Hayley Westenra (4 page)

After I had performed, one of the judges went out and bought me a
Kathleen Battle CD.

'I think you could sound like her if you keep going in the direction you're going in,' she told me as she handed over her gift.

These days, I'm singing a lot of classical music, but back then my singing style was similar to that of any young girl. My voice was very natural and not at all classical, but, then again, by choosing a song such as 'The Mists of Islay', I was not positioning myself as a pop artist either. When I listened to the Kathleen Battle CD, I was very taken with her voice. She has a very pure, clean sound and her voice is extremely agile. I was very touched by the compliment that the lady had paid to me.

The victory at Northlands Mall came just after I had completed my time at Fendalton Primary School and just before I was due to join
Cobham Intermediate School. It meant that I was able to arrive at my new school with a cheque for a cool NZ$1,000.

'Well, you know, we feel really bad about accepting this, because we haven't really done anything for it yet,' said my lovely principal, Trevor Beaton.

'Don't worry, you will!' replied Mum with a smile.

And she was right. I had a wonderful two years at the school. It was another very supportive place to learn. The teachers very quickly hooked into my
love of music and I was given the lead role in the school play,
Alice in Wonderland.
I was so excited, not just because I had the opportunity to sing and act, but because I was actually playing the title part. Just recently, I visited the school again to open their new music suite, which I'm very honoured to have named after me.

I remained quietly competitive as each of the Talent Quest competitions came along. I had been given a taste of winning and I really rather liked it.

'You come across as so nice and sweet,' Mum told me one day. 'But people don't realise that you're really tough.'

I don't think she meant 'tough' in a horrible way, but I was very focused and quietly determined to work my way up.

Child stars are always asked, 'Were your parents pushy?' I can honestly reply that my parents never pushed me in any direction that I didn't already want to go in. Dad always tended to take a back seat in these things; Mum would always encourage us to practise our instruments and our singing, but she would never push us into doing it.

I know that I would never have achieved everything that I've done today without my wonderful Mum. I knew from a very early age that I wanted to go on stage and that I wanted to be involved in musicals.

About this time, she said to me, 'Hayley, you've just started intermediate school. You shouldn't be doing any more musicals. You should be concentrating on your schoolwork.'

'Oh, I guess you're right,' I would grudgingly reply. But then I would hear about another set of auditions and 'Mum, can I just try out?' would come the plaintive request.

Inevitably, I would then win the part. Mum always supported us wholeheartedly in anything we chose to do,
and, once we had decided on something, she would make it happen to the best of her ability. For example, she used to spend hours helping me to sort out the backing music for the Talent Quests. Nowadays, it's a lot easier to locate music with the Internet being more advanced, but back then it was really tough. It was a struggle for all the singers in the competitions to get hold of good arrangements. Some kids would even resort to singing along to the original recording complete with the original vocals – something that just didn't work at all. These were the kids who were not lucky enough to have parents who spent time helping them, so, to my mind, it does pay to have a mum and a dad who want to be involved.

But I think that, if they had pushed me, I would have probably resented it. If singing was not something that I had wanted to do, and they had forced me into it, I would have given up long before now.

On a sunny weekend, you will generally find a couple of buskers performing in the Arts Centre area of Christ-church. A few others are usually milling around, awaiting their turn. I ended up becoming a busker by accident. It all began after I had joined the Canterbury Opera Children's Chorus, which is now known as
Canterbury Opera Youth. A group of us were putting on a concert as part of the Festival of Romance at the Arts Centre.

We had a lunch break after a busy morning of rehearsals, but a few of us didn't have any money with us to buy food.
One of the gang pointed to a busker down the street and suggested that we go outside and try our luck as buskers to see if we could earn some cash. So, more as a joke than anything else, five or six of us went out on the street and sang some of the songs we had spent the morning rehearsing – songs from operas and operettas – quite high-end classical stuff.

It went surprisingly well and, after we had given our performance with the Canterbury Opera Children's Chorus, one of the guys from the group turned to me and said, 'How about we do some more
busking?'

So we sang all of the songs we knew and things went very well on the money front. When Mum and Sophie came to pick me up, Sophie joined in and we ended up splitting the afternoon's takings three ways. We had each made enough to buy not just lunch that day, but for the next couple of weeks, had we wanted to.

When I arrived home that evening, I got thinking, and my little business brain started ticking over. I realised that if I went out on my own to busk, I would be able to keep all of the money for myself. So, from then on, going out to sing became a regular weekend occurrence. True, earning some pocket money was a great motivator, but I also loved having the opportunity to perform. I found it a real challenge to see if I could manage to stop someone in their tracks and force them to listen to my voice; I found it a very satisfying experience to see the effect that I could have on them. There's a real sense of power from being able to do that with nothing except your voice.

As I write this now, I'm beginning to realise that I'm probably a bit of a show-off when it comes to singing. But you
have
to be to do my job. It would be very odd to be a full-time professional singer and to hate the idea of performing in front of a crowd. The more I busked, the more I discovered that I liked the attention that my singing brought me.

