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Weekly
Media Feature - (4/1/2001) |
THE
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
April 1, 2001
15-Year-Old
Charlotte Church: The Major Minor
By JONATHAN
VAN METER
It's a Wednesday afternoon in mid-January, and Charlotte Church is
hanging out in a New York hotel room where, for one rare moment,
neither her parents, her publicist nor her record-label chaperone is
on hand. Having flown in from Wales the night before, she's sitting
barefoot in the middle of a big unmade bed, listening to a Destiny's
Child CD and preparing for a typically full week. First she will fly
down to Washington to sing at a presidential Inauguration concert.
Then back to New York, where she will perform on a bill with Eric
Clapton, Whitney Houston and a handful of other superstars at a
benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, after which she will attend a very
adult, very late party at Lotus, the downtown club-of-the-moment.
Then it's back down to Washington to wave from a float with the kid
actors from "Jerry Maguire" and "Home
Improvement." Switching back into "adult" mode, she
will attend the California Inaugural Ball, squeezing her rapidly
blossoming curves into a corseted, exquisitely uncomfortable Oscar
de la Renta gown. The next day, she'll be off to Los Angeles for
meetings with producers and writers. And then she'll return to
Wales, to her parents' home, her classes and her friends.
"I find it fine to adjust from a normal life to this famous
life," she says, now lying on her stomach, chin in hands,
"but for the people around me, to have this famous person come
back into their house and come back to being
their friend -- I know it's difficult." She sits up, grabs a
brush and runs it through her hair as she ticks off the downsides of
her demanding schedule: "Not being home enough, being tired,
having to be happy all the time. I'm on show 24-7, and I can never
be in a bad mood, which is quite hard for a pretty moody
teenager." Brush, brush, brush. "And when the press writes
'the Maria Callas of Cardiff,' I'm like, that's a slightly dramatic
comparison, since she was a great opera singer and I'm this little
girl from Wales. It's very flattering, but my friends are like"
-- she mimics their eye-rolling sarcasm -- 'So, I hear you're the
biggest thing since Pavarotti. . . . ' "
Charlotte Church has recorded three albums of mostly classical music
and sold close to eight million copies worldwide, five million of
them in the United States. Her album "Dream a Dream" made
the Top 10 last year (somewhere between Limp Bizkit and the
Backstreet Boys) and went on to become the No. 1 selling Christmas
album, beating out Christina Aguilera and Rosie O'Donnell. When
Billboard ranked the Top 10 female artists of 2000, Church clocked
in at No. 9. Whitney Houston was No. 10.
It wasn't Corn Belt Christians who bought most of those Christmas
CD's: New York is her biggest market by nearly 2 to 1. After women
over 35, the biggest portion of her fan base is girls ages 5 to 12.
She has performed live on New York's pop radio station Z-100 five
times. John Vernile, vice president for promotion of Sony Classical,
says, "Charlotte has done more to make young kids aware of
classical music and opera than anyone has done in
years." She's an unqualified phenomenon, unprecedented in the
history of music -- our first Teen-Popera star.
Lately she has been sprinkling a few show tunes into her
performances: "Bali H'ai" from "South Pacific"
and "If I Loved You" from "Carousel." "At
this point, there's an opportunity for Charlotte to go beyond her
classical
roots," says Tommy Mottola, chairman and C.E.O. of Sony Music
Entertainment, who intends to get "personally" involved
with her next record. "I have some ideas and plans that I'm
working on to really place her in a more popular music world.
Anything from dance music to duets with major stars."
And that's just the beginning. She has hired the legendary manager
Irving Azoff to guide her entree into Hollywood, and has already
talked to several studios. Later this month her autobiography,
"Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far)" -- ghostwritten by
an English journalist -- will appear, accompanied by a book tour and
the usual round of morning talk shows.
