you call this bacon?

I really enjoy being part of a choir.

Even if I didn’t work towards any performances in front of an actual audience, I still think it would be worthwhile. There’s something pure and therapeutic about just singing for a couple of hours a week, and there’s something wonderful about a choir of human voices coming together in harmony.

…I just wish that some of our songs were a bit better. Or perhaps by “better”, I really mean “a bit cooler”. Don’t get me wrong though: it’s definitely not that I’m too-cool-for-school, and there are very few songs in our repertoire that I actively dislike. In fact, some of the ones that I thought I liked the least have often turned out to be the ones that I have enjoyed singing the most…. it’s just that there’s something downright WRONG about being caught in the office quietly singing "Little Town (Belle's Song)" from the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack to myself as I sit at my desk. I’ve never even seen the Disney animation and I’ve certainly not seen the recent adaptation starring Emma Watson, and yet this has been my number one earworm for several weeks now. My wife actually walked into the kitchen this weekend to find me singing this song along with Alexa as I was cooking.
“Er, What’s this?”
“It’s Emma Watson singing on the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack”
“Why on earth are you playing this?”
“Because choir”
“Ah. I see” [shakes head sadly and walks off]

You know what, I actually quite like it, too.

For the record though, “Wind Beneath My Wings” is not a beautiful, uplifting song… it’s a dirge and a #humblebrag. I have my limits.

nothing else matters...

Metallica have just released their first studio album since 2008.  It's receiving some decent reviews, but Metallica being Metallica, there are also plenty of haters lining up to complain that this album isn't anywhere near as good as [insert name of Metallica album here, probably from the mid-1980s, but if feeling awkward then Load].

I'm quite keen to give it a listen.

Sadly I can't.  Not for another couple of weeks, anyway.  And it's all my own bloody fault too... totally self-inflicted*.

It's nearly the end of the season at choir.  In just over a week, and with two more practice sessions to go, we'll be into the Christmas concerts.  I want to perform these 'books down' so that I can concentrate on the cues from our musical director, but this means that I need to actually learn the damn songs.  Unfortunately, this means that I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last few weeks listening to nothing but my choir rehearsal tracks - rather dull MP3s that very plainly highlight the voice part that you're trying to learn.... bass, in my case... and pretty much nothing else. They certainly don't highlight the songs to their best effect, anyway.

This works up to a point, helping you to learn your voice part (they're especially useful if you think you already know the song, when actually you know the melody but not the harmony you'll be singing).  But there are always a few songs that refuse to completely go in... the final 15% just seems to get stuck and you need to put in that bit of extra effort to get them properly learnt.

Sadly, for me, from this season's songs, the ones that require the work are:

- Merry Christmas Everyone (bloody Shakin Stevens!)
- Jingle Bell Rock (fiddly opening lyrics)
- That's Christmas to Me

...so I'm spending all my spare time at the moment listening to a crappy backing track version of a Shakin Stevens song that I hated before we even started the season.

Brilliant.  It's about the least metal reason there could possibly be for not listening to the new Metallica album.  I defy you to think of a less metal reason than that.

Pah.

* I'm a slave to my art.

sing, sing, sing...

Sunday was the climax to the Spring season at choir, with a big concert at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre.  The choir actually did two performances on the day, but I only sang in the matinee because I'm currently mindful of how much energy I'm expending in the build-up to Sunday's little run.

It's all about the bass....

The concert went really well, and we played to a packed auditorium, but it's been a bit of a bumpy season: I was initially quite keen to sing a solo, but for various reasons, decided not to go ahead with it... and with hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't.  It's not that I don't think I'm capable of singing to the standard required, it's just that I think I'd underestimated how much of my mental and physical resources training for the marathon would take this year.  Much more than last year, anyway. 

I've really enjoyed singing with the choir over the last year or so, and part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that you have to put in a fair bit of effort to learn your part well enough to be able to sing it without your book.  It's easy enough to turn up to rehearsal each week and sing, but to take it up to the next level, you need to be able to take your nose out of the book and commit to following the prompts of the musical director.  To do that, I find that I have to spend an awful lot of time listening to the rehearsal tracks of my part, downloaded onto my iPod.  If you listen to that enough, you start to learn your part, which is especially important if your part doesn't follow the tune, which is usually the case as a bass.  It really needs to be second nature.. which is actually pretty hard, especially if you know the song you're learning.

