After winning Britain’s Got Talent, the Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir are taking their message about the realities of life on the land on tour
From left: Richard Heady, Aled Morris, Gwen Woodruffe, Esther Stevens and Owain Fisher
It surely stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Susan Boyle’s audition among Britain’s Got Talent’s best I-didn’t-expect-that moments. A 40-strong group of farmers, few of them in the first flush of youth, dressed in fleeces, caps, jeans and boots as if they had just come in from the fields (one even had his arm in a sling), stepped out on stage in May last year to audition for the ITV talent show.
Singing together was, they explained to head judge Amanda Holden, their hobby, and their release from the physical and mental toil of hard, often isolated, 365-day-a-year jobs on the land. They were half-way to winning the audience’s hearts before they sang a note, putting the real into reality TV, but when they broke into a pitch-perfect rendition of Elbow’s One Day Like This the panel’s Golden Buzzers of approval were ablaze.
Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir went on to win the whole series and have since sung at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium as well as at the O2 Arena during the National Television Awards. Now, 18 months on, they are releasing their debut album, This Is Home, before embarking on an 18-venue countrywide tour next spring.
Who, I can’t help wondering, is going to be looking after their cows? “I’m not going to lie,” says 39-year-old Richard Heady from Drayton Parslow near Milton Keynes – phone in hand, still in the cab of his tractor, unable to make it back to his office for our Zoom call because he is sowing wheat on his family farm for next summer – “it does put more weight on the shoulders of my father and my uncle, but they have said they want me to enjoy the ride. And who knows when it is going to end?”
Fellow choir member and dairy-farm manager Owain Fisher (“It’s pronounced the Welsh way: O in front of wine”) worries that he may not be able to make all 18 of the tour dates. “As agriculture stands now, it is hard to leave the farm [at Corngafr in Carmarthenshire] to that extent. Labour costs are so high.”
Anyone who watched their first BGT audition (and if you haven’t, do, because it will make you feel better about the world) will remember 35-year-old Fisher’s face because he sang the solo at beginning of their song. He looked terrified. “I was,” he confirms. So how does he cope with nerves, if any, now? “I don’t really. At the National Television Awards, I was in front of 20,000 people and I was still terrified.”
Such has been the public reaction to Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir, that the 10 members who sing the solos are now getting recognised in the street. “I appreciate it,” says Fisher, his seven-year-old son snuggling in next to him on the sofa, “although I don’t feel eligible.” Why? “I’m just a farmer. I’m not trying to be a celebrity. My day job is agriculture and farming, and I am never going to leave that industry.”
For some, though, the strange part of overnight success comes when they find themselves swapping places with “proper” celebrities. “At the National Television Awards,” recalls Gwen Woodruffe – born and bred on a farm in Yorkshire, a graduate of Harper Adams, the farmers’ university, and now a farmer’s wife – “sitting in the front row, right in front of me as we sang, there was Graham Norton and what’s-he-called from Celebrity Traitors, Alan Carr. They are in the front row and I’m on the stage. I kept thinking it’s meant to be the other way round. It was surreal.”
Fisher confesses he is still pinching himself on a daily basis in case it is all a dream. “I get up at half four, go out, milk the cows in parlour, and when I have time to think – overthink at times – I ask myself, did I actually appear on stage at O2 Arena last night?”
For Aled Morris, 42, who works on the family sheep farm at Llangollen in Denbighshire, North Wales, alongside teaching full-time at nearby Llysfasi College, what he sees is the choir playing a role in changing public attitudes to farmers. “I do feel farmers are generally an underappreciated bunch of people who work incredibly hard and don’t always get the shiny side of the penny.”
Others evidently agree. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has just awarded the choir its Farming Champion of the Year award.
This heart-warming story (and it is surely going to be made into a film like the one about those Yorkshire members of the WI who stripped off to raise money for cancer) begins in the spring of 2025, inevitably enough with Britain’s best-known farmer Jeremy Clarkson. He wanted a choir of farmers to sing some lewd lyrics on an ad campaign for his Hawkstone drinks brand.
A social-media call-out was issued for applicants to send in a recording of themselves singing. They were looking for 10 “confident” singers for the main parts and 30 more to sing backing. “I was on Facebook looking for bargains in Marketplace when I saw it,” remembers Morris. “That’s what most farmers do.”
Morris had been in a choir when he was younger: “I have always been a shower singer – or in the car.” With his wife’s encouragement, he recorded himself singing the Welsh national anthem on his phone, propped up on a windowsill in the spare bedroom. “Only she heard it. Once I got the call to join, I deleted it.”