Church has been ushered onto the pop stage during a time of
seemingly endless hunger for anything to do with teenagers,
especially adolescent girls who project an adult sexuality that they
may not fully understand. Sony has made the most of this fact,
stretching the conventions of classical performance as far as they
can. Church is no Britney Spears, but she's not Shirley Temple
either. Her album covers all feature her pretty young face, with its
long eyelashes and full lips, and her television broadcasts show her
made up and lighted like a model, wearing gowns that few
15-year-olds would feel comfortable in.
Because Church is both MTV and PBS, she has found herself at the
center of a debate that's heating up in the classical music world:
Is she the industry's savior or its worst nightmare? Will her huge
sales finance all the serious musicians whose low profiles challenge
the patience of the recording industry? Or will her concessions to
popular taste degrade the standards of an entire genre? It depends
on whom you ask.
"There are two worlds of classical music out there," says
Paul Burger, the president of Sony Music Entertainment Europe and
the man who first signed Church three years ago. "The classical
cognoscenti, who are a small, vocal,
very active community but, regrettably, a closed community. The
other community is the broad public, most of whom have had some
education in classical music in some form or another. I think one of
the problems is that
classical music has historically been presented in a style that
makes it almost prohibitive for Joe Public. It's not a particularly
inviting world. Whereas the world of pop marketing is a totally
inviting world."
When CD's became available in the 80's, classical music aficionados
began going through their records and replacing them, album by
album, with digital versions. The result was a decade of vigorous
sales, during which labels merely repackaged the same music into
ever more expensive collections and sat back to count the revenues.
But now the changeover to disc is largely complete, and sales are
down by nearly half, according to some estimates. At the same time,
classical music programs in schools are disappearing, and the
audience is slowly but surely drying up. Out of necessity, classical
labels are turning to the pop marketing tactics that they previously
had the luxury to eschew.
Amid this shift, Church's success strikes many purists as a triumph
of packaging over content. According to Fred Child, host of NPR's
"Performance Today," the objection is that she doesn't
have a fully mature classical
voice. "She's using some classical material in what purists
would say is a watered-down way. She doesn't have a huge expressive
range. People for whom rock 'n' roll is an art form detest 'N Sync
and Britney Spears. Britney
Spears -- what is she? She looks great on video. Charlotte Church
looks great on a PBS special."
Church is aware of the controversy and of her place in it.
"Most purists, because they're small-minded, they judge me by
comparing me to a 40-year-old opera singer," she says. She
knows she still has a lot to learn, but she's not apologizing to
anyone for her success. "If it weren't for people doing the
classical crossover stuff -- like Andrea Bocelli, Enya and me --
then classical music in a couple years' time would be virtually
extinct."
Charlotte's mother, Maria, is even more direct. "This one guy
said, 'I'm always defending Charlotte on the Internet, in the opera
chat rooms.' I said: 'It's lovely that you care, but don't worry
yourself about it. We don't give a [expletive] anymore.' "
Despite all the friction, Church has no shortage of invitations to
perform with symphony orchestras. They simply can't afford to spurn
her. She's now on a 13-city tour of North America, which includes
her first solo concert in
New York, at Avery Fisher Hall, on April 9. Not only is she playing
to sold-out houses, she's also attracting people who never before
considered attending a classical concert. "She's a breath of
fresh air in the concert hall," said Rudi Schlegel, director of
presentations for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. "Charlotte is
the bridge over into the concert hall for many families with young
children."
But there's another reason that most of the grumbling is consigned
to cocktail parties and electronic bulletin boards: whatever you
think about her in theory, in person Charlotte Church telegraphs a
charisma that disarms
nearly everyone. "About two years ago," Child says,
"I had dinner with John Vernile and Charlotte and her mother in
a little Italian restaurant in San Antonio. She was being a teenage
girl, being persnickety and a little bit antsy in the chair, and
finally somebody figured out who she was, and she went back into the
kitchen and sang one verse of 'Pie Jesu,' a religious song about the
adoration of the Christ child. It's not like she walked in sucking
on a lollipop and started belting it out. She knows a little
something about performing, and she gathered herself, waited till
she had some people around her. She took a deep breath and launched
into it. There were clanging pots and people yelling at each other
and suddenly, the sound of her voice cut through and all activity
stopped and everyone focused on nothing but Charlotte and her voice.