This season's songs included several that I thought I knew really well.  Probably the hardest was "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, which is a great song but I had to work to actually learn the lyrics and to learn which bits I'm not supposed to be singing.  Even a song as seemingly simple as "Here Comes The Sun" turns out to be a bit of a nightmare of changing time signatures, requiring concentration to get right.

The net result of all this is that I basically listen to nothing by my rehearsal tracks for weeks.  This means that one of the greatest joys of finishing a season is that I get to listen to something else!  Since last Sunday, I've worked my way through some Muse, some Guns n"Roses, AC/DC, Soundgarden, a bit of Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Beastie Boys....

...the bad news is that the new choir season starts in exactly a week's time.  The rehearsal tracks are actually already available to download, but I'm just nowhere near ready to make that sort of commitment quite yet.

do you hear the people sing?

The real show-stopper in this my choir's repertoire this season is a medley of songs from Les Mis.  They've sung it before, and when we had a vote on the songs to be included in the "best of the first five years" season in the summer, this was the number one choice.  It wasn't included in the end because we couldn't get the rights to record it onto the CD we made in Scarborough, but it's probably the most popular number in the history of the choir.... it lasts a whole fifteen minutes, for goodness sake, so it's not exactly an easy sing.

Les Mis?  Meh.

I'm not familiar with the musical and I don't know any of the songs.  I know it's based on a classic of French literature, and I have dim memories of watching a film version starring Anthony Perkins, but the musical is something that I'm just not interested in.

Imagine my surprise then, when after only a couple of weeks of rehearsals, the only songs that were stuck in my head for the rest of the week were songs from the medley: "Look Down", "I Dreamed a Dream", "The Thénardier Waltz of Treachery", "One Day More".... I'd never heard them performed anywhere, but the process of learning how to sing them was embedding them in my head.  I was curious enough to look up the novel and to learn that it's *not* set around the French Revolution, but starts in 1815 after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy.  Huh.  I was told that watching the songs in context would really help me to 'get' them, but I seemed to be doing alright....

... and then curiosity got the better of me, and last weekend, I downloaded and watched the 2012 film starring Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Russell Crowe.

My verdict?  Meh.

Don't get me wrong: it's a powerful story and those songs have a real emotional heft.  Hathaway's Fantine in particular is superb.  Russell Crowe was a controversial choice for Javert, and there was much comment about his singing, but I thought he was a good choice and that his singing was fine.  Not as good as someone like Hathaway, but it was good enough and his general bearing was perfect for the role.

...but this brings me to my main problem with it: it's 2 hours and 38 minutes long and the fact that everything is sung quickly became quite wearing.  The main set-pieces were superb, right enough, but there's not a single piece of proper dialogue in the whole damn film.  I started to imagine Jean Valjean and Cosette coming down to breakfast and having an entirely sung exchange about passing the jam, please.  It's ridiculous.  Well, not to my taste, anyway.  Neither was Eddie Redmayne's singing voice, but that might just be me.  Surely I wasn't alone in cheering when that irritating little brat (Gavroche) bit the bullet?  Also, is anyone really surprised that Valjean dies shortly after crawling through the Paris sewers? Marius should probably consider himself lucky that he didn't get some kind of hideous infection in his wounds (as well as the fact that his grandfather appears to be quite so forgiving).

So. Yes.  An interesting way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

It *is* a good sing, though.  Although I have started singing normal conversation now, which is fine at home, but a little annoying in the office.

hang some tinsel on that evergreen bough....

On Tuesday evening, I took part in a singing Christmas Tree.

We’ve been learning the winter season at choir now for something approaching 3 months, but it’s not really accurate to call our weekly sessions “rehearsals”, because that implies that the end goal is the end-of-season concerts. The concerts certainly provide some focus – we’re singing to 800 people in Nottingham’s Albert Hall on Sunday evening – but I think the simple act of singing in a choir for a couple of hours each week is a thing worth celebrating in its own right. It’s definitely more than just practice for the big concerts.

