[ ClassicalX ] Katherine Jenkins: the misfit

It's pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently, the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century.

Her reticence appeared almost saintly. Jenkins never talked in public about boyfriends, never dissed less musically gifted rivals such as Charlotte Church, and was never photographed falling out of taxis at 4am. Until last November, the notion her past might contain embarrassing secrets a phase of class-A drug use, say, or a tangled family history seemed highly unlikely.

It still does today. On the eve of a big show in Las Vegas where her first interview since the tabloid hoo-ha takes place in and out of the broiling desert heat Jenkins does not come across as the secretive type. She chats for Wales, and while occasionally saying she “doesn’t want to dwell” on this or that, she accepts that unwelcome media revelations are “part of the job”. She insists that she has only “tried to draw a line between my music and my personal life”.

This hasn’t been easy. She tells of problems with stalkers and overzealous fans. One man managed to sneak into her dressing room during a London concert. “I was like, ‘Hello, do I know you?’ ” Another cunningly identified her address in north London via the satellite pictures on Google Earth and started posting notes through her letter box. “He would always begin with,

‘I’m not stalking you Katherine, but…!’ ” The police haven’t responded to her complaints, but she only uses a bodyguard at her concerts.

Not that a bodyguard would have spared her recent embarrassments. The trouble started with an interview Jenkins did with Piers Morgan for GQ magazine, in which Morgan laddishly pressed her to reveal the devil within Ms Jenkins. She declined to play the minx, and when Morgan asked if she’d taken drugs, she denied it.

The truth was, though, that Jenkins had taken cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis during her student days at the Royal Academy of Music. With wide-eyed astonishment that seems to belong to more innocent times, Jenkins says she’s “amazed stuff

I did at parties as a student is news”. But it was.

After the GQ article ran last October, one of her former party pals contacted Britain’s leading scandal-broker, the PR Max Clifford. Forewarned about the imminent sale of a drugs exposé to a tabloid, Jenkins rang Morgan, whom she calls “great fun” and told him all. She admitted snorting up to three lines of cocaine a night, “usually at parties after getting drunk on too many Malibus and Cokes”, and suffering terrible hangovers, where she felt “depressed and paranoid”. The comedown from ecstasy was even worse: “I didn’t want to live.” She put it down to falling in with “a bad crowd” and insisted she was “very naive about drugs. There was nothing like that where I grew up”.

Morgan’s graphic but sympathetic account in a Sunday newspaper averted much of the “shock horror”. There was plenty of tabloid tittering and a droll Excess All Arias! headline. Although she says she hasn’t touched drugs since signing her first record contract in 2003, she seems slightly less repentant now, saying she “was just experimenting”. The most hurtful part of the disclosure, she admits, was the betrayal by her “friend”. And she doesn’t want to dwell on that.

No sooner had this storm died down than another blew up. This time the revelations were news to Jenkins herself. In March, the Daily Mail ran a story claiming she had twin half-sisters by her late father’s first marriage. The women, now 56, still live, as they have done all their lives, in Neath, the town where Jenkins grew up. Following a tip-off, the reporter doorstepped Pauline Jenkins, who appeared wearing a dressing gown and slippers. She said, yes, she was Katherine’s sister, but that she “didn’t want to get involved in all of that”. Three months later Jenkins and the twins still haven’t met.

She again professes to be perplexed by what counts as news these days. “The first time I saw pictures of my sisters was in a national newspaper, which was upsetting for me. I feel sorry for them that they’ve got dragged into my world, because I don’t think they wanted it. I wanted to send them some flowers or something to say sorry. I’m amazed we’ve not met before.”

Though her mother apparently knew about her two stepdaughters, neither she nor her husband spoke of them to Katherine or her younger sister. She doesn’t resent her mother’s silence: “Mum’s like me, we don’t like to argue. If something’s an uncomfortable subject for us, we’d rather sidestep it.” Not dwelling on awkward matters is clearly a Jenkins family trait.

People who’ve worked with Jenkins are quick to stress how ambitious she is. “Ruthless”, says one, who adds: “When Katherine wanted to be seen at the Baftas and in Vogue, she made sure she got people in place who could deliver.” She fired her first manager and, according to a former staffer at her label, “became quite demanding and costly in terms of hair and make-up”.

That Universal was happy to comply is a measure of the success of Jenkins’s mix of classical favourites and old pop ballads, such as Somewhere. Hers is not a unique formula. Other singers of the so-called “can belto” school — young, classically trained vocalists marketed as pop stars, like Simon Cowell’s operatic boy band Il Divo have crossed over into a commercial hotspot recently. With six albums released and 4m copies sold, Jenkins is “can belto’s” leading soloist, and not just by virtue of her sweet and powerful mezzo soprano. She has become one of the iconic blondes of the day.

Her glamorous image has, inevitably, drawn fire from classical singers of the old school. A row erupted in February 2008 following Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s dig at “opera fakes” in an interview. The dame complained that singers like Jenkins can only perform with a microphone and can’t cut it unamplified in an opera house.

