There are five species at a cathedral choir school. Probationers never sing, Deputy Singing Boys only sing in emergencies, Singing Boys always sing except in emergencies, “Chorister” is like getting school colours in sport… and then there is BV – Broken Voice. Most boys’ parents hope and pray that their sons never reach BV, but I did, at 12 and a half. I sang my last service on Ash Wednesday. “Remember that dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” – very appropriate for a retiring choirboy!

Dad bought me an ipod, and took me to see Arsenal during half term, which was very decent of him as he hates football. “Never mind,” he had kept saying. “Only another few months and then you leave. When you get to Bloomfield School in September, you can join their Oriel Choir. They tour all over Europe, you know.” He had found out that this Oriel Choir was giving a concert in Rouen Cathedral and I think we would have gone (“Lovely cathedral, Rouen, Joan of Arc…”) had there been two seats available on Eurostar, but there weren’t and I would have missed seeing Arsenal.

Now I was back at school for the second half of term and it was first thing in the morning, or rather first thing in the morning for normal people. We at the choir school had already had showers, got dressed into our school uniform, eaten breakfast and done one of our two instrumental practices. The choir were now lining up outside the choir school building, black woollen cloaks over their grey uniform, in silence, according to school rules. Matt Hall, his head chorister’s medal hanging over his chest on a thick blue ribbon, was walking up and down the crocodile, a serious frown clouding his thirteen-year-old features. “Josh… shut it! We’re going to Song School,” he called, then, when he gave an emphatic nod to deputy head chorister, Tom Russell, the crocodile set off, wending its way around the cathedral close. A party of be-suited Japanese tourists snapped, their camera flashes lighting up the dull March morning, and two American women tourists in checked trousers stopped and stared open-mouthed. In the background, I could hear the hum of the traffic, the persistent “ner-ner” of a distant police siren, the normal sounds of London going to work.

“Matt giving his orders as usual,” said Pringle’s voice behind me.

I turned, from where I had been watching from an open dormitory window. “Well, he is head chorister,” I replied. Matt and I had joined the choir school on the same day some five years ago, me sobbing my little eight-year-old eyes out every night for a week.

He lent me tissues and whispered (because we weren’t allowed to talk after lights out) that I would be all right and we could play football in the cathedral close tomorrow.

“What you listening to?” I asked Pringle, who had his headphones on and was swaying and humming.

“Black Sabbath,” he replied, still humming.

I didn’t know anything by Black Sabbath, so I turned back to the window to continue staring at the close, at the plane trees which surrounded it, the circular driveway, where the parents parked at weekends, and the so-called “green”, brown and muddy after our football games…

So what did we BVs do? Not a lot. We turned over the pages for the organists and wore a different colour tie. On that first morning of BV-dom, I had wandered around the empty school building, my own soft footfalls loud on the wooden floor, hearing the faint strain of music from the Probationers’ practice downstairs and the chatter of the school cleaners. I had spent a long time studying everyone’s posters. As a general rule, the lower school were into cricket and the upper school into football, except Matt, who was into motor racing. I stared for ages at some car poster of his without interest. You see, for years, I had had no free time at all. Every single waking moment had been taken up with practices and services, lessons and prep.

Then I found Pringle again. He had been sitting on his bunk, insofar as you could sit on a choir school bottom bunk without knocking your head on the upper one, strumming his guitar, an electric guitar, although he was not allowed to plug it into the amp in the dormitory.

“I'm so glad you’re here,” he said. Pringle had been a BV since Christmas, had had all this emptiness all by himself, for two months.

We chatted for a while. I said that the choir were doing Gibbons and Byrd.

Hee wrinkled up his nose in scorn, “Boring!” Then he started to strum again.

I recognised the tune and hummed along in my half-treble, half-bass voice, “N-o a-l-aarms and n-o sur-pri –ises…”

He laughed at me. “You sound really weird!” Then he stood up. “Come on. Let’s go to Howard’s room, where I can plug this thing into the amp… and you can play on the keyboard… because you really can't sing, mate!”

