How Russell Watson found his voice again

Ahead of his appearance at Audley End, ‘people’s tenor’ Russell Watson tells Paul Kirkley how he faced down life-threatening illness – and his critics – with help from some friends in very high places.

Forget all the talk of Susan Boyle: The Movie, how’s this for a Hollywood pitch: Average blue collar Joe working 12-hour shifts in a nuts and bolts factory is plucked from obscurity to sing at a high-profile sports game, signs five-album deal that results in the most successful classical record of all time, and goes on to perform for popes, presidents and royalty all over the world.

At the height of his success, he is struck down by a life-threatening illness – twice – but fights through to make a triumphant return to the stage. Cue rousing finale of Nessun Dorma, fireworks, standing ovation. The End. It’s A Star Is Born-meets-Rocky- meets-Billy Elliot – with the welding scenes from Flashdance thrown in for good measure.

The only problem is it’s way, way too cheesy. I mean, seriously, a nuts and bolts factory? That’s positively Dickensian. And that third-act reversal, where our fallen hero lies in his hospital bed and wonders ‘Will I ever sing again?’… well, who’s gonna buy that?

“A film has been talked about,” says Russell Watson, the man to whom all this, and more, actually happened.

“I remember somebody saying to me not so long ago, if we were to make your story into a movie, no-one would believe it.”

But the facts are there for all to see. Go back two decades and you really will find this factory worker’s son following in his father’s footsteps, working double nightshifts as a YTS bolt-cutter in Irlam, near Manchester, while earning extra cash to support his wife and baby by singing Elvis covers in local working men’s clubs.

One fateful night in Wigan, he was encouraged by a club secretary to try his hand at Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, and gradually began slipping more and more classical arias into his repertoire.

It was this part of his act that attracted the attention of former Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards, who invited Watson to sing at Old Trafford during a 1998 memorial for the victims of the Munich air disaster. Unfortunately, fate – or rather Eric Cantona – intervened, and his appearance was cancelled in favour of the fiery Frenchman’s preferred choice, Mick Hucknall.

The following year, Watson’s day in the sun finally arrived when he sang at United’s last game of the season. After the match, with his team crowned league champions, he returned to the pitch to sing Freddie Mercury’s Barcelona, tearing off his tux to reveal a United shirt underneath.

The crowd went wild and, a week later, Watson found himself reprising the song with Mercury’s original recording partner, opera legend Montserrat Caballé, at the Champions League final in – where else? – Barcelona.

After that, the successes piled up with dizzying speed: Signing a five-album deal with Decca, Watson’s debut release, The Voice – a mix of Italian arias and pop classics, featuring a particularly memorable duet of Barcelona with the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder – broke worldwide records by holding the number one position in the classical charts for a year, before being knocked off by its follow-up, Encore.

Watson became the first British male to simultaneously occupy the top of the UK and American charts, his next two albums were both Platinum-selling chart-toppers, and he lent his vocals to projects as diverse as the movie adaptation of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the theme to the latest Star Trek series.

During this period, Watson also took up semi-permanent residency in palaces, courts and embassies across the globe, performing for, among others, George Bush, Tony Blair, the Emperor of Japan, the King of Malaysia, various powerful Sultans and tabloid Britain’s own newly-anointed royal couple, Posh and Becks.

He even sang for the late Pope John Paul II, after the pontiff requested a private audience at the Vatican.

“It was almost like, dare I say it, destiny,” says Watson, reflecting on those heady days a decade on. “There was a culmination of different things. I got the Rugby Union World Cup, I got the last game of the season – and again, would it have been such a big moment if Manchester United had lost that day in 1999 on the last game of the season, and then I wouldn’t have gone over to Barcelona to sing at the Champions League final?

“There were a lot of different things that were out of my control that just happened to make it all gel together – the night that Martin Edwards was in the Midland Hotel in Manchester and saw me sing three or four arias and said, ‘wow, you should come and perform for us at Old Trafford’. It just happened – everything just seemed to be lined up.”

Of course, as we’ve seen from everyone from Britney to Amy to the current tragic pantomime of Susan Boyle, fame brings as many pressures as rewards. Did Watson – who split from his wife soon after the release of his first album – struggle to adapt to his sudden success?
“The honest answer to the question is yes, it was difficult to adjust,” he says.

“At first I was caught in the lights and my little puppy dog tail was wagging away and I was so grateful to be there and every day was a bonus. And then after a while you realise it isn’t just about good luck and good fortune, it’s about a lot of hard work.

“And that’s when you realise it’s tough out there. It’s a battle. I’ve always maintained the easy bit is getting there – the real battle is staying there. That’s what’s tough, and so very few manage it these days.”

“Perhaps inevitably in those fevered post-Diana days, Watson quickly inherited the mantle of ‘the people’s tenor’ – and a bucket of critical cold sick to go with it, the Daily Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen famously branding him a ‘karaoke crooner’.

