Daily Mail, 21.12.11
There’s nothing phoney or saccharine about the song, and nothing fake or glitzy about those who sing it. Wherever You Are, as sung by the choir of Military Wives, is reality put to music – the reality of waiting and praying, by those who wait and worry.
They aren’t a glamorous choir. They’re better than that. They’re beautiful. In that everyday, busy prettiness of young wives and mothers, with their high street dresses and the roots showing in their newly washed hair, there’s an honesty about them, a beauty in their very ordinariness.
They don’t look like stars. They look like women you see in the supermarket or at the school gates, but this week theirs is the best selling record seen in this country for six years, out-selling one by last week’s X-Factor winners, Little Mix, by a factor of six to one.
Both records are in aid of charities, which is excellent. But while the ambitions and generous intentions of the young in Little Mix should be applauded, they are already finding their lesser success tainted by the brass faced commercialism of their mentors, Simon Cowell and his crew.
Because, for Little Mix, as for so many artists who make charity records, there is inevitably an element of show-biz opportunism. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a fact of life in our over glamourised, market-led world. So, good luck to Little Mix in their careers: may they be long and fruitful.
Wherever You Are, however, is something quite different. It’s a prayer not a show-biz opportunity. “Wherever you are my love will keep you safe,” go the lyrics. The choir knows, and we all know, that’s an eternal hope, not a reality when daily there are deadly explosive traps laid in the ground for our troops to step upon. But the line is valid just the same. Because it’s a prayer about love, and love strengthens resolve like nothing else.
Based on lines from letters and poems sent by the women in the choir to their partners serving in Afghanistan, then turned into song by Aberdeen University’s professor of music, Paul Mealor (who incidentally composed the new music for this year’s Royal wedding), the effect is truly genuine, moving and inspiring.
What a song. From the moment the dark haired opening soloist with the tattoos and the glasses begins to sing that litany of love, hope and pride, to when the full choir joins in, any possible argument about the point of the soldiers’ mission is transcended by the nobility of the uncomplaining message. “Light up the darkness, my prince of peace,” they sing. It’s the very spirit of Christmas.
Millions of words have rightly been expended on praising Gareth Malone, the inspirational young choirmaster who coached the Military Wives from the tri-service RMB Chivenor in North Devon, and who through other television programmes, has made choir singing a national pastime again. He’s a breath of fresh air in the midst of the posturing of vainglorious TV personalities, and his contribution to the fabric of so many lives, both directly and indirectly, cannot be exaggerated.
But what Gareth has shown in his choirs isn’t something new. The joy of singing together is in all of us. It’s part of being human, part of being a group.
For most of our lives, as church going has been replaced by supermarket shopping on Sundays, communal singing lost its way in our increasingly secular society. Somewhere in this world of universally available cheap recorded music it seemed to go into slumber mode in these recent electronic decades.
But it’s always been there, just waiting for a Gareth to remind us that we learn to talk and to play together through singing nursery rhymes, and that the sound of Christmas carols sung by however amateur a group of singers will, as if by magic, send hands into pockets and purses in the act of giving.
Recently only by seeing and hearing the majesty of the mass singing of Jerusalem by five thousand promenaders at the Last Night Of The Proms have we been annually reminded of what we’ve been missing.
Earlier generations understood the link between singing together and living together far better. When Vera Lynn sang We’ll Meet Again for the troops in World War II, and heard them immediately join in with her, she would have realised that she was tapping into an ancient language of shared emotions, one that expressed through music those universal dreams and hopes too deep for words.
That’s what music can do better than any speech by the most eloquent of speakers. It links minds and hearts, and, yes, tears, too. For thousands of years soldiers forced into battle stilled their fears with songs that instilled camaraderie while workers sang together as they toiled to keep up the rhythm of their work. More recently protest groups sang as they marched, as today football crowds sing their team’s anthems in great emotive swirling masses, be it You’ll Never Walk Alone or The Wonder of You. It’s why we have national anthems, too, songs to remind us that we belong, that we are part of a group bigger than ourselves.
Most of us think we can’t sing. But Gareth Malone has shown that most of us can sing, maybe not well enough to appear at La Scala in Milan or even make a record, but, unembarrassed in a crowd and particularly one that is well run, we can surprise ourselves. We shouldn’t. That was what we learned to do through the millennia of evolution. We just began to forget it.
You night think that after a long shift down the mines in South Wales the colliery workers would simply want an exhausted quiet night in. But for generations, pit workers would hurry home for their tea and then be off out to make the sublime music of Welsh male voice choirs.
And why? Because singing is not only good for us in that it sucks oxygen into the lungs and in doing so releases chemicals into the blood which make us also feel good, but because it’s an act of sharing.
More than anything in the year, Christmas is about togetherness, when families and friends cross the country or the globe to be together at Christmas, and when the music of carols binds the generations.
This year many will come together and be comforted by the lyrics of Wherever You Are, and the stoicism of those who sing it. Many of us these days don’t know anyone in the armed services, their numbers now being relatively few and the job they do seeming so distant from our daily lives.
But the spontaneous applause that used to break out at Wootton Basset as the fallen soldiers were brought home from Afghanistan told us that, though out of sight, they are not forgotten. Deep within most of us, albeit usually hidden, there remains a gratitude for their bravery.
And it’s that gratitude which will make Wherever You Are a musical focal point, not only for this generation and the ones to come, because I suspect it will prove popular for many years. But for all those who went before when women waited and wondered and kept the home fires burning and prayed that the knock on the door would never come. For my mother, widowed in 1944 when I was three, it did come. Through inevitable tears, she would have loved and understood this song.
The language of music, with its short cut to the deepest of our emotions, can often talk to us more clearly than any conversation. Through the work of Gareth Malone, Paul Mealor and the brave Military Wives the words of Wherever You Are will provoke millions of tears this week. Good, grateful tears.
Footnote: Proceeds from the sale of the Military Wives CD will be divided between the Royal British legion and the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen Families Association.