But Jenkins emerged unscathed. In October last year she switched record companies to sign a new £6m contract with Warner Music, one of the biggest deals offered to a classical artist. The most attractive element for her was the chance to work with David Foster a prodigiously successful songwriter, producer and doyen of the power ballad who has presided over some of the biggest hits of the past 20 years, notably the monster from The Bodyguard, I Will Always Love You. Dame Kiri would doubtless snort with told-you-so derision, but Jenkins is now aiming to become a mainstream pop diva in the States.

This is some mountain to climb. As Jenkins takes the stage at the Mandalay Bay Events arena, one of the largest performance barns in Las Vegas, the ripple of polite applause barely extends beyond the first 10 rows. It’s clear hardly anybody in the 8,000-strong audience has the faintest idea who this cute little blonde Brit in the green satin frock is. She’s not mentioned on tonight’s bill. The show is called David Foster and Friends, and he has a lot of them. His professional pals include Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Michael Bublé. In the classical area, Foster has worked with Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli. Compared to the “friends” who’ve turned up to sing or just air-kiss tonight Cher, Donny Osmond and Paul Anka to name three Katherine Jenkins ranks as a nobody.

The fact she’s here at all reflects her pluck and her ambition. It’s no accident she teamed up with a veteran hit machinist who chooses his projects with a shrewd eye and ear to their commercial success. Backstage before the concert, Foster, the fast-talking Canadian, gushes: “Katherine’s voice is right up there with the best. Anything I ask Katherine to do, she’ll exactly do it. Unlike a lot of the classically trained ‘popera’ people who can’t work outside the box, she’s hip.” And Jenkins also raves about Foster calling him “the best producer in the world for taking my kind of music to a pop level. He has a very strong sense of what will work in America”.

Her success so far has been limited to the UK and Europe, and it is whispered that the reason Universal let her go was because they felt she had plateaued: Jenkins has never had a million-selling album. Undaunted, she says she would love to tour America and perform a residency in Las Vegas one day. “Every artist wants to do well in America. It’s a challenge. Not many crack it.”

Fair point. But given the problems fame brings, you wonder why Jenkins is so keen to become public property in the land where celebrity is king. She is unfazed at the thought of being approached by fans and starstruck strangers in malls. “I don’t mind. I get into conversation with people quite easily. I like it. That was one of my dad’s characteristics. He could talk to anyone.”

Jenkins is a pop kid at heart. “If I’ve been singing classical all day I want something I don’t have to think about.” She bops around the dressing room to Kylie before every show: “It’s a superstitious thing.” The artists on her iPod include the rapper Kanye West, Nelly Furtado and Beyoncé. Her favourite is Amy Winehouse. “She’s mega talented. I hope she can get over what she has to get over. I sometimes think I could’ve ended up like her. I don’t think I’d have got that bad, but who knows with drugs?”

Born in 1980, Jenkins was singing songs she heard on the radio before she started going to school. She adored Madonna. “The first song I bought was Material Girl. I used to sing that all the time. I used to tell my mum I wanted to be a pop star, because that’s all I knew.” A precocious self-starter, she entered a talent show aged four, “just because I loved singing”, and won her first talent contest at 10.

By then Jenkins was a staunch fan of pop starlets Kylie and Jason. Classical music, she maintains, is “just the pop music of its day” that she learnt by a traditional route. Her vocal prowess meant she was soon inducted into the Welsh choral culture, singing in the local church choir, her comprehensive school choir, and, in time, the National Youth Choir of Wales. As a teenager she joined a group of travelling cathedral singers who toured Britain. It was no surprise when, at 18, Jenkins won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

Her home life up till then had been happy, and unusual in the respect that most of the parenting was done by her dad. Her mother, Susan, was 25 years younger than her father, Selwyn the same age as his two unmentioned daughters by a previous marriage. When Selwyn opted to take early retirement from his manager’s job at a local factory in 1985, Susan went back to work as a hospital technician, screening mammograms for breast cancer. “She was the career woman. She’s very strong and she made me and my sister think about being independent, getting your own job and earning your own money.” I point out that househusbands must have been quite a novelty in Neath in the 1980s. Jenkins seems surprised. “I suppose it was quite forward, but it didn’t feel different because Dad was so much older than my mum.” She loved being picked up from school, ferried to music lessons, and having her tea cooked by her dad. She was heartbroken when, in 1995, he died of lung cancer.

Jenkins is currently dating the former Blue Peter presenter Gethin Jones, but has no plans to start a family yet. “I’m a perfectionist and it’ll have to be at a time when I can focus properly on that,” she says. Fellow students from her days at the Royal Academy remember Jenkins as “driven”. There’s a widely circulated rumour that she had a boob job during her time there. Jenkins denied it, but she was sufficiently interested in her appearance back then to enter a modelling competition in 2000 that got her crowned Face of Wales. When a female member of the orchestra at the 2006 Classical Brits made a bitchy comment about her figure, Jenkins had the woman fired.

