‘We love Bake Off and Bob Marley’: the nuns shaking up the music industry
In 2019, the sisters at the Poor Clares convent in Arundel received an email. “It was from a lovely man called James Morgan at Decca asking us if we wanted to record an album,” says Sister Aelred, who is 80 years old. “He’d had the idea of recording some nuns and someone had told him we were quite good. We laughed the idea out of town. One sister reminded us that our most recent singing practice had been a disaster. Most of us were completely against it.”
The following year, Light for the World, featuring 15 of the 23 sisters at the convent, and comprising the Latin plainsong they sing each day at Vespers plus several original arrangements by Morgan and his partner Juliette Pochin, went to the top of the classical music charts, where it stayed for 19 weeks. The release coincided with the start of the second lockdown, and, so directly did the sublime mix of ancient incantatory song and gentle modern effects speak to the fractured soul of a broken nation, Decca ran out of CDs within 24 hours.
By the end of 2020, the Sisters had become the biggest-selling classical music debut artists of the year, selling 80,000 copies around the world, plus 60 million streams. This week, they release a second album, My Peace I Give You, containing a similar mix of 13th-century Gregorian chant and a new central arrangement of St Francis’s Canticle of Creation.
The Poor Clares live a very quiet, sequestered life, largely consisting of silence and prayer. Very occasionally, they leave the convent to make a visit to the post office or the doctor’s. They certainly never imagined Light For the World would make them superstars of the classical music scene.
“Parents wrote to say our music had helped get their babies to sleep. One man said it was the only thing that calmed his wife, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s,” says Sister Gabriel, 53. “I’d have made the album just to receive that one message.” Another wrote to confess he had stopped the car when he heard their music on the radio and had a quiet weep by the roadside. They have given the proceeds to local charities. “Twice a year when the royalties come in we sit down and decide who to send it to. Foodbanks, local schools, a woman’s refuge centre. It’s rather lovely.”
Yet the decision to record that first album didn’t come easily. “We had about 10 meetings within our community to discuss it,” says Sister Aelred. “Some of them were quite adversarial, really.” “I was very much against it,” says Sister Graça . “I pointed out we didn’t have the time, we already have a lot on our plate.” Most of the nuns at the convent are over 60; several are in their 90s. They cook and clean, tend to their vegetable garden and run a small on-site guest house entirely by themselves. “The whole thing felt like too great an intrusion.”
They were eventually persuaded by Morgan, who argued among other things that their music could help young people stressed by the pressure of modern life. All the same, the nuns’ lists of demands puts Mariah Carey in the shade. They refused to record the album in a studio, insisting instead that Decca record them during weekly singing practice on a Wednesday, as befitting the rhythm of their daily life – a process that in the end took six months. They insisted the album include the words of St Francis and St Clare, who founded the Order of the Poor Clares in 1212, “because that was the message we wanted to put across – messages of love and peace”. They wrangled at length over the contract. “There were a lot of things in it we crossed out,” says Sister Leo, 69. “They wanted us to do live events, that sort of thing. We said no to all that. I think Decca learned a lot from us. We don’t do things the way famous people do.”
Yet nor do they make chart-topping music like most famous people. To listen to My Peace I Give You, simple and exquisite, is to feel your very breath grow still.
The nuns’ respective journeys to the Poor Clares differ enormously. Sister Aelred, who grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Lancashire, joined at the age of 21. Sister Leo, who was raised in a Franciscan community in Kent, was a similar age. Yet Sister Gabriel had completed a degree in engineering by the time she decided to become a nun in her late 20s. Sister Graça, 67, who was born in Portugal, hesitated for years. Sister Eileen, who grew up in Nigeria, had her childhood desire to become one derailed by the death of her parents, meaning she had to take care of her siblings, and arrived at Poor Clares only six years ago at the age of 52. Yet at heart each of them always knew it was where they wanted to be. As Sister Aelred puts it, “it’s something below articulation”.
Does it concern them that their music – sacred expressions of faith – has been co-opted by many listeners for secular therapeutic purposes? Decca even promoted Light for the World as mindfulness – that icky modern term that can’t help but feel a crass bastardisation of the profound meaning the music has for the sisters who recorded it. “Not at all,” says Sister Aelred. “Someone wrote to say, ‘I don’t believe in God, I still don’t believe in God, but your music has touched something in me that I’ve never experienced before.’ And that’s wonderful. Anyway, even if a person uses our music purely for therapy, who is to put the line where God is at work and where he isn’t?”
The nuns may live “an unusual life” as Sister Leo puts it, but it’s not entirely without contact with the modern world. On Sundays they listen to music of their choice – Sister Graça is particularly fond of Bob Marley. At mealtimes on Sundays, otherwise conducted in silence, they take it in turn to read out loud a book: Barack Obama’s autobiography was a recent hit. They also watch TV – Bake Off is a favourite. Five of the nuns this time round even went to Abbey Road where the album was mixed to hear it in Dolby Atmos surround sound and posed on the famous road crossing. “It was extraordinary,” says Sister Eileen. “The music was even coming from the ceiling!”
Yet they are painfully aware that to the average person they are regarded as objects of curiosity. “The fact we are nuns is partly why people buy the album,” says Sister Graça, slightly tartly. “Society has moved on so much that we are no longer a normal part of life,” says Sister Gabriel. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this was to say ‘we’re just ordinary women who’ve given our life to God’. For me, it’s about building a bridge back.”
But building that bridge can be a struggle. The convent is “top heavy,” as Sister Graça puts it. The youngest nun is 50, the oldest is 96. There have been no new nuns since Sister Eileen arrived in 2018. The sisters have discussed whether removing the habit would make them look more relatable to people considering a life of prayer – the idea was dismissed. “Less and less people opt for the vocational life these days,” says Sister Leo.
“As old Sister Mary Francis used to say, ‘they comes and they goes, but mostly they goes’.”
Yet they retain hope. “Our Poor Clare life has been on a journey for 800 years,” says Sister Gabriel. “The Franciscan message will continue. It might take a different form, but it’s still really important to the world.” “Every track on this album is about peace and forgiveness,” adds Sister Aelred. “Blessed are those who forgive. Look at the state the world is in. These are words we need so much.”
‘My Peace I Give You’ is out now on Decca
