Sir Karl Jenkins reflects on performing at the Coronation

My mother died when I was just four years old. She was in her mid-30s and she had tuberculosis, and I was too young to really grasp what had happened. We lived in Penclawdd in Wales and I was sent to stay with my mother's sister and her husband in a nearby village. Still, it was a happy childhood. My father and I eventually moved in with my grandmother and another widowed aunt. It was a big family and there was lots of love from lots of ladies—lots of aunts and cousins—but there was always something missing because my mother wasn't there. 

My father introduced me to music. He was a music teacher, a chapel organist and a choirmaster. I started having piano lessons when I was five or six years of age and I became fairly proficient but not brilliant. I was also exposed to a lot of music because it was the beginning of LP vinyl records just after the war and my father built up a huge collection of classical albums and music he loved—from Bach through to the usual suspects like Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Mahler, Brahms, Richard Strauss and Wagner.

After the piano I turned to the recorder, which I was also quite proficient on. When I went to Gowerton Grammar school I started on the oboe, which is very similar to the recorder so it was quite an easy changeover really, and later on I played the saxophone. I was in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales and we did a concert tour, so to some extent I was a musical tourist. I didn't really know what I wanted to become or what I wanted to do but the important thing during my teenage years was that I kind rebelled against what passed as modern classical music—some of which was great but a lot of which was a cacophony in some people's minds—so as a music student at Cardiff University I had this dichotomy.

Then I discovered jazz music, which immediately grabbed me because it was of its time, it was modern, yet it was still tonal, it was still accessible and it still worked within the pattern of keys rather than being hugely dissonant. It was also very exciting rhythmically and the improvisatory nature of it appealed to me. So I had this kind of dual existence, moonlighting as a jazz musician in what used to be the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff at night while doing my studies at university during the day. From there I went to the Royal Academy of Music in London and joined Graham Collier's jazz group before we founded Nucleus together.

Nucleus was one of the first jazz-fusion bands, where jazz was improvised but to a rock beat rather than to a swing beat. We won first prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1970 but the next year I was drawn to prog rock band Soft Machine, of which there were quite a few incarnations. People came and went but I stayed on until the early 1980s. As with any band really, you got on with people for a while and then you irritated each other, then you got on with them again and became best friends. It was a good bunch of people and we didn't get into very many excesses, at least not when I was in the band.

With Soft Machine there was no great farewell tour. It just kind of dribbled away. Myself and Mike Ratledge, who was one of the founding members, moved on to working on commercials, including one for Boots Number 7 that won several awards, and that famous Levi's one where Nick Kamen took his jeans off and put them in a laundrette machine to the tune of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard it Through the Grapevine". But it wasn't Marvin Gaye, it was us copying the song with a singer called Tony Jackson and P P Arnold on backing vocals. It was common practice back then but it all came to an end because people were getting sued for what they called "passing off" the voice where the public thought they were hearing the original.

When I started the Adiemus project [of new age albums starting in 1995] I had no idea it would be so successful. You never know about these things but we got to perform in Japan, all over Europe and various other places, which was very rewarding. I also got to perform The Peacemakers at Carnegie Hall, which is not a great concert hall per se but it's iconic and I was honoured to be there after so many great artists.  

I don't take awards too seriously. Of course it's gratifying to be the highest living composer in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, at number five. On that list there's no Mahler, no Richard Strauss, no Stravinsky or Bartok and all these giants of classical music. It's a list of popularity which I take humbly but my head and my feet are firmly on the ground. As the cliché goes, we all stand on those who have gone before and every day I hear a piece of music that is better than anything I could write.

Attending King Charles' coronation felt like being a part of history. It was a privilege to have one of my compositions played at the ceremony as it was a moment of great significance. We composers were all seated in a group, although I had various Tory party members behind me and there were various famous people dotted around. Prior to that, conducting The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace at the Lincoln Centre in New York was also very memorable because it was ten years to the day after the 9/11 attacks.

One thing I'm very pleased about is that I work a lot abroad so I'm not a UK-centric composer and I don't see myself as a core classical composer either. I've drawn from other cultures and brought them together, and I've worked with so many great singers and musicians like Kiri Te Kanawa, Evelyn Glennie and Brent Averill. I've also done a few tours with various people as a session musician, like George Harrison, Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I tend not to be starstruck, although if any of thee composers came from beyond the grave to visit me than I guess I would be. 

I met my wife Carol more than 50 years ago through a mutual friend and we were married a few years later. The attraction between us developed after we went on a few dates, [laughs] the first of which was when we went to Highgate Cemetery—not the one where Karl Marx is buried but the other one, where they used to film Hammer horror movies. Our second date was to see the American jazz drummer Shelly Manne at Ronnie Scott's, then we eventually moved in together in West Point Grove. 

Becoming a father changes your life a lot because suddenly there's someone else to look after and love and take care of and cherish. It was a fulfilment in many ways and it enriched our lives. When our son Jody wanted to become a composer too I encouraged him. I think everyone should follow their passion, which is what I did. As I say, I was a musical tourist essentially. I had no master plan other than being in music and then gradually there were a series of accidents that happened or chances that I took.

The most memorable review I ever got was when a critic said, "Karl Jenkins and his music are emotionally manipulative." It was intended to be negative but I thought it was wonderful. I thought, Well, that's a great thing to say about a composer. If I can make people laugh, cry, shout or whatever then surely those are skills to have if you write music and want to communicate with people. I can't recall which one of my works that critic was referring to but I don't take critics seriously really. I always find it strange how people end up doing it for a living because I'm sure they weren't in school as as teenagers saying, "I want to be a critic." They probably wanted to perform, sing, play an instrument or something but then proved not to be good enough, because who would choose writing about it instead of actually doing it?