The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A Caribbean experience that’s right on song
Telegraph choir member Keith Miller finds his voice and some great new singing buddies on the beaches of Barbados
It’s ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Outside, it’s a muggy 84F (29C); there’s a heavy sweetness in the air from the blossom by the pool; the crabs are shyly scurrying at the edges of the beach; a few chunks of coral gleam, half-buried, in the sand and the water teems with wrasse and angelfish. Inside the Club Resort Barbados where our choir is practising it is savagely air-conditioned and a man named Mike is helping us to find our diaphragms.
We’ve four two-hour sessions to look forward to, culminating in the slightly more daunting prospect of a performance – I can’t yet quite bring myself to call it a “gig” – in the resort’s Ewok-like central recreation area. But for now it’s thumbs in navels, breathing in and holding, hissing like kettles as we exhale. The theory – though it’s expounded with a light touch – is that once you can feel where the sound comes from it’s easier to control. Within half an hour we’ve warmed up and done a (fairly bashful) group hug; Mike has gauged our different vocal ranges, and we’re ready to rock and roll.
This year Mike King launches a programme of singing workshops here and elsewhere across the Caribbean. His work as a voice coach is just one facet of a busy musical career as producer, performer and arranger. He has worked with Mark Ronson and
Boy George; he coaches contestants on The Voice UK for their very first on-camera appearances; his professional choir, the Mike King Collective, mixes session and live work (they played Edinburgh last summer). Our group here in Barbados is a more ragged assembly: half a dozen journalists, Mike’s wife and collaborator Carol and – crucially, it will turn out – several members of the resort’s staff. The latter have been roped in through a mixture of bribery, coercion and vague promises of time off in lieu; general manager Rodcliff Massiah is here, as is Dewey King, the air-conditioning technician, who’s clearly not wildly happy to be here today, but who will emerge as one of the strongest talents in the group as the week unfolds: a clear, soulful tenor with a faint burr like torn silk.
During a break I managed to corner Mike. Does he really believe anyone can sing? His easy enthusiasm is undimmed. “I believe everybody can be taught to sing… it’s all about technique.” Unconvinced, I push for more. “What if you’re just tone deaf?” “I’m not sure there’s any such thing. But if someone thought they were tone deaf, I’d just do a lot of listening with that person, a lot of repetition.”
No one left behind, then. Our musical menu would include reggae, soul and R&B-type songs (plus the Jackson 5’s Rockin’ Robin
– the accidental copyrightfree status of the song makes it invaluable as a promotional tool) though Mike has other genres in the kitty should he find himself working with different age groups. His arrangements, sturdy and learnable and mostly set in three parts, can
‘I believe everybody can be taught to sing… it’s all about technique’
be tweaked if more holidaymakers show up, or if people can’t reach the high notes. As we started to work on our “set” I grew increasingly impressed with these arrangements. There was nothing fancy in there, but Mike has a way of getting to the heart of the tune – and as we grew a little more confident, he taught us a few tricks of pitch and volume that helped to make sense of a lyric, or buttress the architecture of a song.
Dinner the first evening was at Lone Star, a storied seafront joint a couple of miles up the coast. We tossed morsels of coconut prawn to the crabs and drank in the beauty of the place: the torchlight and the sighing waves.
Some of the group had never sung in front of other people before, or only ever done karaoke; we were still a little apprehensive, but an afternoon of swimming and spa-ing had induced a general mellowness. Mike, who lives part of the year on the island with his wife Carol (some of whose family are Bajan), had joined us.
He leaned conspiratorially forward: “Do you remember this morning, when you asked if it would be hard work? I told you I’d make you work but you wouldn’t know how hard you were working.” It already feels a long time ago.
Being an infrequent visitor to the tropics, I was knocked sideways by the prodigious energy of nature: the flowering shrubs, the aerial root systems, the glorious cavalcade out on the reef. I got away from the resort