The singing Christmas Tree was part of a series of events laid on this week by the West Bridgford Methodist church to support some of their charities. Although we sing in this church every week, we’ve not actually practiced with the choir in this arrangement, and it was very strange to find myself singing and not to be able to hear any other basses. In some of the songs that I know really well, all I could hear was other voice parts, and I started to wonder if I was singing the wrong bits. It was my first concert of the season, and we were far from perfect on the night, but I’m pretty sure we got away with it. One more concert tonight and then the next stop is the Albert Hall.

As an atheist, you wouldn’t think that churches are really my natural habitat, nor would you imagine that I would enjoy singing songs about God (we’re not a religious choir, but at this time of the year, it sort of goes with the territory). Well, I’ve always loved cathedrals as beautiful buildings in their own right, and it's possible to enjoy that and even to appreciate the devotion that built them without buying into anything else.  And actually I’m able to switch off the part of my brain that finds this God stuff daft, and just enjoy these songs as beautiful songs (there was an especially lovely ensemble piece on Tuesday of "The Angel Gabriel").  Some of them are a bit grovelly, it must be said, which wouldn’t be to my taste if I was the Creator, but I'm not, so there you go.  Perhaps he likes that sort of stuff (although I suspect it says an awful lot more about the songwriters than it does their God).

 My friend Tony took some pictures of me as we were singing “Little Donkey”. We don’t do much choreography – lucky for me – but we did have to do a little bit of gazing up in wonder during this song during the “ring out those bells tonight” bit. As has been pointed out, I look as though I’m not so much looking up in wonder as staring at an incoming comet. Or, as I suggested, I’ve realised that a lifetime of atheism is coming home to roost, and that I’m standing in a church and about to burst into flames.

You, dear reader, can make up your own mind….

no matter what comes my way, I'll lift my voice and say...

I’m an atheist. Although it might sound ridiculous, I try not to use religious turns of phrase in my every day vocabulary: oh my God, Jesus Christ, Good Lord, heavens above…. That kind of stuff. I know that they’re only words, but there are so many other words that I could be using instead, that I’ve imposed this little rule on myself to push the language of religion just that little bit further away.

That being true, it probably seems a little odd that I’m perfectly happy to sing devotional songs at choir. We’re not a religious choir by any means and we don’t sing all that many songs about God, but we do sing some. One of my favourite songs from the last season was a gospel song called “Total Praise” and another was “Heaven Help Us All” by Stevie Wonder. They’re both great songs, and the gospel song in particular, originally performed by the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, was an absolute joy to sing. This season we’re doing a few carols (as you’d probably expect when all our concerts are in December), as well as another gospel song called “Hallelujah Anyhow”, which is also shaping up to sound pretty good.

So why no problem with these?

Well, because. Just because. They’re only songs and we make a splendid noise as a choir when we sing them. Do I need another reason? Some of the other singers might be wholeheartedly offering them up to their God in devotion, but the fact that I’m not doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy them for what they are and how we sound and how they make me feel when I sing them.
I like visiting cathedrals. Part of my interest in them stems from my love of history and art history (I once wrote an essay on some of the iconography on the stained glass windows in York Minster, and it tickles me greatly that, tucked away on the side of the choir screen of this great Yorkist stronghold is a little stone carving of a chained white hart, the symbol of the very Plantagenet Richard II). Even as an atheist, I can appreciate the devotion that went into these buildings and I love spending time soaking it up (providing they haven’t put bloody turnstiles up asking for money to get in).

I was a chorister at school, and we would almost exclusively sing devotional songs, lifting our voices in praise of God. I loved them. My favourite carol is an old medieval English number called “Adam Lay Ybounden” and I love many of the Christian songs of Christmas as they celebrate the birth of a man that I don’t believe was the son of God. And you know what? That doesn’t matter at all and I certainly don’t have a problem with it.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph….why on earth would I have a problem with it?

