Michael Ball and Alfie Boe reveal the desperately dark times behind their success 

When you’re about to walk on stage in front of 25,000 people you tense up, and the thing you have to do is just breathe, breathe, breathe. It slows everything down and you become much calmer,’ says Alfie Boe, one half of Britain’s best-loved theatrical singing duo with Michael Ball, who have a string of sell-out tours and chart-topping albums under their belts.

The technique may be a big help for singers, but Alfie actually developed it during his appearance on Wim Hof’s BBC1 show Freeze The Fear earlier this year, when he revealed he spent five weeks in rehab after suffering with depression leading to an overdose when he separated from his wife of 16 years in 2020. And as we’ll discover today, Michael too has experienced some desperately dark times in his life.

On the face of it, they’re an unlikely pair. Alfie is the brooding and introverted opera singer who calls a spade a spade, while Michael’s the flamboyant West End star who can talk the hind legs off a donkey. But together they’ve sold over 1.5 million albums in the UK, and their debut, Together, beat Little Mix and The Rolling Stones to the Christmas No 1 in 2016. Now, with their fifth album Together In Vegas due for release, all bets are off for another festive hit.

Today there’s a tacit sensitivity around the mental health struggles Alfie, 48, talked about on Freeze The Fear. He and his actress wife Sarah met in 2002, married two years later, and have two children, Grace and Alfred. They spent the first lockdown at home in the Cotswolds, but split up in August 2020, saying that his work commitments had caused the marriage to fall apart.

With a new Vegas-inspired album, Michael Ball and Alfie Boe have revealed the desperately dark times behind their success – and how swimming in cold water has helped them manage 

Dutch wellness guru Hof claims immersion in ice-cold water can have therapeutic effects on the psyche, and on the show Alfie told him, ‘I went into a real dark place, which resulted in a foolish act of throwing some pills down my throat – I’d lost my way.’

Today he says the show was one of the best experiences of his life. ‘I got nothing but positivity from it. I came out feeling on top of the world. Breathing properly was key to the challenges we had to do, like swimming under ice and sitting in a frozen lake, and Wim was the first teacher I’d had. Throwing ourselves into that lake was daunting, but the breathing was just incredible. It’s a natural thing, but when you take it to that level it can calm down so many issues.’

Michael, 60, says he enjoyed watching Alfie on the show, not least because he has faced his own mental health demons. 

He practises the Emotional Freedom Technique, in which you tap key parts of the body to open energy pathways. ‘Like Alfie does the breathing, I do tapping because it’s a way of making you focus so that you can do what you need to do,’ he says.

Michael, 60, says he enjoyed watching Alfie on the show, not least because he has faced his own mental health demons

It was back in 1985 when he was playing Marius in the original West End production of Les Misérables that Michael was first bitten by the black dog of depression. Aged 23, he’d been ill with glandular fever, and although he went back to work after six weeks he was exhausted. 

He had a panic attack on stage, and then they started happening everywhere. He quit the show and spent nine months hiding at home, thinking he’d never work again. He felt unable to seek help and muddled his way through, and today he’s still conscious of that fear.

‘It’s important that we talk about this, and I wish I’d talked about it at the time as I was going through what essentially was a breakdown,’ he says. ‘I lost my confidence and my ability to perform. It was terrifying. 

‘It’s overwhelming, you can’t control it. I wish I’d found some help but I came through it and found a way of conquering those terrors. When you come out of it you think, ‘How do I stop this happening again?’ I needed someone to have faith in me.’

Alfie’s a passionate ambassador for Outward Bound, an educational charity that helps young people to defy limitations and believe in themselves through adventures in the wild, as it helped him as he began his musical career

That someone was Cameron Mackintosh, who offered him the role of Raoul when he recast The Phantom Of The Opera. Then he met his partner Cathy McGowan, the former Ready Steady Go! presenter who interviewed him when he was in Aspects Of Love. They’ve been together for 33 years now, and although they never had children, Michael is stepfather to Cathy’s daughter Emma and grandfather to her children.

