The Big Interview: Lesley Garrett

After much to-ing and fro-ing we finally speak and she says the one thing she didn’t mention when we met, was the death of her father, just before Christmas.

Unable to choke back tears, she explains her father was – and remains still – an enormously important part of what makes her who she is. It’s why, she says, she is finding performing the solo opera La Voix Humaine so very hard; the opera is about lots of things, but a central theme is loss.

It’s a very different Garrett than the the one who arrived at the Opera North offices having spent the day rehearsing Poulenc’s piece all firm handshakes and appearing every bit a force of nature.

At 10 minutes 54 seconds into our time together (rarely have I been so pleased to be recording an interview), she pauses for breath and says: “I’m sorry love, do you want to start again? Shall we start properly now? What do you want to ask me about?” Almost eleven minutes in and the only question that’s been asked is “how are you?”

“A mixture of really tired and really excited, it’s an amazing piece and it’s getting a mixture of responses – do you know the piece?” Garrett had begun. “It’s just me by myself, which is a virtually unique situation in opera, where there’s just one character on stage – well, there is another character, but he’s imaginary, on the end of a telephone, I’m having arguments, conversations, making love, all on the telephone, it’s quite a challenge.” The words continue to tumble out.

“There’s a 40-piece orchestra, an audience of 1,000, that’s a challenge. I didn’t want to come back with a Gilbert and Sullivan, something predictable, I wanted to come back with something nobody would associate me with and I’m very grateful to Opera North for allowing me to do that. It’s been eight years since my last opera, that was The Merry Widow with the Welsh National Opera and that was an operetta, but since then I’ve been doing mainly the West End show....”

Famously from Doncaster – not famously in the sense that she’s become a professional Tyke with no real connection to the county, but that she has always been an ambassador for her home town and county – young Garrett was raised on a steady diet of music and a spirit of Yorkshire graft.

“We, well, we were poor, it’s a fact, we were poor. We had a piano, but that was all we had,” she says.

What the family was rich in was aspiration. After training at the Royal Academy of Music, she began her career at Opera North before moving to the English National Opera where she became lead soprano. Garrett had dipped her toe into performing on international stages and was about to dive headlong into a new phase of her career which would see her performing all over the world, when her life was flipped on its head. She met her husband on a blind date. The way she tells it, it was pretty much love at first sight.

“Pete and I met very late, we were in our late 30s. It’s a completely true story, he came into the dressing room and that was it,” she say, clicking her fingers. “I know it sounds a bit Mills and Boon, but there were witnesses who will confirm it, I swear.”

Garrett’s love-at-first-sight story led quickly to marriage and within a couple of years two children, Chloe, now 18 and studying clinical science at Bradford University and Jeremy, 19, who’s studying computer science at Sheffield University. Garrett says it’s a total coincidence that they chose to study in Yorkshire, but you can’t help but feel that having a mum who is such a champion for the county might have something to do with it.

In fact, Yorkshire is one of the constants in Garrett’s life – she says there are “grooves in the M1” from the tracks she has made from her London home to the one she still has in Doncaster.

“Being Yorkshire is not something I have ever had to think about,” she says. “Being Yorkshire to me is about the fact that I love my family, I love what we stand for, I love the fact that we are resourceful and funny and determined. I love the ‘spit on your hands and tek’ a fresh hold’ nature we have up here. It’s where I come from and it’s where my music comes from and it’s where I come back to when I want to remind myself about what’s important.”

Her railway worker father and mother were self-educated, progressing to become a headmaster and a music teacher in Yorkshire schools. Garrett talks at length about her upbringing and the inspiration she gained from seeing two parents with little education drag themselves up by sheer force of will.

“I thought, ‘If he can become a headmaster from being a signalman, why can’t I become an opera singer?’ He was such an inspiration – and my mum, she matched my dad for everything he did,” she says.

So, become an opera singer she did, but the thunderbolt moment with future husband Peter, meant her career suddenly faced its biggest challenge.

“Being an opera singer is an incredibly selfish existence,” says Garrett, who is 57 but looks a good decade younger. “You have to be so careful with yourself, have to avoid noisy atmospheres, smoky atmospheres, you have to be careful with tiredness, dehydration, dairy products – you name it – you have to be very precious. That is not easy when you’ve got kids.”

Making very clear that never once was it a sacrifice or compromise, Garrett decided to pursue a different avenue because of her family. She even, without any self-consciousness about the phrase, says that she pursued the “celebrity career”.

“I had my own TV show for three series, did one-off specials, did a radio show, appeared on Strictly. I could have worked internationally in opera, but I had these two beautiful children and wonderful husband who I just didn’t want to leave. I was still working – I’ve been working in the West End for the past eight years, but I was always working somewhere that was a short train ride from home.

“Some critics said I sold out, but you can’t do opera without 100 per cent effort and I was now involved in this very important production, which was raising my children. The work I’ve done over the past 10 years is not work I regret, nor do I consider it second class in any way. I’m proud of the fact that there aren’t many opera singers who have been able to do Loose Women, and a big part of doing something like that is persuading the general public that opera is about people like me, friendly, approachable, everyday people.

“The other thing is that it has made me better. You work with Lily Savage, you learn a lot about comic timing. Bruce Forsyth taught me huge amounts about timing. I worked with Ian McKellen. I mean Ian McKellen! Pur-lease!”

It does beg the question, if it’s so wonderful, this “other career”, what is Garrett doing at Opera North, back where it all began? Simply – opera is what she was born to do and, she says, she knows it.

However, there is another reason. Her two children have left for university and she is returning to how she identifies herself outside of being a mother. The answer is: an opera singer.

“This art form matters. Opera matters. It’s the best, it’s the best,” she says. “It combines all the art forms. People like Hockney have designed sets, Chagall designed opera sets. Then the orchestra plays a wonderful overture before anyone has even opened their mouths – then you get the vocal element, there’s dance, the most powerful drama in the world. It’s the most powerful music theatre you will ever experience,” by this point Garrett is getting seriously heated. She bangs the table.

“You have to come and see it. There, there’s your last line.” And it almost was. Until she called and revealed that there is a lot more about to be poured in to her first opera performance in almost a decade. It is going to be some return.

Lesley Garrett appears in Opera North’s La Voix Humaine, a double bill with Dido and Aeneas, Leeds Grand Theatre, February 14 to 23. Tickets 0844 848 2700.