Fisher in Carmarthenshire had given up singing in his early teens. “It becomes not the in-thing to do for boys. You are meant to do all the macho stuff – rugby, football, boxing – which I used to do. But I had an interest in singing and performing arts.”
The bullies at school didn’t like that. “It all got a bit too much, so I took the decision to step away from singing. There was some graffiti on the electricity boxes in the town, and said in school too… things like ‘Owain’s a choir boy’ and ‘Owain’s gay’. It was easier to park singing and get on with my life.”
When he saw the call-out on social media, those memories made him decide to give it a miss at first. “But the next morning when I was in milk parlour, I told myself that if my son ever had a situation where he didn’t have the confidence to go for a trial for rugby, or push himself out of the zone, as a father I would tell him to do it. And so I felt I couldn’t be a hypocrite.”
He sent off a recording of him singing Sweet Caroline, the unofficial anthem of the England football team, not the Welsh, and it landed him a place as one of the 10 “confident” singers. Morris was picked too, as one of the 30. Both were summoned to join Clarkson and his side-kick, Kaleb Cooper, in their very own pub, the Farmer’s Dog, to film the drinks advert.
“As one of the 30, at first we just mimed along to the 10,” Morris recalls, “but then we all sang it together and it sounded so good.” The bond that developed at that session between all 40 of them led to a WhatsApp group where someone suggested auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent.
Esther Stevens, a 57-year-old farmer’s wife from Lechlade in the Cotswolds, is quick to praise Clarkson’s role – in bringing the choir together, and as a champion of farmers. A trained opera singer who worked professionally before she married and had four children – “Farmers’ wives are the unsung heroes of the farming world” – she credits him with making “a massive difference”.
“You can say what you like about the man, but he has changed how people see farming and farmers. I’m hoping people seeing us will now understand about buying British. I do understand that financially it isn’t always possible, but food security is important, which is why we don’t want too much land turned into solar farms.”
She is another who believes watching the choir has changed the public image of farmers for the better. “This may sound scary to many people, but we run our farm to make a profit. It’s a business. Too many people perceive farmers as just looking after the countryside for everyone else, and chewing a piece of straw while standing at the gate.”
The reality is very different. The Farm Safety Foundation’s Mind Your Head project reported earlier this year that the mental wellbeing of UK farmers is at a four-year low, following 47 suicides among farmers in 2024 alone – a 7 per cent increase from 2022. “We are doing the choir for ourselves,” explains Heady from his tractor cab, “but also for our mental health, the hardship and loneliness of being a farmer. It has been wonderful getting off the farm and meeting people.”
Stevens echoes the sentiment. “I was really isolated when I came to live here. We are a mile and a half from the nearest village, and I knew nobody. Even now, some days my husband is in the fields and I don’t see anybody, perhaps the postman if I’m lucky. It’s lonely and saps your confidence.”
Because the choir has been so open in talking about mental health and farmers – discussed when they first introduced themselves to Amanda Holden – Heady hopes they are breaking a taboo within the agricultural community.
“Hopefully we are showing that it is OK to be a bit more vulnerable. With the changing weather and changing legislation [Labour’s changes on inheritance tax have not been forgiven or forgotten], farmers can feel things are against us. In the choir, we can channel that emotion and put it out there in a song.”
Their winning number in the BGT final, This Is Home, which provides their album with its title, was written for them, drawing on their experiences as farmers, by composer Simon Gwilliam, who is now the choir’s musical director, with Lizzie Deane as choir director.
For Heady, one of the biggest issues is trying to strike a balance between work and family when the farm is so demanding. “The time I spend in the tractor cab is too often time when I should be putting my kids to bed. It’s the guilt – of being on the tractor when I should be at home, and being at home when I should be on the tractor. Sharing that with others in the choir going through the same thing has really made a difference.”
Fisher says the same. “Lately the choir has been so valuable to me because I’ve been made redundant.” Two of the three owners of the farm he manages “want their money out” and so he is currently facing not only losing his job but also his home, which is tied to the farm.
“You dedicate your whole life to someone else’s business, so this didn’t go down too well, and I do struggle. Usually it can be nine or 10 days here before we see an unfamiliar face on the yard. Having the choir, though, there are people checking in all the time, on WhatsApp, phone calls, emails. They have my back.”
As, I suspect, do many members of the public, who will remember his face and beautiful baritone as the first inkling they got of the phenomenon that is Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir.
Absolution by Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir is released on Friday Oct 9. Their album This is Home will be released on Nov 20. Tickets for their 2027 tour are available on Ticketmaster.
