Thomas Spencer and his brother Oliver are the unlikely lads; the underdogs, fuelled by massive talent and no little grit, who have travelled from the tiny South Derbyshire village of Castle Gresley to Los Angeles, where they recorded The Journey, the sparkling, luscious second album under singer Thomas’s name.
Brave, warm and accomplished, The Journey includes covers from Rammstein’s Mein Herz Brennt (My Heart Burns) to the ever-sweet perennial And I Love You So, alongside a clutch of stellar originals.
“It shows the journey we’ve taken,” smiles Thomas. “Sometimes it’s impossible to believe it’s actually happened.”
The boys lived next door to a dairy farm. Their grandfather was a trumpeter who’d spurned an opportunity to tour the world with the Glenn Miller Orchestra for the security of working as a miner at the local coalface.
Father was an electrician, mother worked for Marks & Spencer and the boys had two loves in life: football and music. The parents scrimped to send their boys to private school: “As I got older, I was bullied because I was dropped off in a Ford Escort.. It didn’t exactly blend in with the Jaguars and Mercedes”
Both were keen Derby County fans, but Oliver was a goalkeeper who attracted scouts from as far afield as Newcastle United, until a back injury halted his progress forever and turned him to music. Thomas was a striker, but his real gifts – excellence at violin and piano - saw him become the only student in his school to take music A level.
“People told me I couldn’t get anywhere coming from where I did. I always had great ambition,” “but with having no friends or family with any entertainment experience, everything felt very new”
London called, initially to study acting, however Thomas made the decision to go to Trinity College of Music to study voice and then the Royal Academy of Music.
Oliver specialised in guitar and trumpet and he followed his brother to London. When it came to his final Trinity recital, his German was terrific, but when the foreign language choice came, he plumped for French, just for the challenge of reading French music and lyrics on sight. “Yes, I would have got better results if I had chosen German, but that was the easy option, I was delighted to pass!”
Fresh out of college, he played Schlomo in a Fame national tour, “Quite an undertaking considering I can’t dance. I did get other auditions but was told my voice was being held back by my distinctive sound and lack of profile.”
The solution was simple if off-piste: to raise Thomas’s profile by making an album which merged classical and contemporary and allowed him to find his own voice. And so Thomas and Oliver recorded the album Credere, mostly in their kitchen.
“The funny thing was that, almost accidentally, I actually fell in love with the process of making and recording music. I knew this was it.”
With Credere enthusiastically reviewed, the Spencers set about getting a label deal. “We didn’t want to go down the Nessun Dorma route, but some labels said we were too classical, others that we were too contemporary. Most just wanted covers. We wanted everything.”
Not ones to take ‘no’ for an answer, they decided to raise the finances themselves. They secured investment to record in Thailand; then in Prague with the illustrious City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and finally the world famous Abbey Road Studios, but they lacked the heavyweight management their heavyweight project required.
Josh Groban had broken through internationally, singing some of the same songs recorded by the Spencers. His manager was Brian Avnet.
“We hired a publicist in New York. Her one job was to call Brian Avnet. Then call him again. And again. Every day in fact until we got a meeting. Frankly, it was harassment, but eventually he barked back at her, ‘they’ve got five minutes’.”
The brothers flew to Los Angeles for their five minutes and knocked at Brian Avnet’s door. “He was wearing his basketball gear. He shouted ‘opinions are like assholes: everybody has one’ at us through the intercom before letting us in.”
The five-minute meeting turned into five days. Avnet signed them up on the spot and suggested they used material from the previous sessions alongside new recordings which took place at the Lionshare Studio in Los Angeles where Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie and a host of others have made magic.
Alas, Brian’s health problems would put the relationship on hold, but with Thomas already a contributor to such soundtracks as The Life Of Pi, Pirates Of The Caribbean, and Kung Fu Panda, the doyen of contemporary film scores, Hans Zimmer’s Studio was impressed enough to help finance and Paul Faberman, co-manager of Celine Dion for 17 years, became Thomas’s manager.
“It was tricky. The finances were tight. We had to pay for recording, accommodation and travel, but when we met Placido Domingo and he said we were the next big thing, I was floating.”
Five topsy-turvy years since Credere, The Journey is, at last, complete. “I didn’t want to look back and think it could have been better. We couldn’t have done anymore.”
Oliver’s love of all-guns-blazing metal spawned a blistering, choral cover of Rammstein’s My Heart Burns: “Why ever not? We only do covers of songs we love”.
Their mum’s favourite song is The Sound Of Silence, so their dramatic, bereft version made the cut (“We let the music take us where it wanted us to go”), while their take on Don McLean’s And I Love You So is as gorgeous as Perry Como’s, but twinkles like Elvis Presley’s. Oh and there’s a version of The Who’s Baba O’Riley. In Italian. “Italian’s so very expressive don’t you think?” chuckles Thomas.
From the heartfelt Somehow, to Brave Enough To Change to La Luce (which their grandmother insisted be played at her funeral), the brothers’ own songs are equally captivating. And the final result is something very special indeed, a journey most certainly worth taking.
For Thomas and Oliver Spencer, non-conformist, mavericks to their shared DNA, their joint journey from living next door to a dairy farm to wherever their talents take them is far from over. Between them they have arranged the theme for ESPN’s Monday Night Football show in the United States as well as sound tracking Special Forces – Ultimate Hell Week for the BBC and undertaking a special commission for BAFTA, meanwhile Thomas’s acting ambitions still remain. Right now, though, The Journey is the real deal.
