Guy Garvey refused to sing on the BBC’s official Olympics theme.
The Elbow star was asked to compose the tune to accompany the broadcasting corporation’s coverage of the London summer games this year, but didn’t want his vocals on it, as he wanted the song to be about the Olympics rather than his band.
He said: ”I knew I wanted to get my ego out of the way, so I told them that I wasn’t going to sing on it. It’s not an Elbow song; it’s an Olympics theme song and it has to sound like it belongs to everybody. I think having the gospel choir on there helps give it that ‘everyman’ feel.
”The choir was especially assembled for us, and we recorded them at Abbey Road in Studio 2. That’s The Beatles’ old studio, which was great.”
Guy, 38, also said the music needed to be appropriate for both winning and losing athletes.
He told The Independent newspaper: ”We wanted to do something quite traditional-sounding with a big gospel choir and a philharmonic orchestra. We knew it would have to have some gladiatorial elements; that it would need to be fierce. It also had to be the biggest piece of music we could create, yet be written in such a way that you could strip it down into different elements for use over different kinds of footage. We needed something that could work as a ‘winning’ theme or a ‘losing’ theme.”
The 2012 Olympic games will start on August 3 in London.