Soon, I decided to broaden my busking repertoire, by adding some tunes on my violin. I knew only a limited number of songs, so the instrumental pieces helped to pad out my set. I soon realised, though, that the crowds would disappear when I played the violin and reappear when I started to sing again. The violin swiftly became a former part of my act and I stuck to singing all the way through. There was nothing for it: I was simply going to have to learn some more songs.

I had already mastered the songs I had learned as part of the opera chorus. Now, I added a few Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers as well, including the 'Pie Jesu' from his
Requiem.
Since then, I've sung that song so many times in so many different places around the world that I'm giving it a rest from my repertoire at the moment. For me, it will always be one of the songs I associate with my period of starting out on my career.

Conversely, I still enjoy performing
'Pokarekare Ana', which has become my signature song. It has taken me all across the world and I've performed it for so many different people. It's a song that has stuck by me throughout and it's always a crowd pleaser. I regard it as being my trusty old faithful.

When I started busking regularly, it was not really something that kids did in New Zealand. It was more for hippies doing their juggling and circus acts, or for music students in their twenties. The only youngsters out performing were the little violinists who had studied under the
Suzuki method. There always seemed to be a lot of them, but there were no other kids out there singing regularly. Recently, I've noticed that there have been a far higher number of young buskers around the centre of Christchurch, so maybe it has become the 'in' thing to do over the past few years.

The area in which I used to busk was in Christchurch's tourist heartland and there must be many people who visited
the city around the turn of the millennium who have videos of some of my earliest public performances sitting gathering dust on their shelves at home. I think it's probably best for all of us if these 'gems' remain as part of their private collections!

Street crowds can be tough to work because they are not paying upfront to see you. There's no expectation on their part that you will be good and, as they have made no direct financial investment in your act, they don't automatically have a connection with you. You do have to hook them in – and I found that a real challenge. Having said that, though, I do miss the challenge. These days, I do a concert and everyone is paying money to see me perform, so there's a very real pressure on me to ensure that I give a good show. Everyone has an expectation of what I'm going to perform, how I'm going to sound and what the show is going to be like. When you are busking and you sing a bum note, everyone is far more forgiving because you are giving them a free concert anyway.

I used to like to watch and interact with the audience and I would try to keep them listening for as long as I possibly could. If I could make someone who was out shopping stand in front of me and listen for half an hour, then that was a real achievement. Performing in front of crowds in the street is like taking part in a constantly changing popularity poll. If you do something that they don't like, they carry on with their lives and walk away. But, if they enjoy your act, then they hang around for more. At a paying concert, you don't get that sort of feedback. Nor would you sensibly want to provoke it, either!

Over time, I earned enough money to buy myself a mini-amplifier and a microphone. It was a step up from how I started – just me and my unamplified
a cappella
voice, with a hat sitting on the ground in front of me to collect the money. I then started to bring along the family CD player
to plug into my amplifier. Now, not only was I able to amplify my voice, but I could also sing along to a backing track, so my weekly outings on to the streets turned into quite a big production number. It allowed me to widen my repertoire still further. I did keep some
a cappella
songs in the mix, because they seemed to go down with the crowd, but singing with a backing track made my song choices far less limited than they had been previously.

Around this time, I also developed a novel sideline as a singing telegram. It all came about through a family friend,
Gavin Becker, who went by the professional name of
Sunshine the Clown. We met him because Isaac had become fascinated with his balloon-making skills at the local mall. One of his business interests was running a singing-telegram service and, when he heard me sing, he invited me to work with him when the occasion demanded someone with a voice like mine. It was a bizarre experience for everyone involved. Gavin would turn up at some poor, unsuspecting victim's home dressed in a gorilla suit, with me standing next to him. The general idea was that he would scare them and I would sing to them. Often, I would sing personalised lyrics that Gavin had written to the tunes of well-known songs.

Not all of our singing telegrams were quite like this, though: some of them could be quite touching. On one occasion, Gavin sent me to see one of his best friends, who was celebrating her birthday. I presented her with a huge bunch of her favourite flowers and then sang
'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'. She was blown away by his thought-fulness and became very emotional, bursting into tears.

Although the busking was taking up a lot of my spare time at weekends, it didn't stop me from broadening my horizons into the world of
musical theatre. The first hurdle was always getting through the audition process. The whole family would keep an eye out for the audition notices in the local newspaper. After applying, I would usually find myself
being called in as part of a group of ten or twelve youngsters and we would each have a go at some of the singing for the specific role.

