In a special interview for Classicalx, Sarah Fahey catches up with Stephen Bowman from Blake to talk about life in the group, their forthcoming concert and the less glamorous side of the music business.
Your debut concert is coming up in approximately three weeks time. (February 28th) How are you all feeling about it?
We are all incredibly excited about it and looking forward to it very much. Recently we have been rehearsing and taking songs from the album and seeing what we can do with them. The end result is that we’ve found so many new and interesting ways to perform a lot of the songs. We are playing around with all the songs on the album and we’re going to be doing about 14 songs from the album and extras as well. We’re also going to do a really big version of Hallelujah which a lot of people have asked for. The location itself is going to be beautifully lit and it’s going to be a really special night, with a choir and a string section supporting us. We are also going to be joined by Natasha Marsh who will be performing Jerusalem with us - you will have her lovely soprano voice blended with our baritone voices and we’re looking forward to performing with her. We have a lot of people turning up from GMTV and Alan Titchmarsh and other TV shows we have appeared on and lots of other characters which people have seen us with over time, which should be good fun. We’ve sent out invitations and had acknowledgements back from Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey and Joanna Lumley so hopefully there should be some interesting faces in the audience as well. The whole point is that it’s going to be a show that everyone can enjoy.
More importantly than anything else is the involvement we have with The War Widows Association, which we started back when we were doing work for the BBC Festival of Remembrance. We met with The War Widows after the concert itself and they were, really incredible women. We said then that we would really love to do something to help raise awareness for the War Widows Association. The reason for this, as we found out at the time, was a real shame in that the government restricted access to the War Widows Association about 5 yrs ago, to be able to see records from the MOD to find the names of people who had been widowed through husbands and partners being involved in conflict.
They are not actually able to find out who those people are. The government say that there are around 28000 widows in the UK from conflicts and in actual fact only about 2500 of those are members of the War Widows Association. So there are many, many people out there who could potentially be very much helped by the organisation. They are an incredibly strong unit and really helps people through what must be an incredibly difficult stage. So we said we would be happy to do anything we can to support them and to raise awareness to the widows that they have this resource available to them. We are doing this concert in association with The War Widows Association and we’re also doing an Alan Titchmarsh show on the 24th or 25th of this month and that will be dedicated to the War Widows Association as well. We’re doing everything we can to raise awareness for them as it seems ridiculous that they are there to help people and yet they can’t even find out who those people are. There are going to be around 20 people from the charity at our concert on the 28th February and I think their chairwoman will be speaking for a few minutes at the beginning to let people know about their charity and what they do.
We’re going to do everything we can to make it a truly memorable concert – we are down to the last 50 tickets and we still have 3 weeks to go before the performance, so the church is going to be packed out, which is great and we are really looking forward to that. We want to make sure that the songs we sing that night are really special and that the night is truly memorable indeed. So many people were very used to the production sound of the album and what we want to do now is show them how it sounds live. It brings something out of all the songs on the album. We’ve been amazed because a lot of the songs on the album, we haven’t really gone back to since actually recording them. So to take these songs and start performing them live and working with our musical director to move them into the real world is like rediscovering the songs all over again and you realise just how great these songs are. We love the songs and we really enjoy performing them to its really good fun.
Are you still releasing Hallelujah as a single on February 18th?
It’s coming out as a digital single, so it will be available from itunes or any of the other online outlets. It’s a really unique version of the actual song itself. We’ve had so many lovely messages about the A Capella version we performed on the BBC, so what we’ve done is rather than just release the single which a lot of people probably already have, is go back into the studios a couple of weeks ago and put together a purely A Capella version of Hallelujah. It’s nothing but the voices, no backing track or anything and just shows what 4 voices on their own can do in terms of bringing out the rich harmonies. We re-wrote it, it’s a slightly different version but with harmonies that people will recognise and it’s very, very effective. I just listened to it the other day for the first time since we recorded it and people who enjoyed the version they heard on the album are really going to enjoy this as it’s all about the voices. It’s showing what male voices can do when they are all brought together and it has been quite fun.