Mr Howard was assistant organist at the cathedral and our music teacher. He had a really nice music room upstairs, where we were allowed to practise sometimes. “Do you think he’d mind?” I asked, as we climbed the stairs. The choir school was all stairs, six storeys in what had once been a large house in the cathedral close.

“We’re doing music, aren’t we?” said Pringle, opening the door. “Proper music. None of that Byrd stuff.”

He got out his amp from where it was stored in the corner and began playing again. This time, he was playing Nirvana and the sound really was electric, the twanging of his guitar resonating in the small room. “Proper music,” he repeated.

I didn’t know at that time that Kurt Cobain played acoustic guitar, but I would learn all that sort of thing fast. My father was an amateur church organist (a high proportion of cathedral choristers’ parents are) and he had a very clear idea as to the “proper-ness” of music, and it certainly would not have included either Radiohead or Nirvana.

“Better than what they do in Song School!”

When the boys returned an hour later, I felt I was being returned to reality, the thud-thud of their feet in the corridors, someone strumming on the dormitory piano, their high-pitched shouting. Choirboys do shout a lot – it’s the nature of the animal.

We spent the rest of that term in Mr Howard’s music room, playing Nirvana, Radiohead, Moby, Feeder and Muse, while the boys still in the choir worked their way through Purcell, Tallis and Orlando Gibbons. We also attempted writing our own music, but it never sounded quite right. Once, I mentioned to Pringle that you could buy books of various bands’ music for guitar or keyboard, in music shops.

Pringle fixed upon me a derisive stare which lasted for a full minute. “I'm a musician, man!” He could strum out any tune by ear. We were going to have our own band, we said.

“What shall we call it?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” replied Pringle, strumming the first riff of “Street Spirit” on his guitar. “The BVs?”

“That sounds stupid!”

“Can you think of anything better?”

I shrugged.

“It’s a working title, isn't it? They do that in the music business. Have a working title, then think of a really zappy title afterwards.” Both his parents were professional musicians.

At home at Easter, I played rock on my hifi all day long, driving my poor church organist father crazy, and when we returned to school Pringle and I continued where we had left off, but somehow, something was missing now. Pringle was obsessed with Nirvana, but, actually, Nirvana didn’t do all that much for me. “Teen Spirit” was OK, but all the other songs sounded a bit bare, I thought. Then he got into Enimem and I wasn’t too keen on that either.

I remembered how excited I had been when I had discovered Moby last term. “It’s rock mixed with Blues and Gospel Music!” I had told Dad excitedly over Easter, very proud of myself for analysing the different musical styles. Dad had grunted “Hrmff”. If only I could discover Moby all over again!

That summer morning, I again watched the boys’ crocodile wend its way round the cathedral close into the cloister. “They’re doing “Rejoice in the Lamb” by Britten,” I said to Pringle.

Pringle nodded, to the beat of the vibrating overspill from his ipod. “Load of rubbish about a cat.”

I know that I'm a rock fan now, but I like “Rejoice in the Lamb”. The words are by the mad poet, Christopher Smart. It was the first thing our form had sung in the cathedral. We had been Deputy Singing Boys – the ones who only sing in emergencies - and we had been allowed to join the main choir during Evensong for just this one item. We had stood in a little huddle at the end of the choir stalls, sharing copies, feeling ten feet high, knowing that our parents were watching us in delighted surprise, sensing - for the first of many times - that we were consummating our parents’ dreams.

We had just been singing “..And I consider my cat Geoffrey, For he is a creature of the Living God” when this ginger cat had strutted up the chancel, not at all bothered about anything, certainly not by our singing.

There had been a quick intake of breath from the Probationers’ stall, but no more. Mr Davies, the Probationers’ form teacher, had swung round his fierce eyes and glared. We who were singing never even hesitated, just continued singing “…A mouse is a creature of infinite valour…” That was what you did. In the Probationer year, you learned that when in the cathedral, you sat totally still, not speaking to your neighbour, not looking left or right, and, at weekends, not looking at the back of the stalls for your parents, whom you hadn't seen all week.

