Sutch a musical success

I think the family was gobsmacked.' It is not a word you expect from a Catholic monk, but then Dom - the correct title for a monk, it seems - Antony Sutch says quite a few things that, perhaps unfairly, you do not expect of a religious man.

Said 'gobsmacked' family - their reaction, he says, when at 27 he became a monk 20 years ago - includes a rather more well-known Sutch in Hong Kong: his elder brother Peter, head of Swire and Cathay Pacific Airways, and one of the SAR's most prominent and well-off business executives.

The contrast is remarkable with a man who gave up all that to join an order of St Benedictine monks at Downside Abbey in a rural, beautiful area of Somerset in southern England and, though headmaster of the linked Downside School, takes no salary.

But Dom Antony suggests there is less difference between them than you might suppose. 'I think there's a lot of the love of the entrepreneur, the businessman, the excitement, in me, and there's a lot of the love of the still life in him,' he says. Another brother, Patrick, heads the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York.

The entrepreneur in this black-robed chooser of a semi-cloistered life has come out in a way that has taken both him and his fellow monks down uncharted paths in the last couple of years. When he is not meditating, praying or marking end-of-term reports, Dom Antony is jet-setting around the world in a most unlikely guise - as leader of a pop group.

The 45 monks and 300-plus boys of Downside are one of Virgin Records' more unusual, and successful, sign-ups. In 1996 they produced The Abbey, an album of chants named after the Roman-age Pope St Gregory the Great and gently refined over the following 1,400 years. It rose to number three in the UK classical music charts, while their second recording, Gregorian Moods, made it to the top and was number two for eight weeks around Christmas.