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Michael says the breakdown ‘made me a better performer and a better person’, and Alfie feels the same. He wants to continue putting his body through extremes of cold to raise funds for mental health charities. ‘I’m up for doing any projects around mental health that use the positivity I came away with from Freeze The Fear,’ says the Tony Award-winner.

Alfie’s a passionate ambassador for Outward Bound, an educational charity that helps young people to defy limitations and believe in themselves through adventures in the wild, as it helped him as he began his musical career. 

He was broke, homeless and sleeping rough while studying at the Royal College of Music, but he used the training he’d done with Outward Bound as a youngster to tackle the tutors who wouldn’t back him and the establishment that seemed to look down its nose at the former apprentice car mechanic with a strong northern accent. 

‘I did an Outward Bound course when I was 16, and it can give kids the confidence to accept challenges as life is full of them. It’s our mentors who give us the confidence to move forward in our careers,’ he says.

Raised in working-class Fleetwood in Lancashire, Alfie was the youngest of nine and his childhood was happy. ‘My dad was my biggest influence,’ he recalls. ‘He used to sing around the house and he had a beautiful voice. He introduced me to so many artists and we used to sit around the table and play records.’

After leaving college with no A-levels he became an apprentice at the TVR car factory. His fairytale moment came when a customer heard him singing for his workmates and suggested he head for the open auditions being held by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in London. 

He turned up wearing jeans and work boots and sang the only song he knew classically, You Are My Heart’s Delight from The Land Of Smiles by Franz Lehár, which was one his dad used to listen to. But he passed.

Sadly his father Alf died in 1997, aged 63, of a brain tumour. Alfie was just 23. ‘It was really emotional when my dad passed away. I did a show shortly afterwards and I knew he was watching. Before I went on stage, I asked him to give me a hand because I used to ask him to help me out when he was alive. So now I always say, ‘Can you give me a hand?’ before I walk on stage and I can guarantee the show will go well.’

Michael agrees. ‘You need mentors throughout your career so that when you hit a crossroads there’ll be someone. My dad introduced me to Shakespeare and took me to the theatre. A lovely lady at Surrey County Youth Theatre helped me get into the Guildford School of Acting just as I was asked to leave my private school where I was failing my A-levels.’

Just as Alfie’s dad did not live to see his meteoric rise, Michael’s beloved grandmother Agnes, known as Lil, never got to see his breakthrough performance in The Pirates Of Penzance at Manchester Opera House. ‘Mum and Dad really encouraged me, but my gran was the matriarch of the family. I think she recognised a talent in me. She encouraged me to get out the dressing-up box and we have fabulous videos of us dressed up as Batman and Dobbin, as we called ourselves,’ Michael chuckles. ‘When I played Edna Turnblad in Hairspray I modelled her on Lil.’

Michael and Alfie’s friendship was cemented in 2007 when they appeared in the English National Opera’s disastrous production of Kismet at the London Coliseum. 

The show was so bad they could only deal with it by having a laugh together – and they’ve been laughing ever since. Yet they could never have predicted their combination of powerful voices and tongue-in-cheek charm would yield five albums and global success.

The new album was inspired by Alfie’s concerts at the International Theater at Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino this summer. ‘It’s where Elvis used to play when it was called the Las Vegas Hilton,’ he says. ‘I’m back there in April to do four or five shows and again next November. We saw a great opportunity to come up with a broad musical concept.’

Do they plan to do live shows there together in the future? ‘I’d love to,’ says Michael, who’s never performed in Vegas. ‘We haven’t a clue what’s next. We come up with an idea and then something tends to come along.’

Don’t bet against it being another festive chart-topper.

Michael Ball & Alfie Boe Together In Vegas is released via Decca Records on 28 October. Pre-order now.