I’m addicted to writing music
Sir Karl Jenkins’ celebrated scores have been heard everywhere from the Coronation to adverts for airlines, jeans and cars. Ahead of his 80th birthday and a major new tour, the world’s most performed living composer reveals why he can’t stop working
SIR KARL Jenkins is describing his gym routine. The world’s most performed living composer turns 80 next month and is in training for a celebratory UK tour of his soul-stirring music. Conducting is, he concedes, getting harder with age.
“I get tired in my legs more than anything,” he says. “It’s physically demanding. Very often with concerts, there is a rehearsal in the afternoon – a pre-concert – so that’s six hours in total.
“So I lift weights, believe it not or not. Not seriously, but I am progressing.”
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine Sir Karl – a slight figure with a bushy handlebar moustache and unruly white mane – performing deadlifts and arm curls in the gym.
His distinctive looks went viral at King Charles’s Coronation, when some wags joked that he must be Meghan Markle in disguise – more of which later.
So how does he build muscle, then? “You’re getting tactical now,” the Welshman laughs, his accent becoming more pronounced. “Dumbbells and barbells, but also those weight machines that you sit on.” He pauses. “I don’t think we should be talking about this – but carry on, it’s fine.”
He’s probably right. Warm-up complete, it’s onto the main act: his music.
Beautiful, stirring, uplifting, it’s globally renowned thanks to the adverts he scored in the late 1980s and mid-1990s for the likes of Levi’s and Renault – and he has 17 gold and platinum albums to prove it.
His most famous track Adiemus, written in 1994 for Delta Air Lines, became a sensation, spawning a series of new-age compositions.
“Adiemus created a very spiritual and moving sound,” says Sir Karl, who was knighted in 2015. “It was termed sacred music for secular people. In Japan it was placed in racks of ‘healing music’.”
For that particular piece he invented words, but in his other notable work, The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, he used sacred texts.
An anti-war work, commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds for the millennium, it was based on a Catholic mass and remains painfully relevant to our times.
Sir Karl calls it his “masterpiece”. Since its Royal Albert Hall debut, he’s performed it almost 3,000 times worldwide and it’s spent a recordbreaking 1,000 weeks – more than 19 years – in the UK classical charts.
BOTH Adiemus and The Armed Man will feature on his forthcoming tour, along with songs from recent classical chart-topping album, One World, about our planet.
Sir Karl, a classically-trained musician and former member of the rock and jazz fusion group Soft Machine, has long resisted the “categorisation” of his music, which borrows from cultures and genres.
“It’s hard for me to quantify but I think it’s got memorability, it’s accessible and it’s proven to have longevity as well,” he says. “People sing the music around the world, which is a great benefit to a composer, because he doesn’t always have to be there. It’s a bonus. I don’t mean to be flippant about that, but not being there extends the range of the piece.”
Most of his time is spent on composition.
“It’s more like a drug than a job,” he says. “I was going to say it’s more like a hobby but hobbies you can set aside – I’m addicted to writing music.” For that reason, he persists even when inspiration is scarce.
“One has to keep going through bad periods followed by those of being energised or creative.The more you do, the more it works.”
He was born in the Welsh seaside village of Penclawdd, now part of Swansea, into a working-class family. “My grandfather was a Swedish sailor who came to Newport docks and met my grandmother, who was selling cockles. His wife, my grandmother, later drowned in the Burry estuary with eight other cockle pickers.”
His other grandfather was a coal miner and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was four, leaving his father – a teacher, organist and choirmaster – to raise him, with the help of his aunt and grandmother.
Along with singing, playing the oboe formed a huge part of his childhood. He then studied music at Cardiff University and a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, where he met his wife, fellow composer Carol Barratt. They have a son, Jody, who has two children of his own.
Looking back, Sir Karl views his career as “a series of accidents”. He spent his first few years as a jazz musician in the rock band Soft Machine, after joining in 1972.
Founding member Mike Ratledge dated a model who knew photographers working on adverts, so Jenkins segued into writing music for British Airways and Levi’s.
The decision made critics sniffy about his work, but he maintains adverts taught him how to move viewers in only 30 seconds.
“Many commercial directors in the 1980s became celebrated film directors, like Ridley Scott and Alan Parker,” says Sir Karl. “Production values were high, like little movies. They were beautiful to look at with a good idea, not a jingly sing-a-long ad.”
How does he feel about the snobbery now?
“I’ve kind of cut through all of that now in a way,” he says. “I’ve been critic-proof. A huge number of people sing my music. A lot
‘Adiemus created a very spiritual moving sound…termed sacred music for secular people’
of good people like my music. Lots of orchestras and choirs like playing it, so I’ve had a great life in many ways.”
Was he ever tempted to do musicals, like Andrew Lloyd Webber?
“I would have, if someone asked me,” he chuckles. But he senses it would be too much work to do things how he wanted.
“It would be two hours long for a start and there would need to be an endgame to dedicating two or three years of your life to something that might end up in the bottom drawer of your desk, which happens a lot,” he continues. “I don’t mean that to sound
like a mercenary approach. But you need – well, I do anyway, even if it’s making a record for a label – something that’s got an endgame and substance to it.
“I never dumb down when I write music. I always like music that satisfies me, and then it passes the test – because I was thoroughly trained from a boy to university level in classical music with all cultures, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration.”
Anyway, he adds, a little grumpily, when I dig deeper: “It’s too late now.”
His favourite musicals are by Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, from the 1930s and 1940s. “Oliver! is interesting, and American music shows, like Chicago, appeal,” he says. “Stephen Sondheim [of Sweeney Todd and West Side Story fame] was a fantastic composer and librettist.”
He doesn’t mention Lloyd Webber, interestingly. The two men are friends and sat together at King Charles’s Coronation.
Sir Karl’s composition Tros y Garreg, a Welsh folk song which translates as Crossing the Stone, was performed during the Westminster Abbey ceremony last May.
The King commissioned the piece more than two decades prior when, as Prince of Wales, he reinstated the role of royal harpist after 130 years.
Unsurprisingly, Sir Karl found the service deeply moving. “Funnily enough, I saw his mother’s Coronation on television in 1953. I was aged nine in a little Welsh coastal village and we had a small black and white television with a 12in screen,” he says.
“All our neighbours came in as we had one of the village’s first televisions. So when I was at King Charles’ Coronation, it seemed quite bizarre to be there.The main thing was being a part of history… regardless of whether one is a monarchist or not. It’s bigger than that in a way, it’s part of history.”
He met the newly-crowned King at a Buckingham Palace reception held for musicians the next day. “He said how beautiful it was and how he wanted to have it as part of the celebrations,” he recalls. “He’s good to talk to one-to-one. He’s easygoing.”
As is Sir Karl, when I remind him of the social media silliness over tongue-in-cheek claims he was Meghan Markle – who did not attend the Coronation – in disguise.
HAVING later set the record straight with a TikTok video stating: “I look this way all the time”, he chuckles when I bring it up. It didn’t bother him at all, he insists. “Someone else said I was the coolest dude in the Abbey,” he chuckles. “It was good publicity, in a way.”
Despite this, he has little time for social media. Someone else runs his TikTok account, with its 107,000 followers. “Social media – I was old when it was invented, and I’m older now,” he smiles.
Eschewing fanfare or fuss, he only needs a keyboard, computer and screen to make memorable music. “One doesn’t need idyllic scenery,” he adds. “People have this romantic notion of a composer [being] in this wonderful countryside somewhere, but as long as I have my tools, I can create.”
● Sir Karl Jenkins’ 80th Birthday UK Tour runs from March 10. Tickets are available from raymondgubbay.co.uk