Katherine Jenkins: Access all arias
She has outsold the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud, performed at Sydney Opera House and Wembley stadium, taken the classical and pop charts by storm, and bagged two Brits. Liz Jones meets the Welsh mezzo-soprano who is bringing classical music to the masses.
When I meet Katherine Jenkins at a studio in Hackney, East London, she is peering at a computer, looking at the pictures that have just been taken of her. She starts telling me she ‘doesn’t normally look this glamorous’, and just listening to her talk is like music.
I tell her I have been reading her press cuttings and the same three words kept coming up: ‘Bubbly, blond and curvy.’ Which one does she find most annoying? She ums and ahs, so I help her out. ‘I would hate to be called bubbly,’ I say. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you see I am a bit bubbly, I’m very outgoing. I’m also blond, and although I’m small – 5ft 4in – I’m curvy. So none of them annoys me. Sorry.’
But I find it irritating on her behalf that she is written about as if she were Melinda Messenger. This is a woman who, at the tender age of 23 (she’s now 28), was offered the biggest record deal in classical music history, has seen four of her studio albums top the classical charts and one make the top five in the pop charts, making her the fastest-selling mezzo-soprano ever, has won numerous awards, including two Brits, and has sold more records than Maria Callas: ‘That was unbelievable. She’s my icon. I grew up wanting to be Maria Callas.’
Doesn’t she find it tiresome that she spends so much time being treated like a gormless model? Not really, she says, ‘because I always thought there was an image problem around classical music: people would say, “You don’t look like you do that kind of music.”’
Yet, she points out, ‘if you look at Maria Callas, she was an incredibly beautiful woman. I am a girls’ girl and I’ve always loved wearing nice dresses – I love Stella McCartney – so it’s not an image created by the record company.’ She knows that her looks help sell her music – but she also knows she has trained very hard to get here.
'I am a girls' girl and I've always loved nice dresses – it's not an image created by the record company'
In her recent autobiography, she wrote about how, while a student at London’s Royal Academy of Music (to which she won a scholarship at the age of 17), she developed an eating disorder. She would only eat one Weetabix and a salad a day, which meant her weight dropped to seven stone. Her then boyfriend, Steve Hart, of boy band Worlds Apart, told her she didn’t look great, but she ‘enjoyed the fact people were saying I was too thin’.
What brought her to her senses? ‘I saw pictures of myself, and realised I had a huge head and a stick-insect body. Now, I’m a lot more comfortable in my own skin and I think you have to get to a certain age to realise, OK, I am this way, I can’t be any different, I’m never going to be that stick-thin girl. I have the good Welsh appetite – I eat very well, I eat a lot.’
She loves cooking – she’s a vegetarian – and that is what she misses when she is away. Last year, she tells me, she had just one week off. Her diary is jam-packed until 2012 (I assume this means she will be singing at the London Olympics opening ceremony). Doesn’t she find her schedule too all-consuming? ‘No, I think it’s important to take little breaks and make sure I’m rested, even if it’s just going to see my family in Wales for a weekend.’
Katherine grew up on a council estate in Neath, in the valleys of South Wales, the daughter of Selwyn, a factory worker, and Susan, who still works as a mammographer in Swansea. Katherine joined the church choir aged seven, twice winning BBC Radio 2 Welsh Choirgirl of the Year. It was her father, she says, who ferried her to choir practice. Twenty-three years older than her mother, he retired early and was a house husband until his death in 1995. ‘I always respected him for that,’ she says. ‘Remember, my dad was 70 when he died, so he comes from a different era, and I thought that was really admirable. He always said if I worked hard, I’d make it.’ Katherine was 15 – two weeks away from her GCSEs – when he died. ‘That is why I hate to argue. Life’s too short,’ she says.
She is incredibly close to her sister, Laura, who is two years younger; they shared a bedroom until Katherine was 17 and left for London. Laura, too, now lives in London and, as well as being a social research consultant, raises money for Macmillan Cancer Support. ‘Macmillan nurses looked after our father, they were brilliant,’ says Katherine.
Laura climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for the charity and is now looking at climbing to the Everest base camp. ‘I admire her so much,’ says Katherine, adding that her sister has never been jealous of her musical success. ‘We look alike, and people would say to her, “I think you sang very well,” and she would just say, “Thank you very much!”’
I marvel at Katherine's ability to move people to tears just by using her voice, and she says that is because she always thinks of her dad when she is singing. Her new album, Sacred Arias, is a collection of pieces with a spiritual theme, ranging from her favourite hymn – ‘Abide With Me’ – to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. It will be her sixth album; her previous record, Rejoice, outsold Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls, enough to make anyone stand up and thank the Lord.
‘I went back to all the things I used to love as a chorister,’ she says. ‘[Andrew Lloyd Webber’s] "Pie Jesu" was my dad’s favourite. Whenever we had family parties, they’d say, “Sing 'Pie Jesu',” and I would sing and my sister would play it on the piano.
'When my dad passed away, we wanted to do something for the funeral and we were so young – my sister was 13 – we didn’t think we’d be able to keep it together, so we went to church the day before and recorded it. When I recorded it for the album, I hadn’t sung it since that day. It still gets me.’
