Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006’s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.

I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents’ house in Bournemouth. When I wasn’t filling up guests’ drinks, I’d be playing some songs – it looks like I’m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.

For a few years prior to this, school had been difficult. We moved from a nice leafy part of Wimbledon to Bournemouth when I was 10, and until that point I had friends who were both girls and boys. Going to the all-boys grammar school in a new area was an aggressive gear shift and I struggled to make friends. There was no physical bullying, but it was a sustained period of ostracisation that went on for the first three years of secondary school and dribbled on into year 10. It wasn’t ever discussed. There was no “you’re being bullied. If you have a problem with any other boys, come and talk to us,” from the school. My parents probably knew because I wasn’t bringing any friends over. Instead I learned how to take care of my own problems, which was through music and theatre. My saving grace.

I feel so lucky that I had the music studio at school – a place to be expressive in a sea of business studies and maths. Playing the synthesisers started my lifelong passion for production and all-round music nerdery. We also had a piano at home and I used to sit at it and make sounds for what felt like hours.

Mum worked for Abbey Life Assurance and for the civil service. Dad worked for a bank. Neither of them were particularly career-minded – they enjoyed their life, their family and their house, hence friends often coming over. My grandparents were very important, too. Growing up as an only child made me very comfortable in my own company, but it did mean I wasn’t armed with some of the physical vocabulary that other boys had. I used to overreact when other kids were playing up. “Why are you speaking to me like that? No one speaks to me like that. Why are you behaving in this stupid way? No, I don’t want to play rough, or go and play football, because that’s what five-year-olds do.” I was far happier to sit and have a conversation. All of which is possibly why I gravitated towards the girls at school – they were a bit more sensible.

In my teens I got very into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I was singing a lot in bands – but I was also obsessed with Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, so I decided to study drama at University of East Anglia. I have fond memories of pretending to be a pig, and doing lots of clowning and mask work. Once that was over, I went on to study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. It was a difficult transition for me – I went from that arrogant tweeny, liminal stage, as pictured, to realising that I was, actually, just fairly average compared with my peers.

After graduating, I went back to Bournemouth. I was selling ice-cream to make some money while sending out CVs. A friend got in touch and said they had seen an advert for some youth work in Poole, and thought I’d be good at it. They wanted someone young and musical to work with local children who lived on an estate with a high level of deprivation. They had a little music room with a couple of ropey instruments that I would try to teach them how to play. That’s where my passion for giving everyone opportunities – a safe space and music – came from.

I also realised that to get people to trust me, I had to be myself. I was from a totally different side of the tracks and I was wide-eyed, naive. The kids could smell the middle-classness on me, so any pretending to be cool and aloof wouldn’t work. I had to be rigorously myself.

My job is to give others confidence, but I’ve definitely gone on a journey with my own self-esteem, especially when it comes to being in front of the camera. I was working with the London Symphony Orchestra and running a choir when I first got the opportunity to be on TV. The producers of The Choir had seen that we had a high Google rating so they got in touch. The show was about starting a choir at Northolt high school in Middlesex, and throughout, I tried to apply the same method of authenticity on camera that I’d learned with the youth group. I had been given this amazing job that I’d never done before, but I was learning to do it on national television. I was being filmed constantly. The director said: “I want you when you’re angry, I want you when you’re upset, I want you when you’re happy. I won’t make you look like an idiot.” He stuck to his word, but I remember being nervous, trying to look in control, and dithering quite a lot.

When you’re recognised it can be a great gift, but a burden when you’re, say, taking out your bins. When Military Wives got to No 1, I was suddenly thrown into a new level of celebrity: I was meeting Simon Cowell, having tea with Gary Barlow and dinner with Andrew Lloyd Webber. My memories of that time was that it was intense – when you have a Christmas No 1, it’s like you’ve joined a weird club with people like Noddy from Slade and Shakin’ Stevens. None of the bells and whistles has ever distracted me from the reason I got into this industry in the first place 20 years ago, however. Focusing on my passion for music and the importance of art in people’s lives. There’s something so healing about music, and singing in a choir. When people come together, they are buoyed up by it. I lost a friend at the beginning of this year and before he died he said something deeply touching to me: “We never did go for that pint.” It was brutal. Such a simple thing that felt impossible as we were both absorbed in our careers. The telly, the degrees – all of those achievements are wonderful. It’s the foundation upon which a lot of my happiness is at rest. But it’s not the main thing. People and community are.

When I was 15 I had a clear vision of what I wanted with my adult life. It involved a music studio with lots of instruments in it. The teenage me would be overjoyed to know that at the end of my garden is a little den with a piano, drums, shakers, maracas, guitars, bongos, synthesisers, a computer and speakers – that there’s never a day when I’m not doing music, half of it tinkering alone, the rest making music with other people. He’d probably be confused about the amount of hot yoga I currently do. But glad to know I still like a denim shirt.