 
THE
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
April 1, 2001
15-Year-Old Charlotte Church: The Major Minor
By JONATHAN VAN METER
Photograph by Jillian Edelstein
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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