She says the best thing about her success is being able to look after her family. ‘I am able to treat my mum, who has never remarried, to holidays and take her to places she has never been.’ She laughs, and starts to tell me what happened when she received the ultimate accolade: an invitation to appear on Parkinson.
‘My mum is so laid-back, she takes everything in her stride. I’ll perform at a concert and I’ll ask, “So, how was it?” And she’ll just say, “Yeah, really good.” I think Welsh mums are good at keeping their feet on the ground, so she never gets carried away. And then she came to Parky and sat in the audience, and I remember I looked at her and she was literally like this [Katherine does an impression of Munch’s The Scream].
'She was frozen; she looked shocked and horrified. Afterwards, we were having a drink with Parky, and she just went, “How did this happen? You were my daughter and now you’re this superstar!” It totally hit her all at once. I love that about my mum!’
Katherine still has the same friends she grew up with. ‘Yeah, they’re all friends from before I got my record deal, mainly from my time as a member of the National Youth Choir apart from one, whom I’ve known for about three years. We met when she started doing my make-up and she is now one of my best friends. She comes on tour with me.’
Forty friends and family members (her own personal ‘Tafia’) came to see her win a Classical Brit. Does she feel as though she has changed since all this has happened – success has come remarkably fast; only five years ago she was working as a freelance singing teacher to fund her music studies – or does she think she’s fundamentally the same? ‘I think I’m the same person. I’m stronger now because I’ve had to grow up very quickly – the business side of things has been a steep learning curve for me – but I think I’m the same person when I go on stage as I am with my friends.’
She takes as much care of her vocal cords as Michael Phelps does of his biceps. She can only drink a couple of glasses of wine a year because alcohol dehydrates the vocal cords. She has to avoid dairy foods and smokers. She has to save her voice before a performance, which is hard for someone who admits to being a chatterbox.
Does she have any rituals before she goes on stage? ‘I play Kylie Minogue’s Greatest Hits,’ she confides. ‘I met her when I performed on The X Factor and I told her, “Wherever I am, at Wembley Stadium for the FA Cup or backstage at Sydney Opera House, I’m playing your Greatest Hits album.”’
'Kylie used to get stage fright, but not now. The only thing that terrifies her is walking up a red carpet. ‘I try to make sure the photographers aren’t rolling around on the floor, trying to get that knicker shot, and I have to remember to stand nicely, hold my tummy in.’
Katherine also gets nervous when I start to ask about her boyfriend, Gethin Jones, the former Blue Peter presenter. They met on the set of Strictly Come Dancing last October, when he was a competitor and she performed in a guest appearance. He is only her third ‘proper’ boyfriend, which I tell her is quaintly old-fashioned and commendable.
She suddenly wells up. Her crippling work schedule is what ended her relationship with Steve Hart (he got custody of their jack russell, Mister). How will she make sure that doesn’t happen again? ‘I think it’s hard but what I’ve found is…Gethin knows how much I love music and my career, and he’s so happy it’s happening that he will make…we just rearrange things…I spend a lot of time e-mailing, talking on Skype. We’re managing.’
'I feel so lucky to be on stage and sing something that one minute will have people smiling, the next minute crying'
She is not going to slow down, though. ‘I’ve still got loads of things I want to do. Next year, I’m going to spend some time in America. And by the time I’m 30 – my voice won’t be ready until then – I want to be performing opera. That’s going to be a big hurdle because it’s so different to what I do now. I’m going to be up against a lot of the classical critics, the purists, who may not like what I do…’ she adds, referring to the stick she has taken in the past from those who see her populist style as a dumbing down of serious music.
Katherine would also like to go back to Iraq and Afghanistan to entertain the troops at some stage. On a visit to Basra, at Christmas 2005, her military helicopter was shot at by insurgents on its way from Basra to the Shaibah military base. ‘The more dangerous the military people tell me it is, the more I want to do it. You could see immediately what effect my being there was having – just someone from home going out there to Iraq, doing their bit.’ (In her autobiography, she describes the troops joining in as she sang ‘Over the Rainbow’.)
‘When I went to Afghanistan, I had to do the whole journey on military aircraft and it was about five different planes and helicopters – with no sleep, no hotel. When I got there, I went straight on to sing within about 45 minutes.’
If that sounds remarkably un-diva-like, she admits that she had things put into perspective for her as she set off. ‘I was saying to my mum, “Oh, it’s going to be terrible – I’ve got to go the whole way on these uncomfy planes.” Before I took off I went into the loo, and one of the female soldiers came out in her fatigues and when I said I was off to Afghanistan she said, “Oh, gosh, I’ve just come from there. I was on a plane with the wounded.” Reality set in and I said to myself, “What are you moaning about?”
'I feel so lucky to be able to do something like that. I feel so lucky to be on stage and sing something that one minute will have people smiling, the next minute crying. It’s a powerful thing. I know my dad is with me when I sing. I feel him all the time. That might sound weird to people but I do believe it. I think he’s what spurs me on – especially in the beginning because he believed I could do this.’
You’re almost too good to be true, I tell her. You must have a fault somewhere. ‘Everyone has faults,’ she says. ‘I’m not good at sports. I’m not good at a lot of things.’
