, and works by other composers born in 1959, at the Kings Place Concert Hall, King’s Cross, London, on January 17