Performed by The Shout, The Armenian Church, Gagneurs d’Ame, Finchley Children’s Choir, Gwalia, The Kingdom Choir, Lea Valley Singers Women’s Institute Choir, Lloyds Choir, The London Jewish Male Voice Choir, London Diocese Deaf Choir, London Gay Men’s Chorus, New Elmwood Singers, Ngati Ranana, The South Hampstead School for Girls, The Swiss Church Music School, Velvet Fist

Michael Morris rings me. Would I be interested to do an Artangel piece? yes please - with Alain Platel? yes please - involving masses of amateur choirs? of course.

Our aim: to find choirs of character. It’s almost a mantra.

Our first choir visit: to the Italian church in Clerkenwell. Mad Roccoco décor, girls in sunglasses. The church is very full, people coming in throughout the service, kissing hallo, chatting. A whole gang of men in very fetching Umbrian hats, green felt with feathers – a Central London foxhunting party has strayed in, or what? An exciting sense of a hidden community for whom this is an important social as well as religious event – a chance to speak Italian, to be Italian, to escape temporarily the strain of having to belong in a foreign country. And a warning sign: the choir is miniscule, & old.

The wall of the Roundhouse! Almost like the Wailing Wall…… the piece will begin with the choirs whispering to the wall.

Our second visit: to an interminably dull service at the French Protestant Church in Soho Square. Gradual realisation: there is no choir…….

The Deaf Carol Service. Before the service, the church is almost silent, full of gesticulating people. A man next to me signs a dirty joke to his friend: miming of enormous breasts etc, roars of laughter. People converse easily with friends twenty yards away. The room is on a rake so that the congregation can see more easily – even so some of the deaf have an associated vision problem & need binoculars. Vera Hunt the leader of the choir (& one of the first woman to be ordained as a vicar) is an immensely charismatic person – her very method of signing seems to carry with it an enormous moral authority. Maybe if I’d met her when I was fifteen I wouldn’t have irritably given up on Christianity…… The organist is profoundly deaf, but everyone manages to keep up with the hymns somehow, the choir mimicking Vera’s signing in unison (apparently they do counterpoint signing as well).

Studio 2 at the Drill Hall, off Tottenham Court Road. A rehearsal of ebullient, witty, committed Velvet Fist, twelve women & a man singing political songs with immense energy & charm – a secular choir who sing what they believe……

Each choir will sing a song (two songs? three songs?) from its own repertoire, & together they will sing something (a refrain?) which Richard & I will write.

The basement of Cecil Sharp House in Camden. Our first encounter with the immense, powerful, ambitious London Gay Men’s Choir – what a sound! They sing serious music & they sing cheesy music with enormous gusto. The arrangement of Barbie Girl is accompanied (enhanced!) by tongue-in-cheek choreography. The tenors sound like Jimmy Somerville.

A draughty church in Nowheresville, North-West London. Gagneurs d’Ame the Congolese Christian Choir, are rehearsing. The church lights up with the sound. I could happily listen to them singing for hours. Their leader Diakese is (understandably) quite wary of us. Like a lot of the choir leaders, he has a suspicion, I think, that we are a bunch of smart-arses that want to send up his choir. Fortunately he’s quite wrong.

In Enid Gratton-Guiness’s front room the Lea Valley WI Singers sing Gospel Train & Enid stops conducting, cavorts joyfully in front of the choir. Since I don’t like watching people conduct, I am very taken with this.

Taste! Some of the choirs don’t seem to know what the word means – and that is part of their attraction.

Down to Fulham to visit the Seventh Day Adventist Choir. Most of the congregation have stayed on to listen to choir practice. The choir leader David’s three-year-old daughter Eden bounces around him imitating his conducting. I feel utterly ashamed of my preconception of Seventh Day Adventists as gullible idiots.

A roomful of teenage girls at South Hampstead High School. The choir director Diana Kiverstein seems to break all the rules – there’s no pandering to teenage taste (half the songs are in Latin for God’s sake, and the arrangements are immensely sophisticated). But the girls clearly love it, and they sing with amazing expertise and commitment. Diana bullies them, cajoles them, has frequent tantrums, hurls insults at Edward Kay as he plays the piano. It works!

Directors (themselves often professional musicians) of amateur choirs give their choirs such a hard time! They’re so rude! Richard & I, running The Shout, are soft in comparison. ‘It’s sounding nice, it’s going nowhere.’ ‘Vinegary high notes sopranos.’ ‘Can someone let the cat out?’ But when the hectoring is good-humoured, when there is respect & delight, the method is wonderfully successful; and a disparate bunch of amateurs can sound like angels.