Better to ask me instead about why we seem to sing so many bloody songs by Queen in this choir…. I seem to be in a minority of one, but I can’t be doing with bloody Queen.

pictures of you....

My friend Tony is something of a photography buff, and he took many fantastic photos documenting our time in Scarborough (his wife is in the choir, Tony spent his time wandering around the town taking photos of whatever and whoever took his fancy). Because of his wife’s involvement as a singer, Tony has sort of become the choir’s unofficial photographer, snapping pictures of us as we sing at various concerts.

He took an excellent picture of me at our concert in Bolsover, just at the point in the Motown Medley where the basses and tenors have put on their sunglasses to sing “Heard it Through the Grapevine”.

A colleague of mine liked this so much that she bounded up to me when I was next in the office to show me that she had installed it at the background picture on her new phone. In fact, it was the only photo on her phone.

OK. Fair enough, I suppose. Apparently I lasted 24 hours, which with this girl’s attention span is probably something of a miracle.

Tony took another great picture of me in Scarborough this weekend, but when I got back to work, this same girl didn’t seem impressed:

“It doesn’t look like you”
“What do you mean it doesn’t look like me?”
“Your eyes look all black and you don’t have black eyes. You have blue eyes”
“Yes, but it’s a black and white photograph”
“It doesn’t look like you and I don’t like it”

Everyone's a critic.

win yourself a cheap tray...

The view from the castle

The salad I had for my lunch today had a lovely sticker on it proclaiming “Tastes of the British Isles”. This prompted me to wonder if the UK really did taste of beetroot, lentil and goat’s cheese. After some thought, I decided that I thought that it maybe tasted a bit of beetroot.

so that's £3, yeah?

I’ve spent the last four days in Scarborough with the choir, recording a CD to celebrate our fifth birthday. If I had to say what Scarborough tasted like, I would probably say that it tasted of lager, deep-fried food and regret. It’s a funny place; a somewhat faded English seaside town, filled with tatty amusement arcades, grotty looking pubs and people with buckets and spades, determined to sit on the beach, even if that meant huddling behind a windbreaker or hiding in a tent.  Morrissey would love it.

Typical British beachwear....

Although there were lots of places to buy fish and chips on the sea-front, every single restaurant seemed to shut by 8pm, with even the pub kitchens closing. As I tend to eat around 9pm and have plenty of options if I want to eat out, this was all a little confusing. If you have your tea at half past five, what do you do with the rest of your evening?

This was on the entrance to a toy shop, obviously.... why would they like children?

I was here on a stag-do only a couple of years ago, but I still can’t really get my head around the place. It certainly involves a lot of walking up and down cliffs that the Victorians have covered with “gardens”, that’s for sure. I must have covered more altitude in a few days then I generally do in a normal month. Obviously, me being me, I made it all a little bit harder by going out for a couple of runs before breakfast: the first was up onto the cliffs away to the south of Scarborough Bay, and the second was in the other direction up the cliffs to the castle: both involved a lot of up and down, although when you’re accustomed to running alongside the Trent, it’s actually really nice to run by the sea.

The recording itself took place in the Spa complex on the south side of the town and was great fun. I’ve never done anything remotely like this before, and it was actually really hard work, in a large room with 140 other people, running through around 15 songs and trying to capture the best possible performance. We know the songs reasonably well off the back of 10 weeks of rehearsals and a couple of weeks of performances, but the presence of the sound engineer and the microphones brings about a totally different pressure. I found it exhausting having to concentrate really hard, trying not to make any mistakes and to watch our musical director like a hawk so that I didn’t miss any cues or anything. It was two pretty full days, but was ultimately very rewarding (even before I get to hear the finished product).

One of Tony's excellent pictures from the weekend

I originally double-booked this weekend: I had tickets to attend the Edgbaston test against the Australians (see hat pictured above), but decided that I’ve been to see the cricket before (and it's the Trent Bridge test this week) and I’ve never made a CD. As it happened, the test was over by Friday afternoon anyway (with England winning).  Perfect!

