Keira Knightley: 'I'm never going to sing again'

8 July 2014, 16:37 | Updated: 7 December 2016, 14:40

Actress took singing lessons and asked her rock star husband to teach her guitar for her new film Begin Again. So, how did that turn out?

In her new film, Begin Again, Keira Knightley sings and plays guitar on screen for the first time. But it was a nerve-wracking experience for the 29-year-old actress. She only had a handful of singing lessons and the finished songs arrived just two days before she was scheduled to record them.

"It was rather tense," she tells tenor and Classic FM broadcaster Wynne Evans in an interview to be broadcast this Sunday. "I don't think I was in my happiest of moods," she says.

Keira Knightley on the Culture Club, Sunday 13 July 2014 >

Knightley also had to call upon her husband, James Righton from 'new rave' band, Klaxons, to teach her the guitar.

The lessons were a "disaster," she says. "It was a miracle that the marriage survived, and a miracle that neither of us died."

So does the actress now have any plans to show off her new skills in public - at a karaoke bar, perhaps? 

"I absolutely hate karaoke. I'm never going to sing again," she tells Evans.

In the interview, which will be featured in Charlotte Green's Culture Club on Sunday 13 July at 3pm, Knightley also reveals that she listens to Rachmaninov and Elgar on her iPod to help her prepare for very dramatic scenes, and that she learned the flute as a youngster.

"I was all right... the tone was quite good," she says.

She also talks about the importance of music as an accompaniment to film.

"It's the strangest thing when you see a rough cut of the film without the music. It's terrifying," says Knightley.