Hayley Westenra (17 page)

A few months later, the team behind the group approached my management and asked whether I would perform as a guest on another PBS television special that they were recording and then join them on their tour of America. I leaped at the opportunity, which sounded fantastic. It felt as if it would be a good springboard for me in the USA and I was excited about the idea of joining a
group and having a different experience. I'm always keen to try out new ways of working and, as somebody who has always performed as a solo artist, I was intrigued about the dynamics of working in a group.

I met the Celtic Woman girls for the first time at a lunch in Dublin. I was worried that they might feel that I was muscling in on them after they had done all of the hard work, but I needn't have been concerned, since they were all lovely – very friendly and welcoming, as I've always found Irish people to be. Our lunch was scheduled for the rather strange time of four o'clock in the afternoon. Each of the girls had steak and chips, but, not really being a meat eater, I opted for the fish and chips instead. I hit it off with them instantly and they obviously had a great rapport with each other. We talked about the television show and the plans for the American tour. I left Dublin very excited about working with them.

Soon afterwards, I was back in Dublin for the rehearsals. I quickly realised that, when you're working with a group of other people, you need to know exactly what everyone else is going to do, sing and say at all times, so that you can respond accordingly. We had lots of choreography rehearsals and, for a brief moment, I was reminded of the time when my sister, our next-door neighbours and I all dressed up as the Spice Girls. This was fun!

Now, I don't want to exaggerate the choreography part of things because there were no dances as such. Instead, there were a lot of occasions when we move around stage, with a few skipping moves thrown in. This was all a very new experience for me in my adult career, although the work that I had done when I was very young and appearing in musicals stood me in good stead. I was very conscious of not mucking things up for the group. As they had all worked together before, I think that it all came more instinctively for them than it did for me. I was very aware that I was playing as
part of a team and I wanted to make sure that everything was right so that I wouldn't ruin the show for everyone else.

I loved the music, which is highly energetic and a big change from what I'm used to. I found that I was really in my element standing on the stage and tapping my toe to it. It was heavily amplified and, with the girls all singing, the band playing and a chorus joining in as well, it all made for an infectiously powerful sound.

Ireland and all things Irish are very popular in the States and the television special was recorded at the beautiful
Slane Castle in front of an invited audience. The castle is a great venue and has hosted some big rock and pop events in its time with concerts by everyone from U2 to Robbie Williams. The PBS concert was nerve-racking for me. At the outset it was a little strange, because all the other girls lived in Dublin and I was staying in a hotel near to the venue. So, at the end of the rehearsals, they all went home to their families and I went back on my own to the hotel. Despite their friendliness, I still felt quite the outsider.

Everything was fairly last-minute as we prepared to record the televised concert. I started to worry about the costumes. There are only so many times that someone can be told, 'You'll be grand.' It's a nice little phrase, but it doesn't really mean much and was no comfort whatsoever.

There was a lot of new material for me to learn for the ensemble tracks. My solo songs were
'Lascia Ch'io Piangia' and
'Scarborough Fair', both of which appeared on
Odyssey
and posed no problem for me at all. But, with the group songs, I had to remember my harmonies and my lines. Unlike in a solo performance, where I sing every line of every song, I also had to remember the lines where I had to stay silent because it was somebody else's turn to sing. I also had to learn a song in Gaelic, which was a language I've never sung in before, but, after mastering the Welsh national anthem in Welsh, I felt ready for another language.

On the day the Slane Castle concert was being recorded, our second-half costumes were still being finished off. In the first half, we all wore shades of white and blue, while in the latter part of the show we wore rather more fiery colours. My dress was gold. The set was very dramatic with lots of dry ice cascading off the front of the stage, and striking lighting effects and pyrotechnics at the end. We filmed the show over two nights, but it rained on the first night and the orchestra kept having to run off stage to ensure that their instruments stayed dry.

The programme was broadcast in the USA ahead of our tour and I quickly realised when I got there that it had been extremely widely viewed. My first show was in Boston and then it was on to the world-famous
Radio City Music Hall in New York. It was only when I arrived in America that I also realised just how major a production it all was. Ranked the seventh biggest tour in the USA during 2007, it used four tour buses that snaked their way from state to state: one for us girls, one for the choir, one for the band and one for the crew. We had a lot of consecutive shows and this made the trip demanding for everyone.

