When the William Morris agency, the biggest live booking agent in North
America, agreed to represent the 22-year-old singer Bryn Christopher, a
spokesman described the West Midlander as having “a voice that will no doubt
make him a legend”. Yet, as recently as 2006, Christopher was
languishing at the Italia Conti stage school in London, telling his teachers
that he loved Stevie Wonder and being asked by them: “Why aren’t you saying
Les Misérables?” Five years ago, the Great Barr-born newcomer was a Pop
Stars: The Rivals reject, on the series of the talent show won by One True
Voice and Girls Aloud. “They said I wasn’t very confident,” he recalls,
“that I hadn’t got a very strong voice. I was walking round afterwards like
a zombie. When something like that happens, you think, ‘Are they right? Is
it true?’ The briefest of pauses. “But, you know, five years down the line,
I’m signed to the same label as Girls Aloud.”
The passage of time has no doubt strengthened both Christopher’s singing and
his confidence. But the question of what his voice is — an amalgam of
mimicked mannerisms or something distinctively his own — is one that is
already exercising commentators, who cite Amy Winehouse, Gnarls Barkley’s
Cee-Lo Green, Aretha Franklin and Terence Trent D’Arby as clear influences.
As Christopher himself admits, it’s an issue he has spent time grappling
with, too. “I’m inspired by lots of people,” he says. “But I did go through
that whole thing of, ‘Where is my voice? What does it sound like?’ I’ll
listen to someone and think, ‘I want to get up there and do what you do, and
do it as well.’ ”
A lot of vocalists go through these stages of individuality and similarity, he
thinks, because their musical ears cannot help but pick up anything that’s
on offer, often unconsciously and not always discriminatingly. “I’m a
sponge,” he chuckles. “I’m a singer, after all. As long as I’m singing with
emotion, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like.”
Christopher’s second change of fortune, following his record deal, was a
support slot on Winehouse’s tour last autumn, and this run of luck continued
when his debut single, The Quest, was featured in the season-four finale of
the American television show Grey’s Anatomy. One of four children of a Welsh
mother and a Caribbean father (they divorced when he was six), the singer is
blessed with looks as honed and camera-friendly as his voice and retro-soul
music are easy on the ear and timely. He is also, it has to be said, an
endearingly motor-mouthy fellow, racing off into recollection in a Brummie
singsong he says he isn’t mad about. “I hate it,” he laughs. “I don’t mind it
in other people, but when I watch myself on television, I cringe. Everybody
automatically assumes we’re a bit slow. That’s probably why we’re so quick
at talking — we’re overcompensating.” He concedes that his loose tongue got
him into no end of trouble at stage school. “They didn’t know how to deal
with a young man from Birmingham who was quite confident and wouldn’t take
any rubbish from teachers,” he recalls. “They’d say all the time that I was
singing wrong ‘technically’, things like, ‘There’s a harshness in your
voice, and it’s got to be clean.’ ”
The training, which was, Christopher feels, geared only towards the
tits-and-teeth, musical-theatre type of projection, was woefully unsuited to
what he wanted to achieve. “I remember asking a teacher, ‘Why can’t I sing
the high notes any more? I could do them really easily before.’ She went, ‘I
don’t know, but you’re really singing weirdly lately.’ And I said, ‘You know
what? I’m not being funny, but I’m going to throw everything you
lot have taught me out of my head, because I can’t sing the way I used to.”
Salvation came in the form of a management contract and a collaboration with the
Australian producer Jarrad Rogers, of SugaRush Beat Company. The pair have created
a debut album, My World, that walks a fine line between the type of
chart-friendly, coffee-table soul that will delight fans of Winehouse and
Mark Ronson, and something edgier and less cautious. Tracks such as
Christopher’s new single, Smilin’, bear a strong resemblance to the more
straightforward sections of Gnarls Barkley’s oeuvre, but the closing song,
Taken Me Over, finds Christopher throwing his head back and letting rip, in
a way that makes complete sense of his remark that he has “to sing every
day, otherwise I feel like I haven’t had my fix. In the studio, on stage,
I’ll be jittery, juddering; I’ve got to get it out”. The third track
on the album is a cover of Portishead’s Sour Times, an untouchable in the
view of many fans of the Bristol band. “It’s scary,” Christopher agrees. “My
mum used to listen to them when I was young, so I knew it was a big deal.
But the way Beth Gibbons sings it is so different to what I’ve done. Plus,
I’m not exactly going to sound like her, am I?”
As for the Terence Trent D’Arby comparisons, he says: “That’s an interesting
one, because I’d never heard of him or his music till I was 20, when someone
mentioned the similarity. So I checked him out and I was, like, ‘Oh God,
sure enough, he’s mixed-race.’ He didn’t really have a black voice, but he
didn’t really have a white one, either.”
Christopher knew, he says, that he wanted to perform, to sing, from the age of
six. Questions of how he sang, who he was meant to sound like, never
occurred to him. He doesn’t agree with Estelle’s recent remarks concerning
Adele and Duffy. “When she said those things, I thought, ‘Careful.’ Adele
has got soul. She wouldn’t be able to sing like that if she didn’t have.” He
does, however, worry about the limited opportunities available to black
musicians in this country. “The industry is in a weird place,” he says. “If
we are going to have people like Adele and Duffy being so successful, well,
we should be having black and Asian people doing the same.”
Christopher was bullied badly at secondary school, for being skinny and for
daring to sing. “When people found out I wanted to be a singer, they were,
like, ‘Oh yeah? Do you do ballet as well?’ ” He’s no longer skinny, but he’s
still a singer, if not a legend quite yet. As for the strength and the
confidence, well, it looks as if the bullies, not to mention those
talent-show judges, were wrong about that, too.
Smilin’ is released on August 25 on Polydor; My World follows on September 1
