The Kingdom Choir's Karen Gibson interview: 'I still haven't processed performing at the royal wedding'

Karen Gibson’s The Kingdom Choir have performed for many celebrities, such as Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd
Clare Allfree10 October 2018

Karen Gibson will never forget where she was when she took the call. “I was on the number 87 bus,” she says, with a twinkle that suggests she has told this story many times before.

“A woman said: ‘We’d like to invite you to sing at the royal wedding’. I said: ‘You’re joking, right?’ There was a silence. I said: ‘Oh, you’re not joking at all’. So that was a mad moment.”

Two months later Gibson conducted a performance of Stand By Me by The Kingdom Choir during the marriage ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — which in three heart-stilling minutes bewitched the soul of the nation.

A global audience of two billion had tuned in to watch the wedding: by the end of that day the choir’s website had crashed.

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Even immediately after the ceremony Gibson knew they had created something special: when they left St George’s Chapel to go to the media room they were mobbed by crowds. “We needed bodyguards!” Gibson marvels. “To be honest, I still haven’t processed what happened.”

What’s happened is that a gospel choir that grew out of an informal music group which Gibson, her sister Kimmie and school friends Elaine and Collette started as teenagers in Tooting in 1994 has become a phenomenon.

Next May The Kingdom Choir embark on a UK tour. On October 27 they will perform at the closing ceremony of the Invictus Games. Tonight they are singing at a ceremony to mark the publication of the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000, a list of London’s most influential people. And in two weeks they release their first album — a gospel covers record which Gibson describes as “15 songs of love, hope and inspiration”, and which includes rousing versions of Coldplay’s Fix You, Beyoncé’s Halo and, of course, Stand by Me.

Not only that but Gibson, 55, got to take her mother to Buckingham Palace. “We were very kindly invited to one of the Queen’s garden parties a few days after the wedding,” she says. “Mum loves the royals. She got to meet Prince Charles. She couldn’t believe it.”

Gibson is sitting in a draughty church hall in Pimlico where members of the choir are slowly drifting in through the door ahead of the evening’s rehearsal. She’s regal in bearing but humble in person, describing meeting Prince Harry and Meghan Markle before the wedding as like “walking into a magazine. But they were lovely, down to earth, friendly. And they were clearly very much in love — they had that invisible thing you see going on between couples.”

Nonetheless, it took Gibson and the choir two months to produce a version of Stand by Me that satisfied them. The pair wanted something simple which, admits Gibson with a laugh, is not the style of The Kingdom Choir. “Gospel is a big, flashy sound, it’s bells and whistles,” she says. “I had to learn quickly to get off my high horse.”

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She produced version after version, each one more stripped back than the last, and 11 times it came back with a no. “The version everyone heard was the 12th version, and even now I don’t know if it was exactly what they wanted since we had simply run out of time,” she says. “At the time I didn’t understand why they kept saying no but of course they were right. The version they got was pure. And it absolutely suited the style of the wedding.”

Gibson set up The Kingdom Choir in after being made redundant from an “unhappy” job in IT. She had grown up in the black Pentecostal tradition where, she says, “singing is a thing”, attending church with her mum from the age of five, and singing in the choir.

When she was nine she began learning the piano, and at secondary school the oboe. She listened obsessively to gospel records — “the Winans Brothers; Andrae Crouch; Richard Smallwood” — but also, on the sly, jazz and soul fusion. “I got that from my dad. We didn’t live with him but I would listen to all these pirate radio stations with him on car journeys. So I had all these different influences.”

Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

Today the choir boasts 20 members, including Kimmie, Elaine and Collette plus several much younger members. In fact they are pretty used to celebrity audiences: they performed at Buckingham Palace during the Queen’s Jubilee procession in 2002 and for Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu. But the royal wedding was meaningful on a wholly different level.

“Obviously the wedding has done something for the country as a whole, but it’s done something in particular for people of colour,” says Gibson. “The looks on the faces of the black people I meet down the road, the pride in their eyes as they hug you. Someone said to me it felt like it was our wedding. That’s deep. One of the choir members has a friend with a four-year-old daughter, and when she saw us on the TV that child said: ‘Look Mummy, those people look like me’. Which of course meant that that child had already in some way articulated the feeling of exclusion. So, for me, it became even more important that we did our community proud.”

She thinks gospel has always been popular in England but that it’s also been kept out of sight. “It’s like England’s best kept secret. We haven’t had the platform to bring it into the mainstream. Even when gospel singers do pop, we do it as the backing singers, not in our own right. The singers who got closest to that are artists such as Lavine Hudson and Mica Paris, who both came out of the gospel community. But that community here is nothing like it is in America.”

Gibson still hasn’t processed what happened at the royal wedding. But not once before or during that game-changing performance did she feel nervous. “Nerves is another version of fear, and when you are fearful it’s become about you. But it was never about me. I had a job to do. And that job was simply to give something beautiful to the couple, and to impact other people. We did, right?”

The Kingdom Choir's debut album, Stand By Me, is out on Oct 26. For album and tour details go to kingdomchoir.com