I learned a lot on the tour and I used in-ear monitors for the first time. These are the earpieces that you might have seen singers using during concerts. It allows them to hear exactly what is going on above the background noise. I've always avoided them before, preferring to have wedges at the front of the stage. These are speakers that point in my direction so that I can hear how everything sounds. If any singer has to rely solely on the speakers that are pointing away from them towards the audience, it can be very hard for them to hear their voice and musical accompaniment clearly.

I had tried using in-ears myself only once before, when I was recording my own PBS special in
Wellington in 2004. I had found it a very uncomfortable experience and, at the last
minute, I asked for monitors to be placed on the front of the stage for me. That was never an option on the Celtic Woman tour because there were five of us performing on stage and each of us needed to be able to hear the other four clearly so that we could harmonise and perform in time with each other.

The benefit of in-ears is the consistency it brings to you. Wherever you perform, no matter what the size of the arena or your position on stage, you always hear a perfect mix of your voice and the music in your ears. But, for me, the drawback is that they made me feel very cut off from the audience. We had a range of different-sized venues on the tour: sometimes we were in stadiums and on other occasions in theatres. I found it very hard that the in-ear monitors removed any sense of scale from the venue. It was also hard to make a connection to the audience in the smaller theatres when they were so close to me and yet I felt cut off in my own little sound bubble.

I love to share the sounds that the audience are hearing, but with in-ears I find myself in a completely different world. So, as a compromise, I used only one of the earpieces on the tour. That meant I could still hear the other girls clearly in one ear, but I could also hear the audience and the venue's natural ambience in the other.

The idea of travelling across America on a tour bus sounds great in theory, but let me tell you, it's very hard work in practice. We usually clambered on to the bus at about 11 p.m. at the end of the show. The next hour or so we would spend chatting and eating. This was a change for me because I usually eat before rather than after concerts. Then we would each climb wearily into our bunks and try to snatch a few hours' sleep before arriving at a hotel in the next city where we were performing, at about 4 a.m. The tour manager would wake us up and we would trundle bleary-eyed off the bus and stagger to our rooms in a zombie-like state before slumping back to sleep.

The girls were all great fun and there was a genuine spirit of camaraderie, not just among the main singers but also among the choir, the band and the production people, nearly all of whom were Irish. The girls introduced me to the delights of American cuisine, a subject they had become experts in after spending the previous couple of years touring the States. There was Irish food on the menu, too, which was brought over by family members on their visits. I was introduced to chocolate mini-eggs, which were the regular after-show treat for the girls, as well as all kinds of cheeses, including Black Diamond Cheddar Cheese, or Extra Sharp Canadian Cheddar, as it's also known. In return, I tried to impart some of my own food knowledge to the girls. Much to my delight, Mairead took to the tamari-toasted almonds, but the goji berries didn't really go down so well.

The girls enjoyed messing around, as I discovered to my cost on stage. At the very end of the performance we would all sing a song called
'Spanish Lady' as our final encore. One of the girls whacked me on the bum as she walked past me in the final piece of choreography. I nearly screamed with surprise. It then became a nightly event and they realised that, even though I knew it was coming, it never failed to surprise me. Finally, one night towards the end of the tour, I managed to guess that I was about to get a simultaneous double whack from two of them and I grabbed their hands before they could make contact. This only made them start laughing. I found that I was quite easily distracted on stage and I struggled to sing through the number without getting a fit of the giggles myself.

I hate being told off and there were two occasions on the tour when I got myself into trouble – both times because I was late for the tour bus. Every day, we were given a call sheet and I found out very quickly that, when it said 'Departure 3 p.m.', it actually
meant
that we would leave at three o'clock on the dot and not a moment later. It was a
sensible rule because there were so many people on the tour and, if there was too relaxed an attitude to timekeeping, we would never have left at all. Everyone had to be on time to keep the show literally on the road. The first time I was late, I was let off, but on the second occasion I received a stern talking-to from the tour manager.