It was a remarkable moment. They were mesmerized."
The day I first meet Church I ask the inevitable question: When did
she know? "You don't wake up and go, 'Wow, my voice is amazing
today,' " she says. "It's like growing in height. It's
gradual, and you don't really notice. I still don't hear my voice
today and think it's amazing. It's just there every day. It's just
me."
Church was brought up in a musical family that inverts the standard
time line of popular music. Her grandfather "Bampy" played
in a rock band, the Solid Six, that charted in Holland and Australia
in the late 50's. Her mother, Maria, studied classical guitar as a
teenager.
Church started performing at age 3, when she and her cousin would do
"the chick-chick-chicken song" during her family's Sunday
lunch at the pub. Church socials at the local parish followed.
"I think she was about 8 when
we first went, 'Whoa, this is not a normal 8-year-old voice,' "
her mother recalls. "But she had been through fads, dancing
lessons, ice skating. When she was 9, she said, 'Can I go to singing
lessons?' And I was like, 'O.K.,
here we go again, another fad.' "
One of the first songs her voice coach had her learn was "Pie
Jesu." Church began winning competitions, even a voice
scholarship to attend the Cathedral School in Cardiff. When she was
10, she appeared on a television show and sang "Somewhere"
from "West Side Story." A couple of agents called. But a
few months later, when she appeared on another show and sang four
lines from "Pie Jesu," the Churches were inundated by
inquiries from agents and managers.
Charlotte Church had found her metier.
A manager named Jonathan Shalit drew the long straw and took Church
to Paul Burger's office at Sony. "The last thing I wanted to do
was to sign an 11-year-old kid," Burger says. "It just
didn't feel right. We're talking pre-Britney Spears, pre-Christina
Aguilera, before the whole kid revolution. But the more I spoke to
her, the more in love with her I became, and what was supposed to be
a 10-minute meeting turned into 45 minutes. She sensed
the meeting was coming to a close and said, 'But you haven't asked
me to sing yet.' "
She planted her feet and started into "Pie Jesu." Burger
says: "I know it sounds incredibly clich 1/8d, but the hairs on
the back of my neck stood up." He told Charlotte: "It's
really simple: as soon as we sign a deal, you
have to promise me there's no more show tunes and no more pop stuff.
That direction of the semiclassical and the semioperatic is the
niche that you can absolutely own.' "
Church signed a five-album contract. Her first album, "Voice of
an Angel," was released in November 1998; within a few weeks,
it went double platinum. Then all of 12, she was invited to the
Vatican's Christmas concert. Wearing
a floor-length red dress and accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra,
she sang "The Lord's Prayer" for the pope. Over the next
year she sang for the royal family, President Clinton and Rupert
Murdoch -- on his yacht, during his
wedding. In November 1999, a two-minute millennial television ad by
Ford was shown simultaneously all over the world featuring Church
singing "Just Wave Hello" from the top of a craggy cliff
at sunrise.
In addition to becoming a musical sensation, however, she became a
tabloid sensation. Obviously, there's no dirt on Charlotte, so the
papers went after her family. Her mother, Maria, and her adoptive
father, James, quit their
day jobs and became part of her daughter's professional entourage.
The couple acquired a new-found fluency in fashion trends,
particularly those with plunging necklines or visible designer
insignia. Maria's first husband
-- Charlotte's biological father, who had not seen the family in
well over a decade -- came out of the woodwork, eager to talk to
anyone who would quote him. Wild stories appeared about the
Churches' new-found fortune,
exaggerated by some sources at 10 million pounds. (The Churches say
that Charlotte's earnings are in a trust.) When Charlotte's manager
was informed that his services were no longer needed, the papers
printed all the gory
details.
