"My voice was always low," he says. "When I was about nine or 10 people would ask me, 'boy, where'd you get that voice? You sound like a grandfather,' they'd say."

White, one the great bass-baritones of our age, was born in Jamaica and still talks with a Caribbean lilt, especially when the conversation turns to his childhood or Usain Bolt. He didn't grow up around classical music and signed up to study Economics at university – "in Jamaica a man had to have a upstanding profession," he says. But during a year of work experience he found himself dissatisfied. "I wasn't good at it. My heart wasn't in it. In moments of difficulty I would turn to singing and would feel different: more rejuvenated, more ready to face life."