In my defence, while everyone else had been asleep, I had been appearing on the wonderfully named breakfast television show
Good Things Utah.
I was tired and so I went back to sleep when I got back to the hotel after the interview. I woke up late and I knew instantly that I wouldn't be on time for the bus. I just hoped that somebody else would be later than I was.

Of course, all the rest had been on time and were sitting in the buses waiting for me. I felt pretty fed up. The last thing I wanted everyone else to think was that I didn't care. Kathryn is the person in my management team whom I always call first when I have this sort of problem, so I rang her to tell her about it. I was embarrassed that I had held everyone up. In reality, I'm not sure that the rest of the production were in the slightest bit bothered, but I still felt guilty for the entire day and I made sure that I turned up early to the bus every day from then onwards.

There was one stage in the tour when I became quite miserable. Although I had felt homesick before when I travelled to London, I always had my family and my management with me. I became sick for a few days with a really sore throat during the tour. While I was feeling under the weather, it felt as if everything was getting on top of me. There was so much going on and so many commitments surrounding the tour that, basically, I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I couldn't imagine how I could possibly get through it. There was a moment when I felt like getting on a plane and saying, 'You know what? I can't be bothered with all this.'

But it quickly passed as my throat cleared up and I gained a better sense of perspective. One of my best coping mechanisms remains a telephone call home to my family. It's never easy getting hold of them, with the time difference usually forcing one of us to stay up late, but it's so important that we do stay in touch – not just to me, but to the whole family. Mum and Dad are great people to talk to and they are very good at calming me down or putting things into perspective. Whenever I'm on the phone to them, it always lasts for at least an hour. Luckily, they have discovered a cheap phone deal back home, so I usually arrange for them to call me.

Other than when I felt ill, the Celtic Woman tour was a great experience. I know that I learned so much on the tour that will help me later down the track. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me do something different. It was quite weird to come back to London and to perform in entire concerts on my own afterwards, although it has given me a renewed appreciation of this way of working.

While I was in America, I really developed as a performer and a person and I also got to know the American people and I feel completely at home in front of American audiences now. They are very enthusiastic and receptive, giving me an extremely positive response wherever I went.

Having a successful career as a recording artist and as a live concert performer was always the dream for me. There's no reason why it should be unattainable for anyone else, although the journey towards having a hit record or a sell-out concert tour is by no means an easy one. I'm often asked – particularly by the parents or grandparents of young girls aged between twelve and sixteen – what they should do to help their daughters and granddaughters along the way.

The first thing to stress is that there's absolutely no certainty of success and, for every one person for whom the
dream does come true, there are thousands of others who discover that it's not their destiny. There are also no absolute rules in this business: what works for one person may prove to be a disaster for another. What I can do, however, is share with you some of the observations I've made along the way.

The very first thing that you have got to have is
talent.
I watch some of the talent competitions that have become so popular around the world and I find myself agreeing with the judges. You have got to have a basis of natural talent. People who think they can take singing lessons to turn a complete inability to sing into a world-class level of singing are deluded.

It's quite all right to take lessons to help improve your singing, but, no matter how good your teacher, you will not become an overnight sensation if you have absolutely no ability to hit the notes in the first place. It simply does not work like that. You have to be born with an instrument that can be fine-tuned by a teacher. It's perfectly possible to develop it in a disciplined way – but you do need an aptitude for music. You must be musically inclined.

To get to a stage where you are making your career out of music for the long term, you don't just need talent, you need significantly
above-average
talent. It's more than just a technical ability to be able to put the right notes in the right place. It really does have to be a
passion.
Even when I was very young, I had that passion for singing.

1 realised that people commented on my voice when they heard it. The feedback was so positive and so often that it became obvious that there were not too many people out there who could sing as I could. In a way, my decision to take it further was a very rational rather than emotional one. There are lots of things that I'm not very good at, but I thought to myself, 'OK, singing it is, then. This is what I'm here for; this is what I can offer the world.'

One of the most important factors for a child singer is their
parents.
I'm really grateful that my parents let me try all sorts of different fields, so that I could be sure that the path I wanted to take was the right one. They allowed me to take dancing lessons, to try out sports such as tennis, just in case I discovered that I had a passion or a talent for something that I had not previously considered.

