Hitting the right notes
Opera sensation Gari Glaysher tells SHELLEY MARSDEN about spinto tenors, his ‘spiritual home' and why boxing is the closest thing to singing... - 08/04/08
When I arrive at his manager’s offices in Wembley I can see why Gari Glaysher, soon performing his own show at IndigO2 in London, may set a few hearts fluttering while he’s belting out something from Tosca or La Boheme. In an outfit similar to his usual onstage attire, Glaysher is wearing a pair of jeans, what look suspiciously like Italian designer shoes and a three quarter length navy jacket over a crisp, white shirt. From the offset, this Chelsea fan and father of two is not your ordinary opera singer.
You might say (if you were a journalist trying to be clever) that Glaysher went from boxing people’s ears to caressing them. He trained for years in Taekwondo but he also did time playing in a rock band and laying bricks before finding his true vocation in life. A self-confessed “council house lad”, Glaysher’s mum is from Dublin and most of his family in the UK live in Cricklewood.
The opera singer as a teen played lead guitarist in a rock band. “Yeah, you didn’t know you were in the presence of a guitar god, did you!” he dead-pans. Having heard Glaysher’s phenomenal voice when he sings (mostly in Italian) it’s hard to believe the heavy London accent I’m hearing comes from one and the same person. It was through this covers band that Glaysher took up singing seriously. Stepping in for the lead vocalist, he went for voice coaching. In the first lesson, he recalls, the coach told him to “stop playing Percy Sledge and Otis Redding and concentrate on the real stuff!”
Glaysher’s love for classical music, though, has been there since childhood. He relaxes into his chair as he tells me about a defining moment, which happened when he was about seven on his way home from school: “I heard this fire engine, ran after it and managed to catch it. But it pulled up outside my house, which I then realised was the one that had burnt to the ground! The horrible thing was that my eldest sister was supposed to be babysitting the youngest, and at first we thought they were in there. They were three doors down, babysitting another kid.”
Glaysher comes from a large family, and this meant that the council couldn’t find another house that would accommodate them all. The children were sent off to live with different people, and little Gari was sent to live with a couple on his own. “I missed my mum; I was probably a bit of a nightmare”, he says smiling. “And the guy I was living with soon realised the only thing that kept me quiet was listening to Mario Lanza and Al Jolson. If he got the records out, I’d soon stop screaming!”
For the full interview, buy this week's Irish World.
i Glaysher is at IndigO2 on Fri 20 June. For tickets call Ticketmaster: 0844 844 0002, Ticketline: 0870 444 55556 or See Tickets: 0870 405 0448. Visit www.gariglaysher.com
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