Now I yearned to sing “Rejoice in the Lamb” again. I wanted to go back with the others to Song School, to stand in the Song School stalls, and, yes, even for a whole hour’s practice, and sing “Rejoice in the Lamb”. But I couldn’t.

The following Sunday, they did the Greer Mass, my favourite piece. “Your voice is settling down nicely. You’ll be able to sing again when you get to Bloomfield School,” said Dad, that afternoon after Evensong, “in the Oriel Choir. They’re singing at the Chelmsford Festival this week.”

Chelmsford Festival? We had sung at The Proms last summer! And I wasn’t interested in singing in some school choir. I wanted to sing in the cathedral again, to process through the Nave, walking over every familiar gravestone and plaque, the step where Matt had fallen arse-over-tip as a new Singing Boy and sung on with a nose bleed, to go behind the rood screen into the Quire, hidden away from the rest of the world, the whistling and ner-ner of the police sirens sounding over the steady homely incantation of the Responses.

There were only three weeks of term left now, three more weeks of choir school. Then two weeks. I went on a new boys induction day at Bloomfields. All the kids looked so big and there were so many of them: seven hundred to our forty. The dormitories were scruffy and there were dolly birds on the wall. The Music School was vast, though, a whole corridor of practice rooms, with serious-looking sixth formers playing cello in them, but the “Singing Hall” (not even called a “song school”, mind) was tiny and even had chairs in it.

One week left. The boys who were leaving were allowed to choose the music for the last week. I chose “Rejoice in the Lamb” and I went and sat in the cathedral to listen to it. I begged Pringle to come with me, but he wouldn’t. He just stayed in the dormitory reading “New Musical Express”.

Afterwards, I sat next to Matt at tea. “It was really good,” I told him. “Wish I was still singing sometimes.”

“Thought all you and Pringle did was listen to Enimem,” Matt retorted.

“Him, not me. What music did you choose, Matt?”

“Parry’s “I was Glad”,” he said, digging his fork into a glutinous lump of macaroni cheese. “You know… you could sing in that.”

“No, I couldn’t! I'm a bass now.” I tried to sound superior, to let him know that singing treble was beneath me. “How?”

“The “Vivat Regina” bit at the end,” retorted Matt.

I frowned. “It’s only a few bars.”

“Yes. Right. Bet they’d let you do that, you and Pringle.”

When I first mentioned it to Pringle, he wasn’t keen. “I couldn’t be bothered.” He had been out of the choir since Christmas, a long time.

I didn’t do anything about it for two days. I had discovered the “Pablo Honey” album reduced in Tower Records, and I was playing that a lot. Pringle said it was lightweight, not real Radiohead, but I quite liked it. On the last Friday morning, we played some of the tracks in Mr Howard’s music room and Pringle sung them better than the originals, I thought.

“We must keep our band going,” I said afterwards. “The BVs… Working Title.”

“Yeah but…” His voice faded as he put his guitar away. “We haven’t got any music. We can't keep doing covers.”

“We will. We’re musicians. When we’re older… we’ll compose.”

“Maybe.” Then he looked up at me. “Did you ask about us doing the Vivat Reginas in “I was Glad” then?”

I hadn't. I hadn't thought he was interested. Later, I spoke to Mr Howard who spoke to Dr Riley, the organist proper. They weren’t very happy about it, but, on the last Sunday morning, Dr Riley swept into the dormitory while Pringle and I were packing and said, yes, we could sing the Vivat Reginas, with the lay vicars. We would have to go to Song School at 2 o'clock.

We thought about putting on our cloaks and joining the choir crocodile, for old time’s sake, but in the event we ambled in a few minutes afterwards and strolled up to the lay vicars’ stall. We had to maintain our status somehow. We were not allowed to process in with the choir, of course. We had to sit behind the basses in our school blazers, but at the end of the piece we stood up and bellowed out, “Vivat! Vivat! Vivat Regina!” in our raw, untried bass voices.

“Not supposed to do the Vivat Reginas except at a coronation!” muttered Dad, in the car afterwards, but I didn’t care. Back home, in my room, I took off my choir school uniform for the last time and, in my underpants, put on my Moby CD.