Interview: Yvie Burnett, Voice Coach

Published on Friday 27 November 2009 16:15

In the X Factor circus, Yvie Burnett has a vital role to play as voice coach to the wannabe stars. With her reality TV clients including Susan Boyle, Leona Lewis and Will Young, the former opera singer from Aberdeenshire is hitting the high notes . . .

rundling through gloomy Wembley in London on a Saturday afternoon, I am guided towards my destination by the distant sound of teenage hysteria.

The X Factor circus has rolled into town, and with the show going live at 8pm tonight, a crowd has already gathered outside Fountain Studios. As I round the corner to the main gates, the noise gets louder.

Fans have scrawled messages of support for their favourite acts on the walls outside, and are pressing themselves up against the barriers, hoping to get a glimpse of the performers.

As I elbow my way to the front, I'm a little embarrassed. Might a passer-by mistake me for one of these passionate teenagers? Truthfully, however, I am a fan.

I'm here to talk to Scots-born Yvie Burnett, as vital a cog in this mammoth machine as Cowell himself, Cheryl Cole's stylist or Dannii Minogue's hairdresser.

Burnett, 41, is the vocal coach who helps coax stadium-filling voices out of average singers. She's the feisty blonde you see on the VT before each act's weekly performance, warning gravely that "this is a big song for him" or "I just hope she's ready for this".

As Dannii keeps reminding viewers, "this is a singing competition" and I've got an appointment with the woman who ensures that all the performers hit the high notes.

There is no security guard to let me in when I reach the front of the rabble. Happily, however, I am quickly identified as an outsider and one young fan helpfully hollers at a burly member of the security team in the distance to let me in. "You're on first-name terms with them?" I ask her, surprised. "Of course, I'm here every week," she responds.

At last, I have penetrated Simon Cowell's inner sanctum. I am on the sane side of the barrier. At least that's what I think until I spot a couple of coiffed young things emerging from a dressing room with T-shirts that read "Team Minogue" on the back. They are, I later discover, responsible for the Australian judge's gravity-defying hair.

In truth, the atmosphere backstage is electrifying, and I can't help but get caught up in it all. Simon Cowell's monstrous Rolls-Royce Phantom is parked outside, his chauffeur standing to attention by the door. Contestants are zipping back and forth in full stage gear, preparing for dress rehearsals. Stacey totters along in dominatrix-esque heels while Joe and Olly dance in the corridor.

In the backstage canteen, Eighties pop star Sinitta is giving out some last-minute advice, while the wardrobe department puts the finishing touches to the costumes for John and Edward's performance of the Ghostbusters tune (tonight the weekly theme is songs from films.)

The make-up room is packed as everyone gets ready for their close-up. Under a cloud of hairspray and powder, Yvie Burnett squeezes out from between a hyperactive John and Edward to greet me.

She is a glamorous blonde, dressed down (but not for long) with curlers in her hair. She has a face for television, a distinctive Aberdonian burr and a mother hen quality which I imagine comes in useful when dealing with the brood of excited contestants.

She leads me to her dressing room. She's lost her voice, she tells me, and is croaking and coughing. A number of the contestants have been unwell and she fears she may have caught something from one of them. "A vocal coach who's lost her voice?" she laughs. "That's no good to anyone, is it?"

She's so pleased to be entertaining a fellow Scot that she's laid on shortbread for me. "Say when!" she says cheerily as she pours milk into my tea.

Burnett's approachable, friendly and maternal qualities may be what help her relate to contestants with a wide range of backgrounds, ages and abilities, but her credentials speak for themselves.

The mother of two was brought up in Methlick in Aberdeenshire, where she discovered her operatic mezzo-soprano voice at the age of eight, performing in a primary school Christmas concert, for which her class sang The Twelve Days of Christmas. Each child was given one line. Burnett was given "five gold rings."

"Everyone else was 'ahn the furst day of Chrustmuss...'" she says, mimicking a child's monotonous singing voice and then I went "five go-old rrrings". Her voice breaks into a mock-operatic shriek. "I didn't know where it came from. But because of the quiet Scottish background that I came from you were never going to push yourself forward. So I just did local things, and any time anyone invited me to do something a bit bigger my Mum and Dad were like 'Oh you don't want to do that...'"

She went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow before heading to London to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She performed as a soloist with the Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne, Opera North, De Netherlandse Opera and Opera De Nantes before becoming a vocal coach.