Maria seems to have taken it the hardest. "The backlash was all
against me," she says, telling the story from her usual
perspective. "Jonathan was so determined that I was the one who
sacked him, and that's so far from the
truth. I was the one who warned Charlotte of the implications of
firing a manager because she was under contract. And she was like,
'I have to do this, Mum.' I was called 'the Welsh Dragon,' 'the
Greedy Mother from Hell' -- these were all the headlines!"
Maria seems to thrive on the pseudoscandal, but it's also clear she
was deeply shaken by it. (When I first met her she was wearing a
full-length black fake fur coat, stiletto Chanel boots and a silver
Gucci pendant; unbidden, she told me the price she'd paid for each
piece at Harrod's, to assure me that they'd all been bought on
sale.) But all of her outrage dissipates when her daughter's name is
mentioned. "Charlotte was stronger than all of us," she
says. "She kept saying, 'We'll get through this, Mum.' "
The strangeness of Charlotte Church's double life reveals itself at
nearly every turn, none more so than the day she and her very white,
very British entourage arrive for a rehearsal with Wyclef Jean.
Church is accompanied by
her parents, a tutor from London, a young female chaperone and
Jeremy Caulton, former director of planning for the English National
Opera. They are met by Jean's entourage, mostly young black men
slouching around the
room in baggy jeans and big sneakers. Jean himself is decked out in
head-to-toe alligator skin, dreads to his shoulders, and pointy
boots. Standing next to him, in her fuzzy sweater and khakis,
Charlotte looks even younger than she is and as straight as could
be.
Jean met Church in 1999, when they presented an award at the MTV
Video Music Awards. While Church was singing a few crowd-pleasing
bars of "La Pastorella," Jean, to everyone's surprise,
jumped in and started rapping.
"I'll be honest," Maria says: "I found it quite rude,
what he did. This is Charlotte's half minute of glory, and she's so
thrilled to be on bloody MTV, and he started rapping." Jean
later asked Church to participate in a Carnegie Hall benefit for his
charitable foundation, and she agreed to sing
"Summertime," from "Porgy and Bess."
As the Churches perch themselves on folding chairs, he plays them a
variation he's been working on -- a hard electronic beat underneath
a soulful soprano with classical Spanish guitar filigreeing through
it. This time, instead of taking umbrage, Maria nearly trips over
herself to get to her daughter's future. "Brilliant!" she
cries." Absolutely brilliant! Charlotte's been wanting to do
something different." She clasps her hands together as if
praying and shoots her eyes to the heavens. "Please, Sony, do
something with it."
She won't have to beg, of course. Sony is altogether eager to see
Church move into more popular genres. But sticking to the classics
was until recently the guiding principle of her career. A little
variety is one thing. How far will she take it?
When I ask Charlotte whether she has any desire to sing pure pop
music, she fixes her big eyes on me and says: "Not really. If I
was a pop star, then the thing I could do is the Britney Spears-type
thing, the Christina Aguilera-type thing. That's just not for me. I
like being a bit out of the ordinary, plus the fact that I couldn't
do all the clothes." She turns on a bit of attitude. "I
can't be dealing with watching my weight," she says with a
faint roll of the neck. "It's just too much stress.
"I don't know where I'm going with my music," she
continues. "It's very taxing to make a very grown-up decision
about my career when I'm on the brink of 15. I have to try to think
about what would be best for me and what
would be best for my career and what would be best for my
family."
Back in the limousine after the rehearsal, everyone is atwitter,
even the very proper opera director. "That was amazing,"
Maria says.
"Wyclef's a genius," Charlotte says. "He said he's
going to do a hip-hop version of 'Porgy and Bess.' "
"If he does," Maria says, "you should ask him if you
can play the lead."
"I doubt it, Mum," Charlotte says, sucking her teeth and
rolling her eyes. "That would be really bad. Hello. A little
white girl playing a big black mama?"
"Well," Maria says, with a smirk, "there's a first
for everything."
Jonathan Van Meter, a frequent contributor to the magazine, last
wrote about
Pedro Almodovar.
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