“Whatever you do, you’re always going to be open to criticism from someone,” says Watson, phlegmatically.

“You can’t be liked by everyone, and clearly there were people at that time who were quite vociferous about their dislike for me and their disdain for what I was doing, and that’s fair enough.

“But by the same rule there were a lot of people who did like what I was doing – and they’re the people I focus my attentions on, rather than people who want to be critical of me. As far as I’m concerned, whatever… I’m still here annoying you, and will be annoying you for a lot longer.”

If there’s an unusually strong note of defiance in these words, you can hardly blame him. Because there have been times recently when Russell Watson wasn’t sure how long he would be around to annoy anyone.

In September 2006, having complained of severe headaches and loss of peripheral vision for some time, Watson was taken ill while recording his latest album in Los Angeles.

Doctors told him he had a developing pituitary adenoma (a type of brain tumour) the size of two golf balls. “Since an early age I’ve had an in-built premonition, a vision that I wouldn’t make 40,” he said at the time.

“For the previous seven years I’d have a recurring nightmare in which my head exploded.”

When the tumour was diagnosed, he was 39 years and 10 months old.

Surgeons removed the 8cm lump through Watson’s nose during a five-hour emergency operation in London. Recovery was slow. His mood swings went from ‘ecstatic to suicidal’ and he has credited his two daughters, Rebecca and Hannah, with pulling him through his darkest hours.

But he eventually finished recording the album and, when he finally embarked on a rescheduled tour in the spring of 2007, he was greeted with standing ovations every night.

Then, in October that year, he fell ill again. An MRI scan showed the tumour had regrown, and was causing bleeding into his brain.

He underwent a second emergency operation at the Alexandra Hospital in Manchester, after which he remained in critical condition in the Intensive Therapy Unit.

“I think to have a genuine, true appreciation of life you have to have been through a little bit of mess,” he says philosophically. “I think bad times make the good times even more poignant and significant. And what I’ve been through in the last couple of years means I have a real zest for life and a real appreciation of my health.

“I feel very, very fortunate to have come through a very difficult health period in my life. And I’m looking forward to the future now, as opposed to back.”

He is, he says, under ‘constant supervision’ from doctors.

“I’m on a concoction of various different drugs. I have to inject myself every day and take tablets but it’s like, when you get up in the morning you know you’re going to need to brush your teeth or your breath isn’t going to smell that great; I get up in the morning and I know I need to take these tablets to get myself kick-started.

“And it builds through the day – I know at lunchtime I need to eat lunch or I’ll be hungry, and I know I need to take another tablet or I won’t feel great. It becomes second nature – it’s not something where I think, oh poor me, I’ve got to take medication. It’s better than the other option.”

Last year, Watson signalled a change in direction when he released People Get Ready, an album of soul and R&B standards featuring the likes of Me and Mrs Jones, Soul Man and In The Midnight Hour. But when he takes to the stage at Audley End this month for the first of the stately home’s summer picnic concerts, it will, he promises, be ‘very much the classical Russell’.

“It’s going to be a great night,” he says. “We’ve got a fabulous, 70-piece orchestra, and there’s going to be a kind of a Last Night of the Proms feel to the show, with things like Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem, as well as the Neapolitan arias and full-on operatic numbers.”

The diversion into R&B territory was, he explains, a case of necessity being the mother of invention.

“Obviously I’ve had a heavy run, health wise, the last two or three years, so I’ve had to take it easy. I suppose it’s like a footballer getting back into training – he’s not going to run onto the cup final at Wembley and play a full 90 minutes after having been out with a serious injury.

“And it’s the same with what I’ve been through. The noise that I make is incredibly resonant, particularly around the front area of the skull, and that’s where I had a great big lump growing for the last few years. I’ve had to be careful.

“Aside from the fact that, at the time, People Get Ready felt like the right record and a record I wanted to make, it definitely felt like a more viable option, vocally, than singing grand opera after having 25 treatments of radiotherapy and two brain tumour operations. It didn’t seem like the wisest move to start belting out Nessun Dorma.”

But now he’s back to full belting strength?
“Absolutely. I feel like I’m getting strong again. I’ve just finished my UK tour, 20 concerts without any problems. And I think as well the public are starting to get faith in Russell Watson as an artist because I think there was a period of time where you never knew if I was going to be well or not.

“The last couple of years, thankfully, I’ve not had to pull out of any concerts due to ill-health. I’m very pleased – two years of a good clean record. It’s good.”

So there’s the Hollywood happy ending, which I think is where we came in. Before we let him go, though, we have to ask: What does one make small talk about with the Pope?

“I actually gave him one of my CDs,” he laughs.

“I got a letter from him about two weeks later – I’m actually looking at it now – saying how delighted he was with it, and that he was going to place me in his prayers.

“It was quite a blessing – I think it may have gone some way to helping me get through the last couple of years.”

Source: Cambridge News