After graduating, Jenkins taught for a year at a comprehensive in Stevenage, then re-applied to the Royal Academy to study opera. At the same time she began punting a demo tape made with a friend that deployed a pop rhythm track against her singing The Flower Duet from the opera Lakme. Whether it was her voice, the bold arrangement or her youthful good looks, she found herself at 22 signing a £1m recording contract, the richest deal ever offered to a debutant classical musician.

But on the road supporting other singers such as Cliff Richard and Aled Jones, she noticed the songs that went down best weren’t her arias. “I wanted to show people that opera was for everyone, but I could hear that more contemporary pieces worked better in a live setting.” In response, she devised a version of the Whitney Houston ballad I Will Always Love You with Italian lyrics to make it sound operatic. Within a year of the release of her first album, Premiere, in 2004, Jenkins’s big voice was being heard at the sort of grand public events where communal emotions run high international rugby matches, cup finals, Live 8. She sang before the Queen, and for Michael Parkinson’s TV show. In the world of light entertainment, Jenkins ranked as a heavyweight. In a move that suited her new-for-old agenda, she became a 21st-century “forces sweetheart”. Cynics scoffed, but there’s a hard kernel of integrity here. Raised in Neath, a traditional recruiting ground of the British Army, Jenkins knew people who had been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. After performing with Dame Vera Lynn at the 60th anniversary of VE Day in 2005, Jenkins and the dame shared a tearful private moment together backstage. “Vera said to me, ‘You really must go out there and entertain the troops.’ ” So she did. The day after Tony Blair flew in and out of Iraq in December 2005, Jenkins took a helicopter to Basra, under the auspices of the British Forces Foundation charity, of which she is a trustee, to sing two free concerts for the troops. I covered this for The Sunday Times and was with her at dusk on a Sea King when our helicopter was targeted by two ground-to-air missiles. Luckily, the pilot released decoy flares, and after a fast and nearly vertical descent, we landed safely.

Close calls such as this can put you off travelling in war zones. It did me. But despite describing the experience as “terrifying”, Jenkins risked her life on two more occasions supporting our boys and girls in the Middle East. She went back to Basra for Christmas 2006 with the chef Gary Rhodes. “He cooked Christmas dinner and I was like a dinner lady, serving it up.” Then, in February 2007, she flew to Afghanistan to entertain the troops in Helmand a desolate place she remembers as “strangely empty, with huge craters and obliterated buildings”.

Jenkins says what she loves most on these trips is meeting the soldiers, “even though I know most of them don’t really like my kind of music”. This isn’t quite true. I recall the rapt attention she commanded from kids wearing Coldplay T-shirts and Velvet Revolver baseball caps as she sang. One came up to her afterwards and said her singing was “angelic”. And I remember her words leaving Shaibah: “We think we know how it is here because we watch it on TV, but until you see the circumstances in which these soldiers live, being away from their homes at Christmas, you realise it takes really special people to do this.” Virtuous cliché it might be, but coming from a woman who, hours earlier, had nearly been incinerated by an insurgent missile, it felt like more than the prattle of an ambitious diva.

For an old-fashioned, on-her-best-behaviour sort of person, Jenkins is surprisingly keen on America’s sin city, Las Vegas. She certainly knows it well. The day before her concert, she shows me round in a chauffeured stretch limo laid on for her by the record company. She displays a remarkable level of courteous concern for others, offering advice to the chauffeur, Tommy, on his sinus problem. And she keeps me plied with refreshments at one point thrusting a Krispy Kreme doughnut into my hand. So unused am I to this sort of unsolicited generosity from a star, I assume she just wants me to hold it for her.

Lunch is at the Golden Steer, a Vegas eatery once frequented by the leaders of the Brat Pack, Sinatra and Dean Martin. The gallery shows another old customer, Jenkins’s heroine Marilyn Monroe. She’s been infatuated with Monroe since she twigged Madonna’s Material Girl video was based on a scene from the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “I started watching all her films.” As she became rich, Jenkins began collecting original 1950s photographs of Monroe “because she’s got more naivety and innocence in them, mixed in with the glamour”.

How well the Americans take to Jenkins’ music is hard to predict. Her songs at the Foster concert are well received without bringing down the house. The crowd are transported by another female newcomer, Charice, a tiny 17-year-old Filipina with a bloodcurdling scream of a voice whose rendition of I Will Survive has everybody on their feet. Jenkins is too cultured a vocalist, you feel, to compete with this histrionic child.

Ambitious as she is for pop success in the US, the day after her Vegas debut she’s in London to rehearse for the Classical Brits, at which she sang with Placido Domingo. She’ll also hook up with the 13-year-old opera singer Faryl, a finalist in Britain’s Got Talent 2008, who she mentors.

As far as she can see with her careerist hat on, classical is still the way to go. “I hear kids saying they want to be a classical star, which shows there’s been a breakthrough. It’s one of the areas where album sales are doing best people don’t download classical. They still want to buy CDs.”

It’s canny, pragmatic thinking like this that leads one of Jenkins’s former associates to observe she has “exactly what you need to be an international star” and to add: “with Katherine it’s about more than just the music”. Is it though?

Jenkins doesn’t want to dwell on that. She smiles sweetly and changes the subject.

Source: The Times