The CD should be mixed and ready at some point before Christmas, so I guess you know what you’ll be getting from me….

A fantastic few days in great company. This is only my second season in the choir, and I have to say that it’s been great fun: I’ve met loads of people and been pushed out of my comfort zone in lots of ways. Who knows… maybe I’ll dust off my Johnny Cash impression and try for a solo spot after Christmas.

To be honest, it almost doesn’t matter what we sound like on the finished CD because it was a fantastic experience recording it….but I reckon it’s going to be a good one.  With this choir and this musical director, how could it not be?

sing, sing, sing...

When I first joined the choir, I hadn’t really done much thinking beyond thinking that it might be quite fun to do a bit of singing. What I hadn’t really considered was the amount of extra effort I would need to put in to learn my part well enough to be able to hold up my end at any performances. It was a bit of an eye-opener, as we approached the concerts at the end of my first season, including one in front of a paying audience of 600 people in the Sheffield Octagon, to suddenly realise that I was going to actually need to put some serious work into listening to the MP3s of my part and learning the words.  Come to that, I hadn't even really thought about the fact that my part wouldn't always follow the melody line.  You think you know a song....

When I was at school, I really didn’t like Latin classes very much, and I went through a phase of going to extraordinary lengths to cheat in the weekly tests by writing vocabulary lists down in tiny handwriting and then taping it to the back of my watch or stapling it to the back of my tie or similar. After a while, it dawned on me that it was actually much easier to put the effort into actually learning the words than it was to laboriously write them out. My marks improved too. I’ve been through a similar experience with choir: you can actually take your book of music into most (but not all) of the events we have, and you can certainly make yourself a crib sheet with prompts like first lines and so on. In the end though, it’s much easier to just learn your part as best as you can and then spend your time watching the musical director as you sing, because he gives us so many prompts and cues and generally makes the whole thing much easier than trying to look at your book, look at him AND to sing.

We had ten songs in my first season, together with a couple of extra ones we learned for the big concert. We’re doing a “best of” season currently, to celebrate 5 years of the choir, and we’re doing a song from every season. In total, that’s about 50% more songs than usual, which is fine if you’ve been in the choir for a while and have done most of them before, but is a nightmare if you’re new. Out of the fifteen songs in the season, I knew one.  As well as the sheer volume of songs to learn, it’s the fact that, with so many to get through, two hours on a Tuesday night isn’t really enough to cover any of them in any depth. There have been a few extra sessions at the weekend, but I’ve only been able to make one of them.

Needless to say, I’ve spent most of the last two weeks spending every spare moment trying to learn my part. I bought a number of albums when we got back from Glastonbury the other week, but I simply haven’t had any time to listen to any of them because I’ve been listening to the recording of my part.

We had our end of season concert in Nottingham on Tuesday and…. it went really well. We weren’t perfect, by any means (honestly, we’ve been told a hundred times that, if we can’t reach the high bass part at the start of “The Rose”, then we just shouldn’t sing at all… but a few people around me where absolutely miles off it on Tuesday night, bless them).. but I think that overall, we sounded really good. I had a couple of moments where I was able to step outside of what I was singing and really hear the sound of the choir as it came together and we sounded brilliant. There were about 100 of us in the choir on the night, and when we came together, I think we made a splendid noise.

Some of my colleagues came to watch, which was lovely of them. As well as just offering support by being there, they were whooping and cheering and shouting out my name… so now some of my fellow basses think that I’m something of a celebrity, which is kinda nice (even if it never, ever happens again). To be honest, I think the girls in my team were nearly as excited as the children present when we started singing “Circle of Life” and “Let it Go”. They were certainly disappointed when I didn't do an air-grab at the key change in "You Raise Me Up".

I’ve a couple more concerts lined up over the next couple of weeks, starting with a much smaller performance in a church in Bolsover tomorrow night. I snatched the chance last night to listen to some local punk music for a review in a forthcoming Leftlion, but as of tonight I have to get back on my MP3s to make sure I polish up a few songs… “Lean on Me” and “World in Union” definitely need some work, and I could be more certain of a couple of bits in the Phantom of the Opera medley too.

