The time is 6.30am, and Charlotte Church is in the garden in a pair of stripey blue PJ bottoms and a strappy vest top, her arms high above her head as she beats a rhythm on the sky, her bare toes digging into the dewy grass. On the singer’s head, a pair of headphones glow red in the early morning light, as she rocks out to a specially curated playlist of ambient dance tracks.
An hour later, the 37 year old is sitting on the stone steps that lead to Rhydoldog House, her cheeks pink from her efforts.
“It’s the best way to start the day,” she beams. “Once a week I dance hard for an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. Ask me to do an hour of cardio in the morning and I’d say, ‘absolutely no way on earth, it’s not happening’, but you add music, amazing playlists and dancing and it works.
“If you can really find stuff that you’re passionate about, it doesn’t have to be a grind, it doesn’t have to be a bore. I suppose it’s like that Mary Poppins quote, ‘Find the fun and then the job’s a game’.”
Charlotte isn’t alone for the silent disco, which she has named Celestial Blessings. She’s with guests from her wellness retreat, The Dreaming, deep in the Welsh woodlands of Powys.
“We’ve been dancing at dawn every week since we opened The Dreaming five months ago and I feel so much better in my body, in my shape, in my strength,” she says.
“I tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my knee in 2018 while walking through snow during the Beast from the East cold snap. Ever since, it would just pop out every now and again, but since I started dancing like this it is so much stronger.”
Charlotte became a singing sensation in 1997, when, aged 11, she called This Morning and sang Pie Jesu down the telephone to the nation.
By age 20, she had sold more than 10 million records worldwide and experienced the full rollercoaster of fame, singing for popes and presidents while enduring family feuds and intense media scrutiny, which included a tasteless countdown to her reaching the age of consent when she turned 16.
“But as dark and seedy and as terrible and as catastrophic as that attention was, if you’re looking at it in a balanced way, while there was all of that terrible stuff, there was also loads of absolutely amazing stuff too. I was creating with amazing people, I was working on the soundtrack for the film A Beautiful Mind with James Horner, I was singing with orchestras all over the world. I was travelling to Niagara Falls and Japan and meeting Tom Cruise and doing brilliantly glamorous things,” she says.
“Meanwhile, at home there were really horrible breakups and all of the other normal teenage things. I grew up in a working-class family, where there’s intergenerational trauma and all sorts going on. I was living on a council estate with my teenage boyfriends, so I really understand what it is to live in real poverty, but then I’d go off and sing in the White House or be doing this super-fabulous concert in Hong Kong with Prince.
“The polarity was really extreme, but singing was just such a balm for it all,” adds the soprano, who now lives in the Vale of Glamorgan with her children Ruby, 15, Dexter, 14, her husband, musician Jonathan Powell and their daughter Frida, two.
“Music represented freedom and joy and expression of rage and grief, happiness, sexiness. It was such a channel for me, such a way to release. I think that I basically sound therapised myself for years.”
Now Charlotte is bringing the benefits of sound therapy to guests at The Dreaming, which offers a range of price points and one “pay what you can” space on every retreat.
It features gong baths, immersion in nature and hearty, homemade vegetarian meals. The food is certainly something Charlotte is embracing, having recently revamped her attitude to her diet.
“I’ve just read a book, Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken, which has completely changed my eating habits, which will therefore change my life.
“It explains how we’re all eating all these chemicals, which disrupt the appetite pathways. The correlation with obesity is frightening – our bodies don’t even know what’s hungry and what’s not. My relationship with food was always a bit of a rebellion, I think in part because I was scrutinised so much as a young person and throughout my life. My weight was always part of that scrutiny, so I really kicked against it.
“I was really insistent that I would do and eat whatever I wanted – ‘I’m not becoming what you think I should be’. So when it came to food, I might try changing things for a couple of days, but had absolutely no sticking power.
“I had a pretty well-balanced diet, but I totally ate junk food as well, had loads of sweets – I was a proper sugar fiend. I ate whatever I wanted, all of the time. I always assumed that when I had to really start to watch what I ate, to look after my body, which I was thinking would be when I was about 40, it was going to be really difficult but I would just have to do it.
“But something in this book has clicked and it completely changed my diet overnight, cutting out anything that’s not ‘real’ food. It hasn’t even been a struggle, which I never in a million years thought would happen. I’m pleasantly surprised by the ease of this transition.”
Charlotte is also trying to go back to basics with technology.
“In the past, our dopamine pathways had to work for a reward but now we are constantly overstimulated, we’re taking in far too much information and we’re frying our nervous systems,” she says, explaining how, for 18 months, she chose to ditch her smartphone completely.
“I can feel what scrolling does to my mental health and my brain and my physical body as well. It’s not just just a mental thing, it affects your whole system. And a couple of years ago I found I was really struggling with just checking – not posting, just checking the weather, checking this, checking that.
“So I got a little Nokia and I loved it. It’s unbelievable the amount of headspace that you reclaim when you stop scrolling. I really want someone to make a dumb phone that’s just maps and WhatsApp.
“When I’m at The Dreaming I’m pretty much offline – there’s no wifi and barely any signal here.
“And on a Sunday, I’ll just put my phone in the corner of the kitchen and say, ‘I am not doing that today’ and abstain. It’s about reclaiming time and space and energy – and we could all do with more of those.”
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