Kendal: the Lakeland town famous for its mint cake, a favourite fortification for adventurers heading into the hills. My ticket for tonight’s concert may read “Lake District Summer Music” but the air is the colour of the grey limestone with which much of the town is built. It’s typically northern rain – water just seems to hang grimly all around rather than actually fall anywhere. “Up from London,” I imagine the wisely waterproof-clad locals must say, shaking their heads as I hurry past, my linen jacket a sodden, dank mess.

My appearance earns me, on arrival at the Parish Church, an immediate mug of tea. Though I imagine it is with some trepidation that the festival helper who guides me to the vestry asks “so, er, what part of the ensemble are you?” Which is the closest I’ll ever come to being a member of The King’s Singers, one of the UK’s most renowned vocal ensembles. To their credit, neither Paul Phoenix (tenor, member of the group since 1997) nor David Hurley (countertenor, joined 1990) flinch in offering the warmest of greetings as I stand dripping over the paperwork they’re working on while waiting for their colleagues to make their way through the Friday afternoon Lake District traffic. Even so, an inauspicious start to the first of my meetings with the group.

The King’s Singers. A name which means different things to different people, as we shall see. But let’s begin with what the name unambiguously means to anyone who has heard them. Vocal excellence, tight close-harmony skills and exquisite, smooth blend – if that doesn’t make them sound too much like a brand of coffee. And a sound resulting from a somewhat unique line-up: two countertenors, one tenor, two baritones and a bass. This arrangement of voices was, as Hurley puts it, “a comparative fluke”, the result of the various voices of the six choral scholars at King’s College, Cambridge, who, in the late ’60s, decided to form a group. According to Philip Lawson (baritone, joined the group in 1993): “I think it gives a richness to the bottom of the sound, because you have, basically, three basses. And when you’re trying to fill a big hall, without microphones, then you need that. And then you’ve got countertenor voices on the top, not sopranos – even though David is very high it’s still a countertenor voice, it still has the richness of the countertenor, not the headiness of the soprano.”

Phoenix, as the sole tenor, is stuck in the middle, though fortunately, as Christopher Gabbitas (baritone, member since 2004) puts it: “Paul is an incredibly versatile singer. In many ways he’s got the hardest job. He really sings down in his boots sometimes, he provides the bass of some trios the top three do and he provides a very big chest voice. But then he also blends it up into the falsetto and head voice at the top, so he has to master a huge range.”

Lots of names, lots of voices, lots of King’s Singers at different stages of their careers. And we haven’t yet met Timothy Wayne-Wright (countertenor, member since 2009) or Stephen Connolly (bass, joined 1987). But in talking about The King’s Singers you need to meet the team: personality, warmth, a bond with their audiences – these are crucial to the group’s appeal. The biographies on their website are very homely, focusing on their families, hobbies, dogs. No staid CV for these artists. Want to know what your favourite King’s Singer gets up to in his spare time? Visit kingssingers.com.

Sitting in the remarkably wide nave of the 13th-century Kendal Parish Church, the rain hammering on the roof, I watch them rehearse. They normally put in two hours of rehearsal before every performance: the precision which underlies their sound is clearly something at which they work continually.

There’s a level of polite but critical interactivity – they look more serious than they do in performance – and the studied attention to detail even extends to the careful positioning of their music stands. The evening’s programme is a typical King’s Singer journey from Byrd and Tallis through Mendelssohn, Schumann and Saint-Saëns, then into contemporary repertoire with John McCabe and Peter Louis van Dijk. Finally, to close, a work by Paul Drayton called Masterpiece, which condenses that same journey into about nine minutes. It’s witty, both in its writing and in its presentation. Look it up on YouTube. The King’s Singers, you see, do comedy – always a success with audiences – but the phenomenal reputation it once earned them hasn’t always been a helpful thing.

It’s a topic I want to pick up with them when I next see them, a few weeks later in London. This time I’m walking up from Kentish Town tube towards St Silas, the London sky as closely resembling the church’s brown bricks as that in Kendal had the limestone grey. Since I entered the tube it’s started raining again – this time proper, vertical rain – and I’m once again meeting The King’s Singers in a drenched linen jacket. It’s also thundering, not ideal for a recording session, which is what The King’s Singers, Laudibus choir, the Eric Whitacre Singers and the composer Eric Whitacre himself are here for. Long hair, chilled manner, Whitacre looks like a surfer driven by inclement weather from the beach into shelter. And what a shelter: this early 20th-century Gothic revival building is a notably High Anglo-Catholic church.