It’s hard work, but in a good way.

I think.

heaven knows I've tried....

The current season at choir is celebrating the first five years and is a "best of" selection of the most popular songs from every season to date, voted for by the members.  That's fifteen songs in total, which is great, but is also fully five more than we would usually cover in a single season.

That's a lot to get through when you only really have a couple of hours a week together to work with.  Of course, because it's a "best of" season, many people in the choir have done some or all of these songs before, so it's probably not that big a deal.  I only joined last season, so of those fifteen songs, I only really know one.  The rest have been a bit of a ride, with less time spent on each song and some barely being covered at all.  Not to mention what you miss when you can't attend a session.

I won't lie: it's been a bit of a struggle.

It's a bit like exams.  When the whole season stretched out in front of me, there didn't seem to be any great urgency, and I didn't spend a whole lot of time listening to the MP3s of my part and trying to get the words down off by heart.  Then, suddenly, before I really knew what was happening, I was back from Glastonbury (whoops, there's one session gone) and realising that I only had a couple of weeks before our end of season concert and that I didn't know many of the songs half as well as perhaps I should.

You're allowed your books at most of the concerts, but in my experience, it's much better to be able to put them aside and to focus your full attention on the musical director, because he works so hard to cue us in and make sure we're singing at the right speed and volumes and things like that.  If you're not watching him, you may be sure of all the words and most of the notes (if you can read music), but you miss so much else.

With the final concerts looming, I put in some focused effort over the last week and have really tried to listen to these damn songs as much as I can.  I might have guessed that a Phantom of the Opera medley might be wordy, but who knew that "Lean on Me" had so many damn words? Or that there are so many subtleties of volume in singing "World in Union"?  And don't get me started on the ridiculous changes of pace in "The World That We Created".  I'm struggling with the absurdly pompous lyrics as it is.

Still, at least we can all agree that the "Frozen Heart" / "Let it Go" medley is going to bring the house down, right?  My colleagues are going to make a night of it and come to watch me perform next week, and they've asked if it's okay to sing along.  Help yourselves.....

I've downloaded a few albums since getting back from Glastonbury: the new Everything Everything and Django Django; I've bought some Frank Turner and I need to be paying more attention to the Sufjan Stevens and Blur and Muse albums too.  I also need to get my teeth into the compilation CD that Ali and Lilly were kind enough to send me months ago.... but no, for the next few weeks, until I get through all the performances, I'll be mostly listening to those damn MP3s of the bass part of these damn songs.

Still, looking on the brightside, the songs we're covering in the winter season have been announced: as well as including "White Winter Hymnal", we'll also be singing "A Wombling Christmas".  How could anyone resist that?

enlargen your world....

Back in January, I joined a choir.  On Saturday night, I was one of two hundred singers performing with a live rock band in front of a sell-out crowd of 600 people at the Octagon in Sheffield.  With all the various technical rehearsals and quite a lot of hanging around, it was a pretty long day.... but it was also an excellent day.



It's pretty disconcerting singing when you can't really hear anyone else singing, but the acoustics of the venue, the volume of the band and the fact that I was standing right next to them (and behind all the other basses) all combined to mean that this was exactly the position I found myself in.  Still, that's what rehearsals are for, right?  I'm also told that the band were so loud for some of the gig, that in places, our voices were a little overwhelmed by the instruments.  Still, it was a good night and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves.

I know I did.



I've always liked singing, but I haven't sung as part of a choir for the best part of thirty years.  I've really enjoyed the last few months and, in spite of the fact that next season includes such delights as a medley of songs from "Frozen", I'm really looking forward to getting started again in rehearsals next week.  We've got a CD recording in Scarborough coming up in July, so it's going to be another step into the unknown for me.  Exciting.

To be honest, this marathon has been looming large in my life over the last few months, and it's been great to have something else to think about.

I won't lie to you though: it's been nice to put the MP3s of the bass tracks to one side for the first time in a few months and to listen to something else.  As my wife is in New York with work, I had the rare treat of a run by myself this evening.  The sun was out and I plugged myself into Metallica and had a not-quite-so-slow-as-recently trudge around the Embankment.  It were grand, kid.  Eeee, it were grand.

a frozen heart worth mining (?)

