Eddie Henley and friends crowned Gareth Malone’s ‘Best in Britain’
A singing law graduate has managed to juggle Trowers & Hamlins training contract prep with a tenor voice part to reach BBC2 choir competition victory.
Property law lover Eddie Henley is the founder and musical director of ‘Semi-Toned’, an all-male a cappella group which was this week awarded ‘Best in Britain’ by choirmaster and TV personality Gareth Malone.
In the sixth and final episode of the TV competition, the group had ten days to prepare two songs — Señorita by Justin Timberlake and Anthem of Praise by Richard Smallwood — to perform at Central Hall in Westminster to a 2,000-strong crowd.
It sounds intense, yet founder Henley is probably used to the pressure. Having graduated from the University of Exeter with a 2:1 degree back in 2013, he has enjoyed a career at the coalface of commercial law.
After dabbling in an assistant role at the Royal Bank of Scotland, Henley joined international giant Trowers as a paralegal back in 2014. He then studied the Legal Practice Course (LPC) at the University of Law and is now a fully-fledged trainee solicitor.
But Henley isn’t the only big-name lawyer on the a cappella scene. Remember uber brain law student Deon Fang, who heads up singing Oxford University students ‘Out of the Blue’?
The musical maestros became household names after they competed in Britain’s Got Talent and have since released a number of successful charity singles. Most recently, the team debuted a mash-up version of Ariana Grande’s ‘Into You’ and ‘Greedy’, the proceeds of which will be donated to Oxford-based children’s hospice Helen and Douglas House.
We have everything crossed for an Out of the Blue/Semi-Toned collaboration.
You can watch the final episode of The Choir: Gareth’s Best in Britain in full here.