Listen to Il Divo
At a postgig party in a vast, duplex hotel suite in Barcelona, things are
getting a little out of hand. The drink is flowing, R&B blasts from the
speakers. When an extremely senior figure in the British music industry
knocks over a towering vase, which shatters into hundreds of pieces on the
parquet floor, few people bat an eyelid. The usual term of approval in such
circumstances is “rock’n’ roll!”. It isn’t, in my experience, “Pop-opera
crossover!” Yet the four-piece band whose concert preceded the party is the
multina-tional quartet of crooners Il Divo, at least two of whom are
apparently still going strong as dawn breaks. Aren’t they meant to be
spotless, buffed-to-a-sheen manne-quins? And shouldn’t they have been in bed
hours ago?
Earlier, at a candlelit, black-tie gala to launch their new album, The
Promise, the band had descended individual staircases in the main auditorium
of the Palau Nacional de Montjuic as the opening chords of their cover of
Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love announced themselves. Simon
Cowell, the man who put the group together, had introduced them, reeling off
statistics (22m albums sold) and looking pretty pleased with himself, before
flying back to London on a private jet to prepare for the next day’s filming
of The X Factor. An unashamed schmaltz-fest that would confirm the worst
fears of Cowell and Il Divo’s many detractors, it nonetheless possessed
undeniable power. Some might raise an eyebrow at their Spanish-language
version of The Winner Takes It All, but so huge, so overwhelming is the
massed-harmony finale, as they walk, gesticulating melodramatically, to the
front of the stage, it’s impossible to deny their communicative force.
On disc, though, Il Divo are a trickier proposition for nonfans, and you sense
they know this. Discussing their effectiveness as live performers, they brim
with confidence. Ask them about the learning curve they experienced in the
recording studio, however, and the unease each admits to feeling before
joining the group is apparent in their defensive answers. Three of them came
from strong operatic backgrounds (only the French member, Sébastien
Izambard, has a grounding in pop), and all are used to the sniping of
purists about the type of music they now make, the fact that they perform
with microphones, the soft-soaped blandness of the records they release. “If
I was singing Mozart on an opera stage,” the Swiss tenor Urs Bühler says
when we meet next day, “I could show much more what I can do as a singer and
a musician. I don’t think my voice is at its strongest singing breathy
verses in pop songs.” Beside him, David Miller, a similarly classically
trained American, looks characteristically pained. “All the composers of
what we consider to be the great body of work that is the untouchable
opera,” he says, “once upon a time got slagged off for being cheesy and
stupid.” I hadn’t mentioned cheesy and stupid, but we’ll let it go. “Talk
about manufactured,” Bühler adds. “Bach wrote his cantatas because he had a
contract to get one out every Saturday. And if you listen to Fidelio, the
second act, Fidelio’s aria, the double bass, that’s thrash metal. Hundreds
of years before.”
If Bühler is earnest, and Miller uptight, their colleagues, Izambard and the
Spanish baritone Carlos Marin, are much more relaxed about the whole thing.
The latter, with his permatanned complexion, pearly-white teeth and
immaculate tailoring, positively twinkles with matinée-idol charm. “Even the
Three Tenors sang with microphones,” he says, so sweetly and reasonably you
half expect a little halo to appear above his suspiciously jet-black hair.
“Mozart’s music was the techno of its day,” Izambard suggests with a
mischievous look in his eyes, laid-back where Bühler and Miller are edgy. “I
think people are missing good voices,” he continues. “With Il Divo, we bring
that back to the audience, who are not familiar with it, and are missing it.
Nowadays, we’re in a consumer industry where you like something one day and
forget about it the next. Because of various television shows - I won’t name
any names, but you know what I mean - the association of who we work with
has been quite difficult. It comes down to talent. That’s what lasts.”
Ah, talent. I wondered when we’d get to that. There are plenty of people who
believe that when Cowell is the one doing the measuring, talent is the last
word you’d use to describe the singers he selects. Yet all four members of
Il Divo can’t be faulted in terms of their voices; it’s what they do with
them that some question. As you would expect, Cowell, who spent two years
auditioning thousands of men before finalising the lineup, has little time
for such criticism. “Nobody owns music,” he says, “and nobody has a right to
condemn anything. We cast a group of guys with a certain type of voice to
sing a certain type of song – simply because we thought people would enjoy
it. And part of the classical so-called elite went ballistic. Why would that
bother you? All I care about is, can we sell records?”
Well, yes, he jolly well can. We’re sitting in his London office, the largest
nonpublic space I think I’ve ever been in, and the hub of his music and
television company, Syco. Cowell has a shtick so bulletproof, so
unapologetic, that chucking brickbats at him is like playing squash against
a mattress: you’re not getting anything back, unless it’s an unanswerably
candid admission of his motives. He is, it needs to be said, extraordinarily
good company (as, indeed, are Il Divo), quite open about his aims and a lot
less objectionable than, say, many faux-humble multiplatinum bands who claim
they’re still down with the kids while scanning their royalty statements.
“There’s this horrible, London, elitist, sneering snobbery,” Cowell scoffs,
“that makes people embarrassed to like something. Who cares? Listen to Bob
the Builder if that’s what you enjoy. What we do is entertainment, and we’re
lucky to be in this business. I like it when it’s big and grand. It excited
me in Barcelona - to see my guys in that incredible venue, singing their
songs. I’d much rather that than being gobbed on, as I was 30 years ago when
I went to see the Stranglers. I know where I’d prefer to be.” The
49-year-old seems genuinely unbothered if some people despise the artists he
markets (his success presumably aids this equanimity). “The best thing in
the world is love or hate,” he argues. “Indifference or ‘quite like’ is the
real danger. And I’m drawn to that, I’m drawn to things that polarise
people. If I’m hearing ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life’,
countered by ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life’, I think
we’re in a pretty good place.”
He doesn’t cite Il Divo as an example, but he doesn’t need to. The quartet are
supreme polarisers: to their millions of fans, they are performers of
immense emotional resonance; to others, purveyors of cloyingly sentimental,
even cynical, tosh. Crucial though Cowell’s role in their success has been,
they are now so huge, theiropinions are beginning to count, or so they
claim. It wasn’t always thus. “I had a big struggle in the beginning,”
Miller says. “The producers we work with are very good at what they do, and
what they do is pop music; what they’re used to is people who can carry a
tune. And they turn that into a worldwide sensation with lots of bells and
whistles and production and tuning and all that stuff, to make it
letter-perfect. That’s one of the things I find is wrong with this industry,
trying to make something perfect.”
He’s looking fretful again. “I find that pop music is in a difficult place
right now. It’s all about playing down to the MTV, 2½second attention span.
And as much as we are bound like this” - he mimes wrists bound by handcuffs
- “we try our best.” “Il Divo are pop singers,” Izambard says. “With
an operatic technique,” Marin adds. “It was,” recalls Miller of the group’s
beginnings, “kind of like we went through a very quick puberty, you know?”
“Like an arranged marriage,” the Frenchman says. They’re referring to Il
Divo when they say this, obviously. But the presence of Cowell hovers,
all-seeing, above them. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Promise is out now on Syco/Sony BMG
