Biography

The Fron Male Voice Choir’s second album is called Encore, and its mission is to repeat -– and better still, beat -- the spectacular success of its predecessor. The choir’s debut, Voices Of The Valley, became the best-selling classical album of 2006. Copies flew off the racks even quicker than discs by such luminaries as Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson or The Three Tenors. The rich, red-blooded tones of 60 Welshmen singing tunes like Shenandoah or Abide With Me exerted a powerful emotional pull on multitudes of listeners.

A year later, the Fron’s follow-up presents another carefully-selected musical mix. Such indestructible popular classics as Bridge Over Troubled Water and Paul McCartney’s Yesterday nestle alongside How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace and Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer, while music director Ann Atkinson takes the solo vocal on Panis Angelicus. The boys -- who range in age from teenagers to octogenarians -- visit the world of opera with Speed Your Journey (alias the slaves’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco), and have recruited Michael Ball to add some West End dazzle on The Rhythm Of Life. There’s something for everybody, but always sprinkled with that indefinable Welsh mystique.

The Fron’s members found that their instant success took some adjusting to. The choir has been celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2007, but throughout its existence it has been a strictly amateur organisation, whose members are either retired or hold down day jobs. Suddenly, after manager Daniel Glatman had shrewdly brought the Fron to the attention of UCJ, it became a popular success and a hot news story, singing at the Wales v Ireland rugby match at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, accompanying Neath’s own Katherine Jenkins at the Classical Brits awards, and undertaking a sold-out British tour last spring. All kinds of offers started pouring in.

“You can’t turn things away really, can you?” says Dave Jones, the choir’s chairman who still works as a part-time prison officer. “These opportunities come up and each one is so wonderful! But the lad with the hardest job is Alan Smith, our treasurer. He’s a retired accountant, but now he’s working 39 hours a week for the choir. He’s a keen fisherman, but he hasn’t got time to put his waders on.”

Dennis Williams, a founder member since the Fron was formed in 1947, can’t believe the situations his new-found fame has landed him in. On a promotional trip to Australia, where the first album was a huge hit and where the Fron will tour in 2008, Dennis not only celebrated his 76th birthday, but found himself standing in his pyjamas in his hotel room, singing Elvis Presley songs down the phone to a live radio audience. Back home, he was an invited onto the TV show Ready Steady Cook! (“I’m bloody hopeless, it’s my wife who’s the excellent cook”). Then he found himself down at his local golf club at 6am one chilly morning, posing nude for a calendar. “It’s based on Calendar Girls, so I suppose we’re the Calendar Boys,” he says. “At my age I shouldn’t be doing things like that, but I was persuaded because the proceeds go to Help The Aged. But they’re all great experiences aren’t they?”

Despite it all, their hearts still belong to their home village of Froncysyllte. Perched on the side of the Berwyn Mountains above the Vale of Llangollen, Fron (as even Welsh-speakers end up calling it, rather than risking its full pronunciation of “vron-cuss-ulth tay”) is a picturesque cluster of tidily-kept cottages and gardens, but also a prime historic site. It was here that 19th century engineer Thomas Telford built an aqueduct to carry the Llangollen canal across the Dee valley, and the choir have collaborated with actor Philip Madoc on a DVD for Welsh Heritage, aimed at bringing world heritage status to Telford’s much-admired structure. To the south of the village runs Offa’s Dyke, erected by the Anglo-Saxon king Offa to keep the mutinous Welsh penned in on their side of the border.

It’s crucial to the Fron’s character that it remains part of the social glue that binds the local community together. Dennis Williams explains that “we take people on and we try our best to see if they’ve got a voice. I think that’s a lovely attitude to be committed to, because nobody is barred.” Inevitably, the choir’s new-found celebrity has prompted a surge of volunteers. “We’ve said we want to keep the membership down to around the 70 mark,” adds Dennis, “so we may have to start a waiting list. We went up to 85 once, but it got far too complicated.” As Dave Jones points out, “it’s lovely to get new people in, but they must join for the right reasons and not because at the moment it’s a glamour train. It’s a big commitment and it’s all about the love of singing.” The Fron was founded in 1947, as a gesture of healing and rebuilding in a world still smouldering in the aftermath of World War Two. Froncysyllte had always enjoyed a healthy tradition of choral singing, but the choir’s formation was inspired by the idealistic ambition of helping to build a more harmonious world by joining other competing nations at Llangollen’s newly-founded International Musical Eisteddfod. Following a public meeting in the village, singers were recruited from local chapels and the Youth Club Choir. The choir won its first prize in 1950, taking top honours at the Flint Eisteddfod, and in the ensuing decades has undertaken numerous international tours and carried home a van-load of trophies. Apart from a string of victories at Llangollen, they’ve won first prize at the Malta International Choir Festival, the Harmonie Festival at Limburg in Germany, the North Wales Choral Festival, the Huddersfield Choral Festival and the British Steel National Championships.

Line up a few beers, and the boys will start reeling off yarns about their adventures. There was the time they won first prize in a singing competion in Athens, singing The Greek Fisherman in Greek. “But what spoiled it was, as we walked off one of our choristers dropped dead,” says Dennis. “It was so sad, because he was a great chap.”

“I suppose you could say he died happy,” adds Alan Smith. “We’d just been told we won, and that’s when he keeled over.”

Dennis scratches his head. “There was another guy we left behind in Vancouver with a heart attack, and we left another one in San Sebastian with a nervous breakdown.” There’s a surge of collective pride when they remember sharing a stage with a rather snooty choir from Maastricht.

“They were very aloof,” remembers Dave Jones, “and they sang well but they all sang from sheet music. Then we sang our programme, and you could see they were gripped. Their conductor stood up afterwards and said to his lads ‘you see those boys? None of them had sheet music, and they sang from the heart. If I could get you to do that then I’d be really happy’. And that was one of the best choirs in Holland!” The Fron recognise that they’re part of a choral tradition that risks disappearing if efforts aren’t made to preserve it. As their conductor and music director Ann Atkinson explains, “when you think back, in all the places where men gathered to work, like quarries or mines, singing was such a strong part of their lives. Somewhere like Blaenau Ffestiniog or Bethesda where they had the quarries, or the mines in South Wales. But the mines and quarries have closed down now.” “I think something about mining and singing goes together,” adds Alan Smith. “Maybe singing expels the coal dust from the lungs.”

“I think it was escapism,” adds Dennis Williams,“to get away from the terrible jobs they had down the mines.” But the Fron’s popular success could prove a valuable weapon in rescuing Wales’s unique singing heritage. Apart from anything else, the choir’s much-boosted earnings guarantee a financial security which should ensure a rosy future.

“Our success has been absolutely unprecedented, and hopefully it flies the flag for male voice choirs everywhere,” suggests Dave Jones. “On our last tour we sang in Cardiff, and a couple of lads from the Treorchy and Morriston choirs came over to me. They embraced me and said ‘you’ve really struck a blow for us’. Male voice singing is a great tradition in Wales, and we don’t want it to die out.”

Source: Adam Sweeting