Those of you that know me, may well know that I take a perverse amount of pleasure from the list of films that everyone has seen that I haven't seen: Grease (although I have seen Grease 2 starring Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer, and I just plain don't see how it can be topped), Titanic, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dirty Dancing, Ghost.... that kind of thing.

Frozen is also on that list.

It really isn't that much of a big deal, except that as the film has become more and more successful, it's a cultural reference point that I simply don't have.  But I'm a 41 year old man and I don't have any children: why would I watch it?  So why do people think I'm weird for not having seen it? Wouldn't it actually be weirder if I had? Kind of like those guys who know all the words to "I Will Survive", because they think it makes them more attractive to women and definitely NOT creepy?

It's creeping up on me though.

First, I saw that a "Frozen Heart" / "Let It Go" medley was on the setlist for the summer season at choir (although, all Disney princesses are sopranos, so I'm not entirely convinced their will be all that much in the voice part for a bass to get all that interested about).  Amazing though it may seem, when I saw that, I still hadn't even heard "Let It Go".... and then over Easter, I caught the last five minutes of a countdown programme on the telly listing the best ever Disney songs.  Somewhat bizarrely, this was hosted by Jamie and Louise Redknapp, and when I tuned in, they were just finishing off "Whole New World" at number 3, playing "The Bare Necessities" at number 2 and finishing - inevitably - with "Let It Go" at number one.  Leaving aside the fact that two of the top three are completely wrong, this was the very first time I had actually heard this song all the way through.  Well, it's no "King of the Swingers", is it?  I'm not even sure it's a "Chim-chimerney" either.

That was bad enough, but look what arrived in the post for me today:

Oh, my friends are such a scream.

I surrender.

Can't hold it back anymore..... (do you see what I did there?)

...and party every day

I don't know whether you think I spend my time either working, running or sleeping... but that's definitely how it feels to me at the moment.  Well, to prove that I do in fact have other things in my life, check out this video of the Stadium Rock Medley from our choir concert last night.



I'm told that I need to work on my "choir sway", and I seem to have a slightly unfortunate habit of leaning backwards as I sing, but I have to tell you that I really enjoyed that.  From the moment the first song that we learned in the very first session I attended was "Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss, I knew I was onto a winner.  The rehearsals have been a joy every Tuesday evening, last night's concert was great fun, and I'm really looking forward to the sell-out concert we're doing with a full live band at the Sheffield Octagon in a couple of weeks time.

I've been doing an awful lot of running recently, and trying to learn these songs has been a very welcome distraction, exercising a completely different set of muscles.  It's also quite nice being one of the youngest, for a change! (some of the choir really struggled with the rhythm of "Don't Look Back in Anger" because they're not familiar with the song... whereas I bought the CD single back in the day and know it inside out).

Thank you Sarah for persisting in asking me if I wanted to join.  You were absolutely right to suggest that I might enjoy it.  Thank you to everyone else for being so welcoming.

Tony has kindly put most of the set onto YouTube and you can view the playlist here.  If you're a fan of manly "umba-oowas", then I suggest you head over to have a listen to "Livin' on a Prayer" as I think you might be in for a bit of a treat....

That was an awful lot of fun.  We weren't exactly note perfect.... but it felt good.

nothing you can sing that can't be sung....

Tonight was the last session of the season at choir.  It's my first season, of course, and over the last 12 weeks I have been given the great gift of rediscovering my joy at singing out loud.... which is something I haven't really done in any meaningful capacity in twenty years, and certainly haven't done as part of a choir since I was 12 years old.

All that remains now are the performances: just round the corner from my house next Tuesday, and then, a couple of weeks later, with a proper rock band in the Sheffield Octagon.  We're not allowed to use our sheet music for the performances, so over the last few days, I've been making a real effort try to make sure that I know my part.  I've been listening to the MP3s of my part for weeks, but there's no substitute for actually sitting down and learning your part the old-fashioned way (besides, although you might be able to sing along when you commute to work in your car; when you're on your bicycle, people tend to look at you funny....)

