Blake
Ollie, Stephen, Jules and Dom became an overnight phenomenon recently when they formed on social networking site Facebook, and have now made an album that is a beautiful blend of classical favourites and classically styled pop tunes. The foursome, who have had a rapturous reaction from the public, all come from classical backgrounds, and the quality and versatility of their voices shines through on this fourteen track disc.
You formed on Face Book how did you go about getting together and why the name Blake?
“Well, Oliver and Jules, half the band come up with the idea of putting a male group together with no particular ambition in mind, you know just to kind of do some singing and maybe earn a bit of money on the side, do some weddings and corporate gigs and Jules seen me in a play in the Old Vic in London in which I sang at the beginning and thought I might be quite good as well for the group, and so managed to track me down on face book and sent me a message and it was the same with Olli finding Stephen through the Gills Hall school of musical drama through there student union group and once we had all agreed to meet we went to the Gills Hall and booked a room illegally and Olli sneaked us in.
We met and we sung together for the first time we sung “Moon River” because that’s what we had the music to do. Then we went on that night and we started to get to know each other we surprised ourselves at the levels of our voices and how it all worked and then we went on to a party and then we ended up getting quite drunk, sung again to some of our friends, who encouraged us to take it on to the next level bizarrely.
So Stephen knew about a guy called Daniel Glatman who is our manager now, who is famous for managing the boy band “Blue” and recently gone classical from male voice choir and because that had managed so well for us, Stephen typed his name into Face Book and I think he was at the stage when he didn’t have any friends on Face Book, I think he had just signed on and he replied, I think as anyone would appreciate with Face Book he became completely obsessed with it and he agreed to listen to us sing and we went in and we met him a couple of days later and he got really excited and took us down to Universal records.
It was literally within forty eight hours before we knew it we were standing in front of Peter and Mark the managing directors of Universal and they gave us a record deal, so we didn’t really have time to think about what had happened because it had all happened so quickly.
Then the name, we didn’t really have a name for a while because we didn’t think we needed one, then we sort of realised that we did need a name so we started thinking about something that represented who we are and that we applied ourselves as a British group and so started thinking about English poets or writers or something and Blake stood out, it just stuck, it was short and dynamic and I studied him for A-level and I came up with the suggestion and it just stuck really, it’s a good short name and people will remember it.”
You tracked down Daniel Glatman, your manager why did you choose him and how did he get involved?
“Well we chose him like I said because of Stephen had heard about him because he had, had massive success with Blue, I think they had sold 30 million albums, or something stupid but more importantly he had just signed a couple of artists who Universal, classic and Jazz and had been the biggest selling artist which is a classical choir.
We just had a feeling that the mixture of his classical and his pop experience could be really interesting and useful and you can approach classical music in a popular way sometimes if you present it in a pop way it more interesting and it has a slightly different outcome. He’s a busy guy and all that so we certainly didn’t think that he would ever reply, but luckily for us he did, and he agreed to come and listen to us.”
Your debut album is called Blake, what can we expect from it?
“One thing that we do, we are proud of ourselves, the blend of our voices we think is quite unique. We surprised our selves when we heard it for the first time, because it’s very rare to get four voices that just click so well. We all have four very distinct voices but when we put them together it creates a very lush sound, it’s very rich and dark and deep it’s a beautiful sound I think.
There is music for everyone on the album. There are some really classical pieces to some really popular pieces, we have taken a theme from the gladiator, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, lush music like moon river we’ve done a boys 2 men cover, we’ve sung in Spanish, all with a 7 piece orchestra so it’s a really romantic sound and very full and a very musical sound.”
It’s quite a classical album, like you said, what made you interested in that sort of music?
“Well, all four of us have had a background of classical music, most of us were choristers at either cathedrals or chapel choirs or Abby’s at some point in growing up. So we had classical music surrounding us from quite an early age and we all have similar tastes in music, we also like pop music at the same time, if you look at our ipods the music ranges from Girls Aloud man enough to Prodigy to all the house music and so we wanted the album to represent that a little bit.
It’s about 60/40 classical and pop, But each track is approached in isolation so we don’t sing a classical song in a pop way and we don’t sing a pop tune in a classical way, We enjoy the versatility that we have with our voices and have a lot of fun with the versatility with our voices where if the tracks are like the Beach Boys which is a slightly pop sound, then we’ll do a slightly pop sound, and like wise the other way round.”
How much creative control did you have for the album?
“We were really lucky actually; Universal gave us an enormous amount of creative input into the album from repertoire from choosing it and what we did was went away and sat down with our producer and ranger and wrote down songs that appealed to us and we come up with a big long list and fighting it out with a few pub rules managed to get it down to about 15 tracks but then it didn’t really stop there.
Even when our producers would go ahead and arrange the songs and we listened to them back and even from the moment we were recording with the mic we’d be changing things to the way we found more comfortable or with different vocal parts.
Putting our inputs saying ‘I think we should have a choir for this one’ or adding bits and various words to different pieces and that never stopped really, it still didn’t stop until after we had finished recording the album and all the mixing was going on and I think the advantage of that is that you have a really group collaboration and what you have got is the end result and experience is we haven’t been told to sing songs because if that happened and in some cases what your singing can end up with quite a square sound. All of our music has come from somewhere, a place within us. It’s come from the heart if you like so it’s much more interesting. Universal have been really good to us.”
You recorded ‘Swing Low’ for the Rugby World Cup’, how did that come about, and what was it like performing at Twickenham?
“That’s right, we were on BBC breakfast TV, when our story broke I guess and they saw us and approached us and said, they knew that we had done a version of Swing Low on our album, they said would you mind if we took it away and did a remix of it, so they did a stadium remix and made it very tribal with lots of big drums it’s was very inspirational and very rugby like.
So of course we agreed it was an honour to us because we are all big rugby fans and so we had the chance singing it at Twickenham actually, in August before the England/France warm up game. That was quite an awesome experience there were about 70,000 fans singing along to our version of Swing Low, it was quite amazing and a real honour to represent and become the real anthem and national theme.
We took it on and hopefully we played our small part in their success because they had a phenomenal time in France this year, and I think the last couple of months in rugby for England has been phenomenal it’s been great, and we ended up singing the fans off from waterloo station at half past five in the morning on the Friday before the World Cup, which was also quite an experience. So they kind of got up the noses of some of the South Africans getting on the Euro star as well.”
Your profile has risen very quickly on Face Book you have even got Keira Knightly as one of your fans, How are you dealing with the attention?
“It’s funny I mean it’s wonderful when you get people like that, and like Cilla Black who came along who was very supportive. It’s wonderful because it kind of shows that people really enjoy what you’re doing. Life hasn’t really changed dramatically to us too much; occasionally you rub shoulders with people you wouldn’t have expected to rub shoulders with but at the end of the day if you stick to what you’re doing and what I’m doing you can’t really go wrong I don’t think.”
What have you got coming up in the next couple of weeks?
“In the next couple of weeks we are; about to go up and record two songs of praise on Friday, We have got a big concert at the Albert hall on the 10th November that’s for the festival of remembrance, which is going to be broadcast in BBC 1, We have got more TV and GMTV and This Morning again coming up, We have got another BBC Breakfast coming up, We have got some charity concerts and Christmas is always a busy time we are doing lots of Christmas things.
We have just come back from a two and a half week radio tour where we travelled the whole country and visited every major city in the country and did about 35 radio stations, which was really good fun and going to places that I hadn’t been to before, getting interviews and singing on the radio, getting the music out there and I think we will just have to see how the album goes, turns out so we need to see what happens.”