What have been some of the hi-lights for you since being in Blake?
Without a doubt it was singing at the Albert Hall, that was really an amazing moment. Probably the hi-light of the whole process so far would be the first time we heard one of our songs being played on ClassicFm. Someone had a video camera on in the touring car as we were travelling around all the different radio stations, it was Vide Cor Meum, it was played on a Monday and we were all sat in the car. We had been told that it might be played that day and suddenly it came on, we whacked up the volume and just looked at each other with schoolboy grins on our faces saying “that’s us on the radio!” All of our collective life times of being singers, practising and training our voices, to suddenly to hear your song on the radio is the most incredible thing in the world and definitely has to be the hi-light so far.
Now being in a group isn’t all about concerts and parties and mixing with celebs. Tell us something about the less glamorous side of being in Blake.
Well it’s nice to have fun things sometimes. In the background though, a lot of time is spent learning new material. We are musicians and yes, we can sight read and sight sing but at the same time, you do end up just basically sat there with the scores in a rehearsal room in some gloomy part of London, just going over and over a song until it sticks in your head. That’s probably the less glamorous side. On our first album, things went phenomenally well but the record industry is very different place now to say how it was 10 yrs ago and people struggle to stay within the industry. That is why we massively appreciate people who follow what we do and support us, it really does mean a lot. Just as much as we put in a huge amount of time into our music and practise like crazy for our concerts, like the one on the 28th, at the end of the day, it’s the people who support us, whether creating websites or telling others about us, that also put in a huge amount of time and it’s only right that we’re all in this together.
As a group you all seem to get on really well and each of you have something to contribute to the group both vocally and personally. Has it helped that you knew each other or knew of each other before you formed as a group?
Oh immeasurably! It is really, really tough spending a lot of time with people and on average, we can spend anything up to 12-14 hours a day with each other. It doesn’t matter how well you know somebody that can be really tough. You could live with a brother or sister and fall out over the smallest things just because you see so much of each other. I think we all have the mentality that we are in this as a job, of course, but unless we are all really good friends it’s not going to work. We have the ability to laugh at one another and laugh at ourselves and I think without that, none of this would be possible. The minute we start taking ourselves too seriously is the minute it all starts to fall down around us! It’s about enjoying what we do together; we go out a lot together, not just to things where the photographers can catch us. The four of us are all keen pub drinkers and we enjoy going out and spending lots of time together. A lot of people think we must be crazy to spend 12 hours of the day working with each other and then go out drinking afterwards. But in our little world, our little Blake world, there’s always things to talk about, so we really are our own best friends in that respect and it works very well.
And you share a house with Jules, so you two are together even more.
It’s a very good thing. He doesn’t get irritated if I’m rehearsing at home and practising or warming up in the mornings. Obviously classical voices need a lot of warming up and in the process, we’ll gradually get louder and louder. If we are doing a performance at 7.00am for GMTV or something like that, we will be up at 5.00am warming up the voices. Our poor neighbours have got used to hearing some very bizarre sounds at odd times of the day!
So what qualities do you admire about each of your fellow band members?
I think everybody is very different. Although everybody sees 4 tall, dark haired guys in the group, they are all very different.
Ollie is an incredible wealth of musical knowledge; he’s probably one of the most educated people I’ve ever met! Any subject you talk about, he has knowledge on it, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Some people might say he knows too much! It’s incredible having conversations with him because he always teaches you something new. With Jules, he’s just a naughty guy who likes to have fun and to live with him day in day out, just lights up your life. Dom is just a very compassionate person, he has a lot of feeling for how everybody is, and he is genuinely concerned for everyone in the group and takes a lot of time with all of us. Add to that, I’m always very patient, I try to talk to everybody and calm things down if a situation gets difficult. I think it’s a combination of all those qualities works very well. We really are the best of friends.
To book tickets for Blake’s concert at St. James’ Picadilly go to www.livenation.co.uk
For more information on The War Widows Association see www.warwidowsassociation.org.uk