This season is all about ROCK, and we've mostly been doing songs that I mostly know pretty well: Kiss, Meatloaf, Alice Cooper, Oasis, Rainbow, Queen, Madness, Van Halen, The Beatles.... stuff like that.  You might imagine, therefore, that I wouldn't have much trouble with the lyrics.

Well, you'd be wrong.

You try singing "All You Need Is Love" to yourself.  Do you reckon you can do it?  Surely you can.  It's one of those songs that you've probably been listening to as long as you've been listening to music.  It's by the most famous band of them all.  It's probably in your DNA if you're British.

How hard can it be?

Well, just try it.

Ok.  Have you got to the "Nothing you can do that can't be done" bit yet?
Do / Done,
Sing / Sung,
Know / Known,
See / Shown
Some nonsense about being where you were meant to be....

It's difficult, isn't it?   It's also got a weird, irregular timing to it.  Bloody smart arses.  As Ian MacDonald said in "Revolution in the Head": "slapdash...sloppy... drug-sodden laziness....casual incoherence...comfortable self-indulgence."  Exactly.

And don't even get me started on Meatloaf.   That damn song ("You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth") goes on forever and, although it seems like it repeats itself a lot, there are lots of *subtle* differences.

Still.  Our musical director gives us every possible chance with his very physical and committed direction from the front.  After tonight's session, although I clearly need to do more work, I'm actually really looking forward to the concerts.

Makes a nice change to be thinking about something other than running, for starters....

Do come and see us.

...and party every day

When I was seven years old, I became a chorister.  I don't remember being an exceptional singer, but I was picked out fairly early on and for the next six years, I was frequently made to dress like the poor souls above, complete with ruff.  I quite liked it, to be honest.  Well, not so much the dressing up bit.  I liked the singing and I liked a lot of the songs that we got to sing.  We also got treated slightly differently to everyone else at school and were always the first people to leave school assembly.  On special occasions - Christmas, Easter, weddings and the like - we got all dressed up and sang our little hearts out.

And then, when I was about thirteen years old, it all ended very suddenly and I was forced to retire.  It was just before the annual choir dinner, but they were good enough to let me attend anyway.  I don't remember being all that disappointed, to be honest.  As well as the changes happening in my voice, I was developing the dangerous notion that it wasn't really all that cool to be in the choir.

At my next school, the head of music used to come round and test everyone's singing voice to try to recruit fresh meat for the choir.  It still wasn't cool to be in the choir, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to deliberately sing badly during the auditions.  As a result, the head of music -- Mr. Crooke -- was always trying to get me to join the choir and I was always trying to avoid him so he would stop asking me.  This happened every single year for five years: every year he'd audition me and ask me to join, and every year I'd turn him down.  My voice had settled down by now, and I still liked to sing, but I was a teenage boy, and I was under the delusion that I was cool in any way at all.  I wasn't, of course, but there was still no way I was going to be joining the choir.

Fast forward twenty-two years and I've just joined a choir.

They rehearse literally a five minute walk from my front door, and my friend Sarah has been gently suggesting that I might join as she thought I would enjoy it.  I've been to several of their concerts, but for some reason I resisted because it still didn't seem like a very cool thing to do.  I'm 40 years old, and apparently I'm still under delusions that I might be cool.

This week, the start of a new "term" at the choir, I gave up.  I like singing and I'm not particularly cool, so I joined the damn choir.

You know what?  It was fun.  I didn't know if I was a tenor or a bass or whatever, but apparently the information that I liked to sing Johnny Cash songs in the shower made it an easy deduction, and I sat with the basses.

You know what the first song we rehearsed was?



Yeah, man.  Kiss!

Barely anyone in the choir knew it, but I sure as hell did and I knew this was all going to be okay. Apparently it's rock this season.  We're also doing some Meatloaf.  And some Van Halen.  It's all good.

Who says that choirs aren't cool?  I was probably the youngest person in the room, but choirs are still cool.

For real.  Believe.