Today, her CV reads like a Who's Who of reality television. She joined the X Factor in series two and has also worked on Britain's Got Talent. Her clients include Susan Boyle, Leona Lewis, Will Young, Paul Potts, Shayne Ward and Leon Jackson, all winners or runners-up on one of the two shows. She continues to work with many of them, including Boyle and Lewis, and has also coached Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol and electro artist La Roux.

"I prefer it when they haven't had any previous singing coaching because I often find that people who've had a couple of singing lessons have got more bad habits than someone who's a complete blank canvas," she says. "And they're usually really receptive because they know they're singing to millions of people and they're like 'oh my goodness, please help me'. I have time to teach them so much, so I can really be excited about how much they can progress and I get such a kick out of that, if they've learned to do something they couldn't do in week one."

Burnett started out teaching using a system called Estill Voice Training, but has developed her own style over the years and now teaches something of a hybrid style she jokingly refers to as the "Yvie Technique." It is, she insists, as much about making people feel confident and comfortable within their performance as it is about teaching them to embrace a new octave.

"A lot of it is lack of confidence," she says, patting at her curlers to keep them in place. "So I have to build up their vocal technique, and their confidence. I'm very much about the technique, but it is psychological. Because I've got to be that person they can really trust and when they're having a really bad day and they sing a really duff note, they can do that in front of me. If they can't sing badly in front of me then they'll never improve. So we do build up a real closeness, and I don't think I could do my job if I wasn't close to them."

She says she could never do what the X Factor contestants have to do. She couldn't stand up and be judged on a weekly basis in front of Cowell and the nation. Indeed, every week she gets nervous on behalf of each contestant, all of whom have quickly become like friends to her. She insists, however, that none of the drama, the emotion, competitiveness and sniping between the judges is staged.

"Oh it's all real," she says. "They really want to win the show and as far as mentoring is concerned they're all really into it. They're equal with that but they do it in different ways. Some of them will speak to contestants on Saturday and Sunday and then they'll leave them for a few days, and others will be always phoning them up. So I think they do it differently but they're very much involved because, believe me, they all want to be the winner of the X Factor."

Who doesn't? This monstrous machine has made superstars out of previous winners, including Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke. Established acts who perform on the show's Sunday night results programme are almost guaranteed to hit number one the following week, and even old, almost forgotten songs that are performed by contestants will race towards the top of the download charts in the days that follow.

Burnett is bemused but excited to play such an essential role in television's biggest success story of the decade. She frequently references her down-to-earth Scottish upbringing, but in the same breath discusses her colleagues and clients, some of the biggest names in showbusiness.

Simon Cowell has "a really amazing manner about him. Always polite, always thanking people". Cheryl Cole is "so little that you don't notice her slipping in and then all of a sudden you're like oh, that's Cheryl sitting there".

She talks passionately about her famous students. Leona Lewis "can really emote a song, she ticks so many boxes. But I'm always pushing her and giving her extra-high notes. She'll say 'I don't know if I can sing that...'". Under Burnett's tuition however, and with one of the most exceptional voices in the business, she always does.

So could she teach a warbler in the shower like me to belt it out like Boyle? "I could teach anyone to improve the muscle," she says confidently. "If you said to a personal trainer, 'here's an overweight person; make them run a marathon', well, as long as they don't have any health problems, with time you could make their muscles run that marathon. It's the same with singing."

She shows me a technique that might get me on my way. "Lie on your back," she instructs me. "Put your hand on your tummy and use your tummy to breathe. When you lie on your back you're letting yourself breath naturally. So whatever you do when you're lying down, that's what you should do when you're singing. That natural deep way of relaxed breathing is not what we do in real life, when we're standing up. If you said here's a singer, they've got to improve and you can only teach them one thing, I would teach them breathing."

That night as I'm drifting off to sleep, I place my hand on my stomach, breathe deeply and have a go at I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misrables.

I picture Simon Cowell chewing his pen and raising an eyebrow. He's unimpressed. Oh well, it's unlikely that you'll see me at next year's round of X Factor auditions, but like a hefty chunk of the British population who've fallen under Cowell's spell, I'll almost certainly be tuning in.

The X Factor live finals are on Saturday nights at 8pm on ITV1, with the results announced on Sunday evenings at 8pm on ITV1. The grand finale takes place on Saturday 12 December. Visit www.xfactor.itv.com for details