Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2008/January 2009 | Page 22

life

INTERVIEW

Photo: Alison Eade pictured at Node Hill School with her students

I was a contralto, but he was convinced I
was a “dramatic soprano”. One day I was
struggling to reach a top note, and he told
me this tale about a famous soprano he was
working with at the Garden. He’d asked how
she got those top notes? “My darling,’ she
said, ‘I just open my mouth and scream.’ ”
That gave Alison permission to scream,
a sound she then learnt to temper into
something musical – which expanded her
range. Later, she was taught by a counter
tenor with whom she performed duets,
so her vocal range expanded downwards
too. As a result her musical life has been
exceptionally varied, moving from folk, to
opera to cabaret.
And so she had found her voice. But it was
her “day job” which taught her about the
things which stop so many of us using our
voices. Having worked briefly in banking,
and then in newspapers, she moved into the
training world where she met psychologist
Lynda Field, who was writing a book about
self-esteem. “We were running workshops
for ex-offenders, working with a group
of disenfranchised young men. One said
“What’s the point?” – and I sang that
phrase from South Pacific: ‘You gotta have

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a dream. If you never have a dream, then
you’ll never have a dream come true.’ As
a result quite a lot of young men started to
write down what their barriers were, and
their goals – and what they needed to do
to fire the goals. It was also a subject for
Lynda’s next book.”
So working with Linda, Alison learnt a
lot about how we think about ourselves
and how our thinking gets in the way.
For men, lack of confidence can be acute.
“The problem stems from their teenage
years when they change from being a boy
soprano. We don’t consider what sort of
trauma that brings to a young man. I don’t
think we do anything to support that in our
society, they are ridiculed, which clams them
up completely.”
She is euphoric when she sees someone
begin to “find their voice”. The workshops
ease people into singing with “easy
listening” songs. “We had a lovely
gentleman in the Newport workshop who
really struggled. Well, we were singing Love
Changes Everything – and at that note at the
end, this gentleman went whoosh! He got
it bang on with such power. I said ‘Charles,
where did that note come from?’ and he

said ‘I just constipated!’ “
Many people she comes across were once
told they sang flat. “They’ve carried this
belief all their adult life, but are longing to
do something about it.”
Hence the peculiar noises, which are
designed to make people feel the sound,
not just hear it – and gradually through tone
matching to get the notes in tune. “We
do all the silly exercise – making sounds,
exploring the spaces and the places where
we can produce those sounds.” So by
screaming you find you have to place the
sound in the roof of the mouth; in growling,
you find you are aware of the vibration
created as you drop the sound towards the
chest. She gets people to rub their cheeks to
feel the vibrations, then as their hands move
back across the ears they have a heightened
awareness of the noise they are making.
“Once they are singing I get them to cup
their hands around their ears or place their
hands around their throat, to make them
aware of the feeling they have when making
those sounds.”
Since she moved to the Island in 2001
Alison has been a life force in the musical
and theatrical world. She produces a show

The Island's new funky radio station www.wightfm.com