“It’s quite something,” says Russell Watson as he surveys the idyllic view from his back door. “An endless tapestry of green. Beautiful. I do two-hour treks over the hills most mornings. I count my blessings every day.”
The best-selling English tenor bought his Cheshire farm three years ago. “We’re not producing anything,” he tells me, adding with a grin, “It’s more a petting zoo for my wife, Louise. On top of alpacas, we have chickens, a cockerel, four dogs, a cat, a parrot, two rescue sheep, five horses, and a South African rescue ostrich called Fuzzy.”
You’ve married Dr Doolittle, I say. Will the zoo keep expanding? “Dr Doolittle will never want to stop expanding,” he laughs.
The man they call “The People’s Tenor” has risen from poverty to paradise yet remains resolutely down to earth. Raised in Irlam, Salford, where winter ice would form on the inside of his bedroom window, Russell’s journey to his bucolic farmhouse has not been smooth.
The former factory worker has faced bankruptcy and bailiffs and survived two life-threatening brain tumours.
This year, Russell, 58, will be touring to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his debut album, The Voice – the first classical record to sell a million copies.
“It doesn’t feel like 25 years, but when you think about what’s happened in between it feels like four lifetimes,” he tells me. “I’ve met presidents, a pope, kings, queens and a Japanese emperor…”
Welder’s son Watson left school without O-levels and spent eight years as a £90-a-week bolt-cutter. He started singing Neil Diamond covers in clubs to make ends meet after winning a radio talent contest. One night the concert secretary of Wigan Road Working Men’s Club changed his life forever.
“I did my first set, all clubland classics – Elvis, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Neil Diamond and finished with The Music Of The Night. Then Sid, the concert secretary, approached through the smoke from the ashtrays – a bit like a Stars In Their Eyes moment – and said, ‘I’ll tell you what lad, you’ve got a cracking voice, why don’t you try that Nessa Dormitt? I reckon your voice would suit that down to the ground.’
“I knew the song because my gran had been a big Mario Lanza fan, so in the second set I sang Nesson Dorma. Technically it must’ve been bloody awful, but I made a connection with the audience I’d never made before. Everyone was up on their feet. I got a voice coach the next day and that was the start of it.”
Russell signed his first record deal for a £90,000 advance in 1999 – the same year that he sang God Save the Queen at the Rugby League cup final at Wembley and Freddie Mercury’s classical crossover smash Barcelona at Old Trafford. After Manchester United whipped Spurs to win the league, he ripped off his dinner jacket to reveal a United shirt underneath.
In 2003, despite filling arenas for three years, Russell received a £750,000 tax bill.
“It was a huge shock. I’d only been concerned about getting on stage and singing, so I’d let others look after my money…We were facing bankruptcy. A bailiff called Mr Jones came to take furniture out of the house. The poor bloke was soaked so I said come in have a cup of tea – he’d never been offered a cup of tea before. He said, ‘I can suspend the warrant as long as you pay me £10 by the end of the week’.
“It became a very strange friendship. I finally paid it off and gave Mr Jones a cheque for £4500. He said, ‘What a lovely man you are, I know it sounds strange, but I will miss you.’ I said, I’ll miss you too, but I won’t miss the debt.”
Russell and Stoke-born Louise, 35, run everything now. They married in 2015 and are happy despite his OCD tendencies. “I can’t stand mess and she’s the opposite. She’s always saying, ‘Babe, where are my shoes?’ because I’ve put them in a drawer.”
He’d had money problems in the 90s when married to his first wife, Helen. “To say we were impecunious would be an understatement. My club work had dried up, we had two young daughters – who still live nearby – and eight county court judgments because we couldn’t afford to pay our utility bills.
“We had to buy blue £5 tokens for gas. We were that poor, it was like a comedy sketch. If anyone came to the house to collect money, we hid.”
One of Russell’s happier early memories was of his maternal grandfather Norman playing Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 in E flat major on his piano.
“I was three, down by the back leg of the Steinway, feeling the vibrations, and falling asleep. He was an engineer in the RAF during the war and had become addicted to spirits, which ended his life prematurely.
“At his wake, his partner Geri told me his last words were, ‘Never let this happen to Russell’.”
Watson likes the odd glass of wine, but alcohol wasn’t a problem until scans in 2005 revealed a tumour on his pituitary gland the size of two golf balls. It was removed but two years later it grew back and was bleeding into his brain. Russell was told he’d never sing again.
“I had a drinking problem for 18months. I had PTSD and couldn’t sleep. It kept playing around my mind: what if it happens again and I never see the kids again. I was drinking and taking sleeping tablets. It was messy for a while. The catalyst for stopping was the front page of the Express, where you ran a list of tablets, one being one of the main causes of early onset dementia. I stopped taking them immediately, and have never taken another one since.” He will be on medication for life.
Russell’s vocal comeback took time. One night he overheard a couple say “he’s good but not as good as he was”.
“I thought ‘I’ll show you’, and that was the beginning of my return to full strength. I called my old voice coach the next day and eventually got the stamina and range back.”
His chart-topping 2010 album La Voce underlined his triumphant return. In a life full of twists, Russell has sold more than seven million albums, sung with Meatloaf, who dubbed him “mini-me”, duetted with Lionel Richie on second album, Encore, and performed with Pavarotti in Hyde Park. “The highlight was singing Let It Be with Paul McCartney at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 2001. I had the Bumper Book of Beatles hits growing up, me and my mate had worked through all 101 of them one at a time, and to be on stage of Paul McCartney I thought holy s*** is this real?
“I’ve met great people. Lulu’s lovely, Mel C…I remember watching the Spice Girls on TV wishing I could get an audience like that when I was on 70 quid a night in clubland.”
The biggest surprise came when Guns ’n Roses guitar maestro Slash asked him to front his Velvet Revolver band. They met in 2012 when Russell was filming Swapping Notes, a BBC1 special on similarities between classical music and rock. “We met at the Rainbow bar at 11am. It was closed but he was drinking a pint of Guinness and smoking a non-filtered fag. He said his mum had my record and invited me to come and sing with Velvet Revolver the next day, but I couldn’t because I was flying home.”
Russell recently recorded an album with Helen Jane Long, the world’s number one streaming piano player, who wrote the music specifically for his vocals.
“I’ve got good stuff in the pipeline. I love what I do, and the feeling you get after a great concert. I’m enjoying life, and I’m enjoying vocalising. I have pinch-me moments all the time. It’s not impostor syndrome – I believe I’ve worked hard – but I still have a sense of wonder at what I’ve achieved.”
*Russell Watson’s UK wide 25th anniversary Evolution Tour will run throughout October and November, tickets on sale now at aegpresents.co.uk