My first straight acting role came in
The
Darling Buds of May.
It was not something I would usually have considered, because there were no singing roles, but I was good friends with our neighbours,
Emma Ritchie, who is a couple of years older than me, and her sister, Nicola, who is a year younger than me. I knew Nicola particularly well because we often shared the same roles. In professional productions, child actors tend to work for only half the productions, and so Nicola and I were often picked for the same role in alternate performances. We shared the role of Marta in
The Sound of Music
and also of Tiny Tim in
A
Christmas Carol.
The two girls were both also in Canterbury Opera Youth. Nicola and I look so similar that on one occasion her grandmother mistakenly thought a photograph of me in the local paper in full costume was actually her granddaughter.

The auditions took place one evening after Canterbury Opera Youth and, as the Ritchies often gave me a lift home, I had to wait around for them. I was already there so there was no point in just being a bystander and I decided to give it a go. Without really meaning to, I got the part.

As Sophie and Isaac became older, we quite often found all three of us in the same productions. When we were in
Rush,
a gold-mining-themed musical, our parents' stamina was tested to the limit. Sophie and I were in one cast, but Isaac was put in the alternate cast. This meant that Mum and Dad had to spend every night of the run ferrying us to and from the theatre without a single day's break.

I loved being in the musicals because not only did I get the chance to sing but there was also an opportunity to act and dance. It's easy to forget, but it gave us a tremendous social life outside school as well. During rehearsals, I would always take along a pack of cards in my bag and would sit
playing Fish or Uno with my friends at the back of the hall when we were not needed on stage. We tended to bump into the same people at each new production, so, instead of spending the evenings and weekends hanging out at friends' houses, I would meet my friends at rehearsals and during performances.

There was a great attraction in having that easy way of socialising. I had decided not to audition for a part in
The
King and I
so that I could concentrate on my schoolwork. Then, I went along to one of the auditions and saw so many of my friends whom I had met in other musicals that I instantly changed my mind and went for a part.

I loved getting dressed up before each performance and, when the curtain went up, I felt a huge adrenalin rush; it's a mixture of apprehension, nerves and excitement. Every time you perform on a live stage, you are laying yourself open to things going wrong – that is the scary bit. But, when things go right and you leave the audience happy, or you even move them to their feet, then that is one of the most fantastic feelings in the world.

There was a spell when, much to my consternation, I seemed to be offered only boys' roles. I never imagined that I would get a male role in a run of
The Nutcracker
by the
Royal New Zealand Ballet. After all, this surely would be an opportunity for me to wear a beautiful sparkly pink dress and dance around the stage looking every inch the ballet queen. The problem was that there were scores of girls and very few boys auditioning for the child roles and ultimately the five girl parts and the five boy parts were shared out among ten girls. You've guessed it already: I was chosen as one of the five who had to wear a horrible itchy wig and a suit. All we could do was look on enviously at the other five girls, who wore shiny dresses completely covered in jewels. We were all very jealous. To add insult to injury, when I was not dressed up as a boy, I had to play the part of a rat. This
was not the result I had imagined when I went along to the audition.

I had only recently played Tiny Tim in
A Christmas Carol,
where I spent the whole time dressed in a boy's suit and leaning on a crutch. It happened again with a performance of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Don't ask me why – and please excuse the pun – but the only reason I was even considered for a role was because they were one dwarf short.

It was a production by a professional Australian touring company and, for some reason that escapes me now, they were missing one of the little guys. The first I knew of it was when Mum arrived in school to explain the situation. My ballet teacher had some dancers performing in the show and suggested that Sophie and I alternate in the part of one of the dwarfs, as an emergency replacement.

The reason why Mum had to come to pick us up early from school was that the first performance was that very evening. I had the opportunity to join a rehearsal that afternoon, which Sophie watched. The following night, she had to go on stage without any rehearsal. It was all a bit of a blur for both of us, as you can imagine. Luckily, they gave us the role of Sleepy, so that we could fall fast asleep if we forgot our lines.

One of the first things that I noticed as I stood in line with my six new best friends was that I was by far the tallest of all of the dwarfs. The other six were very welcoming but very laid back about the whole thing. I, on the other hand, was very scared. I was always a skinny child, so, to make me look more like the other six, the costume people stuffed padding up the front of my shirt because I needed to develop a beer belly fast. It was certainly one of the more bizarre situations that I've found myself in.

There are a variety of talent agencies in Christchurch who are always looking for new people to put on their books. In 1996, when I was still only nine years old, I signed up to the
Spotlight Modelling Agency. I thought that the idea of having my photograph in a clothing catalogue was wildly exciting at the time and this was my goal.

Soon, I found myself starring in a commercial for the
New World supermarket chain. Well, when I say 'starring', I might just be stretching the truth a little. My job was to splash around in a swimming pool with a boy of about my age. It had to look to the television viewers as if we were both having an amazing amount of fun in the summer sunshine. The trouble was that, to have a commercial ready for broadcast at the beginning of summer, you need to film it in the depths of winter. The pool was unheated and the water was absolutely freezing. The director kept encouraging us to look as if we were having the time of our lives, as we flailed about in the icy water, desperately hoping that he would get the shot he needed in as short a time as possible.