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Charlotte Church is growing into her double life
By Joan
Anderman, Globe Staff, 4/29/2001
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Charlotte Church being a typical 15-year-old.
(Globe Photo / Joe Tabacca) |
NEW YORK - Having lunch with the 15-year-old Welsh singer Charlotte Church involves a remarkable number of people. Her mother, Maria, is a constant presence. Two publicists - one for Charlotte's book, one for Charlotte's concert tour - are there as well. A harpist has been invited, and so has Farrah, a school chum who flew over to spend vacation week tagging along to television show tapings and newspaper interviews. The photographer doesn't eat, but his equipment takes up two spots at the table.
The girl is surrounded.
Since releasing her debut, ''Voice of an Angel,'' in 1998 at the age of 12, Church has sold nearly 8 million albums, 5 million in the United States. She's performed for the pope, two presidents, and the queen. Her autobiography, ''Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far),'' ghostwritten by an English journalist and published by Time Warner, hit bookstores two weeks ago. Church's Boston concert at the Wang Theatre tomorrow, with symphony orchestra, is part of her first nationwide concert tour.
Put a tureen of frozen hot chocolate in front of the young star, however, and the frantic task of being Charlotte Church melts away for a few moments. A similarly gratifying second course of french fries is devoured with uniquely adolescent zeal.
When the last greasy morsel is gone, she reapplies heavy coats of three lipsticks for the photographer, who's snapping away. Suddenly the double life of Charlotte Church comes into bold relief.
It's not simply the fact that in three weeks, following the final date in her 13-city tour, Church will pack up her Oscar de la Renta gowns and go back to dreaded math class at a Catholic girls school in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales.
Balanced on the precipice between childhood and womanhood, both her body and her outlook are changing with astonishing speed. In conversation, bubbly innocence and a deep weariness displace each other in a moody, disoriented duet.
You might chalk it up to hormones. But there's no escaping the fact that the world has embraced a little girl who hardly exists anymore, and a blossoming young woman is now grappling with the prospect of transforming herself from a classical music prodigy to a popular culture icon - with the help of a few of the most powerful men in Hollywood.
''It is going to be different,'' says Church. ''I think that I have to move and grow and go on and change. But I don't want to be a pop artist, and I don't want to do a Celine Dion-ish album. I think it's better to be out of the ordinary.''
After three albums of semi-classical and semi-operatic music, Church is planning albums four and five, which according to the master plan (it extends through her 18th year) will be recorded simultaneously. The fourth will be similar in tone and content to the serious-Lite repertoire she's famous for. But the fifth, which is being personally overseen by Sony Entertainment chairman Tommy Mottola, is going to be Church's crossover album.
She hears Indian influences, African flavors, Latin strains. ''I like to mix different kinds of music together and see what it sounds like,'' says Church. A recent duet with Wyclef Jean at Carnegie Hall, where they performed ''Summertime'' with hip-hop beats and Spanish guitar, was a high point of her career, she says. ''I need to experiment.''
Conveniently, Church's faith in her audience transcends the typical indicators of success, like musical tastes and trends. It's as powerful, it seems, as her belief in the short but incredible history of Charlotte Church.
''I think a lot of them will stay with me, because my story is such a fairy-tale story,'' she says. ''It's not just the music they get involved in. They've all watched me grow up, so they're all a bit protective, I think, of their little girl.''
She is indeed an improbable superstar. Unlike her peers in the pop music world - Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera - Church isn't a girl who honed her chops at regional talent shows and angled for exposure on the Mickey Mouse Club. As the child of musical, working-class parents, she sang with her cousins at family pub lunches and entertained neighbors at church socials. Had Church been born in an era when the appetite for teen entertainers wasn't so voracious, a dewy-eyed schoolgirl singing ''Pie Jesu'' might well have become a local treasure, a fixture at Sunday morning services, rather than an international sensation.
''I can't say it's a dream come true, because I never wanted to be famous. Ever. I never wanted to be a singer, professionally,'' says Church. ''I wanted to be a vet. I wanted to be a barrister. I didn't think about it, and it just kind of happened, and I was like, `whoa! what's happening here?'''
Purists sniff at the Charlotte Church phenomenon. But while the notion of a young singer with an immature instrument and limited expressive range diluting the repertoire turns the stomachs of the elite, it's precisely Church's youth and accessibility that have endeared her to the masses. Billboard magazine ranked her No. 9 of the Top 10 female artists of 2000, just ahead of Whitney Houston.
Church's voice is, as the album and the book titles and the advertisements report, angelic. Her tone is lovely, a sweet and powerful soprano. And the package - the image of a pure and at least quasi-glorious sound emanating from the mouth of a youngster - has undeniable appeal. But Church's singing lacks depth and is woefully short on technique, according to Richard Conrad, artistic director of the Boston Academy of Music and himself an opera singer.
''I don't think she's hurting the art form any more than those FleetCenter packages like the Three Tenors or Andrea Bocelli, whom I have great respect for,'' says Conrad. ''I do find it terribly worrisome that her jaw wobbles with her vibrato, and it sounds like she's holding her voice back to make it sound more childish. This girl is not without her gifts. I just worry that she's going to be voiceless. I hope she has a lot of money in the bank.''
Church is well-versed in the controversy, and offers her signature battle cry in response. ''I don't pretend that my voice is the best in the world. I don't pretend that I'm as good as somebody 20 years my senior who's singing some of the songs I sing. I sing them the way I sing them. People like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman and Enya and me are keeping classical music alive. It's just been getting deader and deader. You know, maybe we are like little poppy classical people, making it a bit more contemporized. But they should at least realize, `hello! We're trying to help it!''
In fact, Church is hardly agonizing over how to win the praise of the classical music cognoscenti. The crossover is already in process, and she's begun sprinkling her live performances with Celtic folk songs and American show tunes - among them ''Bali Hai'' and ''Somewhere.'' Three months ago, Church and her parents - who have quit their day jobs and joined their daughter's professional entourage - hired the legendary rock manager Irving Azoff (who guided the careers of Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks, and the Eagles) to grease the wheels for her entree into Hollywood.
''I don't consider her a classical music artist,'' says Azoff, who has already made a deal for Church with Sony Pictures, which is no great surprise considering Church records for Sony Music. ''I call it popera, but words can't describe what she does. She has tremendous instinct and an incredible personality. To me she very well could be this generation's Barbra Streisand.''
Church prefers listening to Destiny's Child, Blink 182, Pink, and Lenny Kravitz, but almost mournfully decrees that she could ''never, never'' sing that kind of music. Plus, she points out, ''it's much harder for them than it is for me. They've got to look perfect all the time, and I don't care. I wear what I want. If I want to eat this, I'll eat this,'' she says, gesturing with a sweep of her hand to the empty plates in front of her.
''I take advice from people,'' she goes on, ''my family, people in the business, people I can trust. But basically, at the end of the day, the final decisions are mine.'' Including the one not to move to Los Angeles, where the rest of her family would like to relocate. At this stage in her brief, sparkling career - when even those closest to her have fallen under the spell of Hollywood's siren song - Church senses the deepening need to hold on to her roots.
''I've only been to America for work purposes, so when I come here it reminds me of working, '' she says, rolling her eyes and lifing her hands to her face. The raw spots where she's bitten around her fingernails are painfully bright against her pancaked cheek. ''When I go home, I'm home. It keeps me grounded. I need to be able to go there.''
This story ran on page M01 of the Boston Globe on 4/29/2001.
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