“We’ve topped the charts more than Wham! or Chas & Dave? We’re a mixture of them both,” jokes Michael Ball. I have just informed Ball and Alfie Boe that their three UK album No 1s also outstrip Simon & Garfunkel and, indeed, any non-family singing duo in history (the Carpenters also scored a trio, but two were greatest hits). Equally impressively, Ball & Boe’s latest chart-topper, the festive collection Together at Christmas, is outselling BTS, the world’s biggest pop group.
“So we’re the biggest boyband in the country!” explodes Ball, 58, like a child opening a present, although the duo’s armoury of skills has not extended to the technical demands of the Zoom interview. The first words Ball says to me are: “How do we turn the camera on, Alf?” But suddenly, here they are – two grinning mates in dinner suits, their album cover come to life.
Ball, a musical theatre colossus and multi-platinum recording artist, and Boe, Britain’s most popular tenor, with four Top 10 solo albums, are huge stars in their own right. This does not entirely explain why Together at Christmas – an album of familiar festive classics with heartfelt singing and orchestral bells and whistles – is also trouncing festive offerings by such big names as Michael Bublé and Dolly Parton. Boe recognises his combo’s enormous fanbase, “who’ve come to see us in Les Misérables or on tour for years and are very loyal”.
Ball mentions “the energy between us” – the bonhomie and chemistry that works in songs and is obvious over Zoom. “We enjoy each other’s company,” he smiles. “There’s no side to this.” But the nub of it is that Together at Christmas’s unmistakable Christmassy warm, nostalgic glow seems to tap into a national mood for something familiar and comforting after a year of Covid, grief and social distancing.
“When you break down Christmas carols and songs, you realise that this year totally contradicts everything that’s normal about Christmas,” agrees Boe, 47, the quieter, more thoughtful yin to Ball’s talkative, jokey yang. While they were recording, Ball felt that, too, and argues that the likes of Meredith Wilson’s 1951 It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas and the traditional carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen suddenly have “an added poignancy, a wistfulness, a sadness to them”.
Although Together at Christmas includes a new song – the banter-rich My Christmas Will Be Better Than Yours – most of the songs are well-worn, countlessly covered staples that have become so ubiquitous that it is a miracle they are topping the charts again in 2020.
“But that’s the point,” contests Ball. “Because Christmas is always a reflection on the year we’ve had, what we were doing when we were kids, the people we’ve lost,” and what Boe calls “an element of hope for what Christmas is going to be like”. Unexpectedly, it is all rather personal. Ball and Boe had not planned to make a Christmas album, but after their arena tour in March everything else got cancelled and they both contracted the virus.
“I told him not to kiss me,” jokes Ball, before admitting it was “really, really rough”. Boe remembers “waking up in a pool of my own sweat. At least, I think it was sweat.” When they recovered, they decided that a Christmas album might raise everyone’s spirits.
This is their first festive collection, but, of their previous albums together, 2016’s Together, 2017’s Together Again and 2019’s Back Together (you are probably detecting a theme here), only the latter does not include a Christmas song. It reached No 2. “That’ll teach us,” chuckles Ball. Isn’t there a danger they will become overassociated with Christmas, like Bublé? Boe grins. “It didn’t do Slade or Roy Wood any harm.”
They were friends before recording together, having met in 2007 in a disastrous English National Opera production of Kismet. “One theatre critic told me it was the only show he never gave no stars to,” chuckles Ball. “But didn’t we have a good time?”
“Even though it was falling apart,” Boe chuckles back. They bonded, realised their voices work together (“I go high, Alf sings low”; “Michael’s jazzier than I am”) and have had a bromance since.
Boe grew up in Fleetwood, Lancashire, a tram ride from Blackpool, where he played drums in working men’s clubs, tried his voice in singing competitions and became entranced by the “razzmatazz” of the showbiz stars who came to the opera house when he was in the stage crew. “Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Status Quo. It was hugely influential.”
He was an apprentice panel beater at Blackpool’s TVR sports car factory when a chance encounter changed his life. “I was working in the garage and always sung along to the radio. A customer overheard me singing and suggested I audition for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in London.” He was successful, and after a stint of Gilbert and Sullivan, he went on to study singing at the Royal College of Music. His first big break was in La Bohème and the rest is history. Boe beams in wonder. “If I’d known back then that I’d end up working with Michael Ball, I’d have … told the guy to buy a car elsewhere.” The two men roar with laughter.
Ball was the son of working-class parents in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. His father worked up from the car production line at Longbridge in Birmingham to become head of global sales at British Leyland and duly thought the done thing would be to send young Michael off to boarding school. But he hated it (“I just wanted to dress up and sing”), became disruptive and was eventually asked to leave. It amuses him that he was eventually invited back to open the “Michael Ball studio” in the school. “I’m now one of the sacred alumni.”
Ball’s first singing experience was busking: “There was a mint spot just between the Guildford high street and Debenhams.” His first part after drama school was in Godspell in Aberystwyth, but he has faced major drawbacks. Aged 18, a parachute jump accident left him facing three years of surgery, “in and out of hospital having bits put back together. No one has a charmed life.”
Ball’s partner of 28 years is Cathy McGowan, who presented the legendary 60s pop show Ready Steady Go!, but subsequently shunned the spotlight and all interviews. “That is so cool. That’s why I love her.” McGowan also saved Ball’s life, in 2002, pulling him out of a house fire. “She was choking. She couldn’t wake me up, dragged me out. Then she went back to get the dog.” Ball lost gold discs, memorabilia, the works. “But you learn quickly that that stuff doesn’t matter.”
Do you draw on such experiences when you sing? “Of course. When you interpret songs, you don’t have to go through the exact same stuff as in the lyrics, but you understand the highs and lows. It’s about communicating the emotion.”
Ball and Boe are more than hired big voices and are “100% involved” in the album process. They sit at a piano with a list of potential songs, develop harmonies, then mock up tracks with synths and a producer. Then orchestras get to work. “That’s so exciting,” Ball smiles. “Listening to our dodgy demos grow into something glorious. The way the music industry is, with everyone doing everything in their front rooms on synths, makes it all the more important that we have the whole shebang. Big orchestral sections, strings, horns, choirs, loads of voices. Quality!”
The pair’s stock-in-trade of classic musical songs may not be fashionable, but such songcraft has timeless appeal – witness the wild success of The Greatest Showman, Mamma Mia!, Frozen and A Star Is Born soundtracks in recent years. Ball cites “the great American songbook – Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Songs we all know and sing. Those Tin Pan Alley guys wrote for shows, but they were clever enough to realise the songs must stand on their own. Take I Dreamed a Dream, which is perfect for the character of Fantine in Les Mis, but anyone watching Susan Boyle doing it on Britain’s Got Talent goes: ‘Oh my God, the story, the emotion.’ That’s their brilliance. They’re the earworms of the musical theatre genre.”
Boe feels “blessed that all this works, given where we’ve come from and how hard we’ve worked”, but thinks of those less fortunate. They are supportive of loneliness initiatives to raise awareness of “the vast amount of people who will be struggling this Christmas”.
As for themselves, they are starring in a socially distanced Les Misérables on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. Ball is cooking Christmas dinner, expects to “fall asleep just after the Queen’s done her thing and wake up in time for Strictly” and – Boe smiles – “Michael’s invited us all over”.
They have been Together, Together Again, Back Together, Together at Christmas. Whatever next? “Together for ever!” sings Ball, breaking into Rick Astley’s hit.
It is left to Boe to be Scrooge: “I’m not singing that.”
Together at Christmas is out now. Ball & Boe star in Les Misérables at Sondheim theatre, London, until February