So, although I realise that I've not had any children myself yet, my advice to a parent comes from the child's point of view. You just have to let your child explore different fields. Then, hopefully, the child will be drawn to one field, and that is then the point at which you give them the utmost support to enable them to follow their dream.

You do have to create an environment in which they have space to develop on their own, while at the same time always being there for them when they need support. Remember that children develop talent at different speeds, so don't give up too soon. At the same time, don't push them too hard in one particular direction because that could just put them off altogether.

Desire
is a very important asset for any performer. Your child must actually want to become a performer. I've seen cases where one or both parents are living out
their
dreams through their child, who is not anywhere near as keen on the whole thing.

You hear of tennis players who start learning tennis at the age of three. It may be in their blood to be great tennis players, but they end up being put off the sport altogether because their parents have ramrodded them down one defined route. Children must ask themselves, 'How do I know if tennis playing is really something I want to do and that it's not just something that I've been forced into?'

So, you have to allow the child to choose the particular field that they want to be working in and allow them to try different things so that they can be drawn towards one field
rather than another, based on an informed decision that they are making themselves.

Dame Malvina Major was a wonderful inspiration and support to me during the period when she was giving me singing lessons. She gave me probably the single most important piece of advice that I've been given before or since:
stay true to yourself.
It's so important because, if you try to be something that you are not or to venture into something that you are not really comfortable with, people will pick up on it very quickly.

For example, if I was to record an album of pop/disco tracks, I would know in the back of my mind that I was doing something that others could probably do better and with more conviction. I don't feel comfortable in that world and I don't think that I would enjoy the idea of a career that is very image-driven and dependent on radio airplay and raunchy videos. I think that, if I did release a record like that, I would fall flat on my face because the public would pick up on my discomfort. They would know that it was not really me, whereas what I'm doing now is very much true to myself. However, who knows how I'll feel a few years down the road? Maybe I'll discover a hidden disco diva inside me!

There are things that you need to be prepared to give up to build a serious music career: heavy partying, for example. Just recently, I'm learning to be a little bit more relaxed about life in general. For so long, I've been so focused and I've not wanted to let anything get in my way to distract me. It's vital to maintain
discipline
as a singer, though.

On the day of a performance, I can be quite precious about my voice. I take all of my live performances very seriously and every time I perform I want to be at my very best. You never know if someone is going to be seeing you for the first time and will be framing their judgement of you as an artist on that performance alone. There's always going to be a new member of the audience at every concert that
you give, so going out and partying the night before and having a tired voice is simply not an option.

I'm really pleased that England has now caught up with the rest of the UK in adopting the smoking ban in public places, because there's nothing that plays more havoc with a singer's voice than sitting in a smoky environment.

The old adage says that
practice
makes perfect, and this is another big area for any budding musician. For quite a while, I have to admit that I didn't do much singing practice, but nowadays I try to do around an hour a day. Generally, with singing, there's no need to do hours and hours of practice, but I always make sure that I do my vocal exercises very thoroughly.

There's a fine line to be drawn between enough practice and pushing it too far. It's a tricky one to get right because, when you're on a fully fledged tour, you could be performing every day for at least an hour,
and
you have your vocal exercises and the sound check on top. That's a lot of singing, so you have no time to do anything else with your voice, especially if you are doing a run of consecutive shows.

It's always important to make time in your schedule to work on new material and to
develop your voice.
Scales and exercises are essential, as well as not being afraid to play around with different sounds. That said, you should avoid making sounds that strain the voice and be aware that, although it's good to be physically tired after singing, you should never be vocally tired.

It's impossible to underestimate the importance of the songs that you choose to sing. If you will excuse the musical pun, they are absolutely key. It's really important that you be very comfortable with every song that you sing in public. If you are worried about a part of a song, then you are not going to be able to deliver it properly to the audience. I know that the songs that I perform best are the ones that I'm not in any way concerned about singing. I know them
back to front and I know that they are in the right key for me. All singers do have notes that are, shall we say, not their favourites. But I'm not going to tell you what mine are, in case you listen out for them when you next hear me sing.