In writing for The King’s Singers, Whitacre joins a distinguished list of about 200 composers, including Richard Rodney Bennett, Berio, Maxwell Davies, Ligeti, Menotti, Penderecki, Rutter and John Tavener. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” says Lawson of commissioning, diplomatically refusing to say who didn’t. “This is always the risk you take. But you can’t really commission someone like Ligeti and send it back saying it’s too difficult, or something like that.” Ligeti wrote six nonsense madrigals for the group and even attended the recording of them. They are, says Lawson, “genius. They’re almost impossible to sing, but they’re fantastic.”

Whitacre’s piece – jointly commissioned to mark the 25th anniversary of the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and The King’s Singers’ 40th – sets Yeats’s poem The Stolen Child. As Whitacre puts it: “I thought Yeats’s exquisite poem (written when he was only 20) would create the perfect dramatic counterpoint between the two groups. The National Youth Choir would represent the voice of the human child, innocent and naive; and The King’s Singers would represent the highland faeries of the ‘water and their wild’, seducing the children away from a world of troubles with the promise of endless revelry and eternal gifts.” Which isn’t a role I’d ever have cast the down-to-earth King’s Singers in myself, but they sing their part very well, while Whitacre, standing shoeless on a box, builds the expansive, Romantic sound for which he is known. Talking to him about writing for The King’s Singers, he says: “When I first composed the piece I asked for a range chart. It was very conservative, so I thought, ‘Can I push them on this?’ When I got to know them they said they always send a conservative range chart, knowing the composer will always want to push it.” When he heard them sing his piece, however, it was “like a King’s Singers app”. A very 21st-century compliment, from a very 21st-century composer.

But it’s to the late 1960s that I take the story now, as I sit down with Lawson and Gabbitas following the recording session. “When the group started the repertoire was incredibly small, so they basically ended up doing everything they knew in the first concert,” Lawson says, “which started with some of the stuff they’d done in the chapel, went through to a commissioned piece and then ended with spirituals. And it seemed to work. There were groups around like the Deller Consort who were doing all serious music and then there were groups like the Swingle Singers who were doing all light music. And nobody had really done both.” The group’s reputation grew and by the 1970s they had become light entertainment stars, appearing on TV variety shows singing arrangements of songs from that week’s hit parade – they even had their own programme, “The King’s Singers’ World of Music”. All the while they toured extensively, increasingly expanding their activities overseas, so much so that when they looked at their diaries they realised there was no time left for the UK. They’ve tried to address this in more recent years by blocking out time in which they stay within these shores and see what comes in. It’s helped, but the bulk of their concerts remain abroad.

But that wasn’t the only “British problem”, as Gabbitas explains. In the late 1970s the group reached something of a crossroads. “There was a real decision. Do we go down the route of being light musicians or do we stay true to our roots and try to do everything? And the decision was taken that they wanted to remain serious musicians who also sang light music.” So the light music stayed. But as the ’80s wore on, and variety shows became less popular and the light entertainment department of the BBC closed down, the group began to disappear from the UK public’s radar. “The group spent probably 10 years in the wilderness in terms of the British musical scene,” says Gabbitas. “People viewed them as being light entertainers and didn’t 100 per cent treat them seriously.” So The King’s Singers concentrated on their wealth of foreign fans and the appreciation that they’d always found in America, Germany and Asia. Until, Gabbitas continues, one day in the mid-’90s, they said: “This isn’t quite right, we need to be taken seriously, we are fine musicians, we have this great heritage.” And so they spent the next six or seven years producing only very serious albums. These included: “Sacred Bridges”, a collection of psalm settings; “Landscape and Time”, a contemporary disc featuring works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Kodály and John McCabe; “The Triumphs of Oriana”, madrigals from Thomas Morley’s 1601 collection in honour of Elizabeth I; “Treason and Discord”, music from the time of the Gunpowder Plot; and Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday. “And it’s worked,” says Lawson. “And thank goodness it has,” concurs Gabbitas, “because it means we can now produce albums like ‘Simple Gifts’ and ‘Swimming over London’,” both of which feature arrangements of jazz and pop, almost as if “we’re allowed time off for good behaviour”.

So, Byrd and Tallis…Billy Joel and Sting. How do they approach these two very different sides of their repertoire? “It’s all music really,” says Gabbitas. “We try to approach it in the same way. Out of necessity we make different sounds. But generally speaking we try to bring the same contrasts and the same range of dynamics, sounds and emotions to any piece of music. And it’s surprising how complicated a close harmony arrangement can be, in the same way that if you’re singing a piece of six-part litany, that can be incredibly complex too. It’s funny, I don’t really think about them any differently, though of course they’re wildly different in terms of their style.”

Speaking of stylistic differences, their next disc is Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – big-band style. Swinging and finger-clicking along in a festive medley of jazz and Latin rhythms, the arrangement by Bill Dobbins is, well, not quite how 18th-century Leipzig would have heard it. “I think what we did was to sing the solos in a Baroque way and the chorales in a jazz way”, says Lawson. “To try to sing the arias to sound like a sub-jazz singer would not be appropriate. But then of course Bill did this fantastic stuff with the chorales, tweaked the harmonies…it was fantastic fun! Bill’s a genius, the way he does it. It doesn’t become the Christmas Oratorio in the end, it moved the art on to a different – I’m not saying higher – plane. He managed to do something new. He really knows how to write for voices – it really works. His jazz harmonies are so sophisticated, these extraordinary intervals…”

This recording marks the end of another era for the group, as their bass of 23 years, Stephen Connolly, prepares to leave. The King’s Singers’ line-up is necessarily a fluid thing, even though for a vocal group of such vintage the turnover hasn’t been particularly high. But is it then still correct to talk of a King’s Singers sound?

“I sometimes listen to a voice and I hear the characteristics of the predecessor,” says Lawson. “You almost turn into the guy you replace. It’s weird, you don’t try to do it, it just happens. Because the other five people have been in before you and your job is to fit.” He recalls “a lady who came up to me in Italy who insisted that I was the soloist on one of the tracks on the ‘Beatles Connection’ – of course it was Tony Halt [a former King’s Singer], but I could have hugged her, because he was the guy, when I was a teenager, that I wanted to be. I wanted to be Tony Halt!”

“And I wanted to be Philip!” chimes in Gabbitas. “Write that down!” laughs Lawson.

“I think especially with Philip and myself being the two baritones,” continues Gabbitas, “there’s often a combination of Tony Halt, Simon Carrington, Gabriel Crouch, a bit of Bruce Russell thrown in there – and all of our illustrious predecessors. If you listen to old recordings and you play them to other people – I played recordings to Johnny and he thought that both of us were on recordings that were actually made before I was born. It’s really strange, it’s not a conscious thing, you just morph into a King’s Singer.”

“Johnny”, or Jonathan Howard, is Connolly’s 23-year-old replacement. And so the lineage continues. Given how close-knit the group is, how blended the sound, how do they go about choosing a new member? What is a King’s Singer?

“That’s an unanswerable question,” says Gabbitas. “It’s quite intangible really. It seems to be a gut feeling, doesn’t it?”

“You often get the feeling that somebody is going to be right when something goes wrong in the audition,” adds Lawson. “Not necessarily a wrong note, but a wrong kind of sound. And you say: look, can you just do this in this way, and if they can do it straight away, they can mentally understand immediately what you’re getting at, they can change their voice, then you know you’ve got somebody flexible and that’s really the keynote in this job, vocal flexibility.”

“It’s about getting round problems,” says Gabbitas. “You might be singing a commission that nobody’s sung before, or a very established piece that you might have sung hundreds of times as a chorister, and look at it and think: I’ve got to sing a tenor part in that, because that’s just the way it falls, that’s far too high, it’s not going to work. But you just have to find a way to get round it to produce your sound in a way which fits in. Some notes you might cheat a little bit, use falsetto or change the sound – as long as the group’s sound fits in it doesn’t matter. It’s always fascinating but terrifying when we’re doing recordings and you can hear each individual mic. Quite often as individuals we’re making sounds that make you want to wince and run a mile away! But when you put the whole together it works.”

October. My linen jacket has long since been relegated to the wardrobe until next spring, and it is with upturned collar that I now cross a distinctly autumnal Sloane Square towards Cadogan Hall.

Connolly is by now heading the list of “Former Singers” on The King’s Singers’ website, and in his place Howard, aged 23, leads the group as they stride purposefully across the stage to take their places.

This evening’s programme, called Nightsongs, sees them joined by pianist Roger Vignoles for a programme of music from the German Romantic era, including Brahms, Schubert and Strauss. In the second half they turn to Britten, the Choral Dances from Gloriana being the concert’s highlight. The programme concludes with songs made famous by the Comedian Harmonists, a German group from the 1920s and ’30s whose remit was not dissimilar to that of today’s King’s Singers.

Comedian Harmonists. Not a bad phrase really to describe the ever-evolving sextet we’ve followed here. Maybe The King’s Singers would approve. Though with as stern a frown as any of this jovial group could manage, they might prompt you to keep in mind their serious side too – and given the riches on offer, it would be wrong, not to mention rude, not to. 

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