You do need to keep on
learning.
For me, singing in
West Side Story,
which I write about in more detail in the next chapter, was a great opportunity to learn something new. There's a great variety of different styles, moods and emotions wrapped up in the score and it's the first time I've had the opportunity to perform in such an expressive way over such a concentrated period of time.

When I first began singing, I simply enjoyed the act and process of making a nice, tuneful sound and I didn't really have a lot to say. I certainly didn't pay anywhere near as much attention to the lyrics as I do now. As I gain more life experience, I suddenly listen to songs and think to myself, Oh,
now
I understand what this song means. It's even the case with some of the songs that I sang when I was younger, and I sometimes wish that I had understood more when I regularly performed them.

But, when you're just fourteen or fifteen years old, you don't have much experience of life and you don't necessarily have a lot to say about how you feel. So, I'm now really enjoying expressing myself through my song choices and using my own experiences to better help me tell the stories.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been doing some songwriting recently and I've found that my fans have taken really well to songs such as 'Let Me Lie', the first track on my album
Treasure.
I think this is because it's another example of my being true to myself. When I sing 'Let Me Lie', it's a particularly special experience for me because people are hearing my own words and music. Writing lyrics gives me the opportunity to express myself that bit more and, when I sing my own songs, the performance comes from the heart because I'm very connected to them.

One of the hottest areas for me is ensuring that I stay
healthy.
Some people even think I err on the side of freakishness on the subject, but I really do believe that it's so important for a performer. One of my fellow singers on the Celtic Women tour said to me afterwards, 'You've had such a positive influence on me. I've been eating so much more healthily since.'

Mum has always been interested in nutrition, so I've always eaten a healthy
diet –
even as a child. There are plenty of easy little things you can do to help, such as eating wholemeal rather than white bread. When I was younger, I used to find that I would get sick a couple of days before any big performance, usually with a sore throat, which would then develop into a chest infection. I started to take a keen interest in what sorts of things I should be eating to help build up my immune system and to help me become less susceptible to coughs and colds. After extensive research on the Internet and at the library, I began to understand the benefits of eating a diet rich in vitamins and minerals – particularly vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium.

So now, when I travel and, as almost always happens, when I'm stopped at customs, my bags contain all sorts of health-enhancing pots and potions. I'm a big believer in eating a varied diet, but always try to make sure I get my daily dose of fresh fruit and vegetables, which can be a bit of a mission sometimes when you are reliant on hotel menus and airport cafes.

I try to remember to pack in my suitcase a jar of Marmite, since it's full of useful B vitamins, and alongside that I always take a multivitamin pill and extra vitamin C. I also take some omega-3-rich fish-oil capsules now and then, because we tend not to get enough of this beneficial fat in our diet.

These are what I've found are right for me. I'm in no way suggesting that they would necessarily be right for you, so
please do consult a doctor or a nutritionist before you go loading up on supplements, because you can take all of the pills and capsules in the world, but at the end of the day, you need to have a good diet.

I try to eat as much fresh food as possible and to avoid deep-fried and overly processed food. However, I do have to confess one terrible weakness: I absolutely adore airline food. I know that it's often prepackaged and processed, but there's something about it that I just find strangely appealing. You can't be good all the time!

Everybody needs to put aside some time to
rest.
You need to be able to take time out and to understand that you can take a break without your entire career falling to pieces. I have to admit that I've been scared to take time off until recently, because I thought that, if I took a break, I would be missing out on something. But life is not a race and sometimes this is something that I can forget. There's no need to be constantly charging around. Breaks do help to give you a chance to reflect, so that, when you do go back to work, you have a clearer head and better judgement.

I was lucky that my parents managed me themselves until the release of my first international album,
Pure.
It's vitally important, when you do get to the stage when you need a full-time professional
manager,
which is not necessarily right at the beginning of your career, that you find somebody who is on the same page as you and that they don't have a totally different idea of where you should be heading.

I'm really lucky to have worked with Steve Abbott from Bedlam Management since before the release of
Pure.
He has been with me all the way along the journey since then and together we have a clear idea of where we would like my career to go in the future. I owe him a lot. I'm also very lucky that more recently Kathryn Nash has joined Steve in working with me and she's very quickly become a friend as well as part of my management team.