On our first visit to Ngati Ranana, the Maori choir, famous for their welcome songs, we get more of a welcome than we bargained for. According to ancient Maori custom (or is it something they’ve cooked up ten minutes before?) we must sing for them. We manage to stagger through our favourite gospel song Soon And Very Soon.

The London Jewish Male Choir (what is it about male-voice choirs? why is the sound so inexpressibly moving?) is performing at the Sacred Voices Festival in Richmond, down by the river. Drizzle. They are dressed in blue shirts; they look like security men. Beautiful songs separated by terrible jokes. A strange Gilbert-&-Sullivan jauntiness to some of the songs, & a sentimentality, like a Welsh choir. The bass soloist David Hilton has one of the most moving voices I’ve ever heard. For a couple of songs the choir are joined by the Korn Brothers, three nervous willing boys in gold waistcoats; their voices sound infinitely high, about twenty octaves above those of the men……

The Met! We love them. They’re not an especially good choir, and half of them aren’t even policemen any more, but we love them. We love their London medley, we love their rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, and we love their Gwahoddiad, a Welsh hymn. They must sing on horseback.

Songs most likely to be chosen by amateur choirs:

1 Cantique De Jean Racine an irremediably dreary piece by Faure
2 Bohemian Rhapsody
3 Soon And Very Soon
4 Satin Doll.

Michael & Alain & I on West Drayton Station after visiting the Deaf Choir – trains in chaos – every time the (digital) station clock advances one minute, so does the expected time of arrival of the train – a Beckettian vision of hell.

A break in the morning’s activities at the Swiss Music School. Christine Sigwart has been trying to firm up a rather tentative version of Swing Low Sweet Chariot. The children burst into a robust & immensely funky jam session.

Our choral excavation leads to a stratum of WMM (white middle-class, middle-aged) choirs, many of them attempting extremely ambitious oratorios, sometimes with great gusto & commitment, sometimes with a kind a patient misery – and it’s their lunch hour they’re giving up! Handel is the composer of choice. Most WMM choirs are having trouble recruiting new members – oratorios are perhaps a dying art. But there’s something gloriously ambitious about attempting this kind of project in your lunch hour - not to be derided.

Rumours of a Firemen’s Choir, of a Politicians’ Choir, of a Cabbies’ Choir, of a Retail Choir (John Lewis) turn out to be false. The Prisoner’s Choir at Holloway pose a problem – how can we get them to the Roundhouse? Perhaps if the Police Choir is there too??

Where is that Asian choir? How can we do a choral piece in London without an Asian choir?? Well it turns out there is no real choral tradition in Asia, and we’ll have to do without. Realise that we can’t have a PC checklist of essential choir types. We just need to choose choirs we like. But a Bollywood choir??? Surely we can find a Bollywood choir?

A Greek Orthodox service in Camden, an Armenian Orthodox service in Kensington. Beautiful, mysterious, awe-inspiring. But the congregation is scarcely involved – the children are almost insane with boredom by the end of the service. At the Armenian service an old woman comes in, sits down, stays a few minutes, leaves, comes back in, stays a few minutes, leaves, comes back in…….. The Armenian music is exquisite. We talk to the choir director Mr. Demirdjian. He can’t believe we’re interested in his choir – he thinks they’re hopeless – undisciplined, under-rehearsed, underpowered. We think they’re wonderful.

The choir leaders gather together at the Roundhouse for the first time, sit in a circle and announce themselves – it’s like a UN meeting. Great excitement and anxiety.

Some of the Maori choir are definitely not Maoris! They are enthusiasts from Radlett or somewhere who are interested in Maori culture. Does this discount the Maori choir? When is a Maori not a Maori?

Even better than the Met singing Gwahoddiad is Gwalia, the Welsh male voice choir singing Gwahoddiad. As it should be. There are two Welsh male voice choirs in London. Apparently there used only to be one, but sometime in the 1960s the director had an affair with the pianist, & half the choir were so shocked that they splintered off to form Gwalia. So we’re working with the prudes…..

Alain wants to know: Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why do they sing? and he finds out by quiet, pertinent, extremely (to me terrifyingly) direct questions. ‘A Deaf Choir’ he says to Vera ‘- isn’t that a bit cynical?’ She is not offended. ‘Music is so beautiful you don’t have to hear it,’ she says. She tells him about the last thing she heard before she became deaf – a boy singing a Welsh hymn. Eventually she will tell this story to the audience in the Roundhouse.

Pianos! Very important to most amateur choirs, in fact crucial to the choir’s well-being. Many choirs are nervous about a cappella singing.

The Shout is becoming involved. A group of singers with a diverse range of backgrounds, they are, in a way, a microcosm of the whole project. They will be a kind of glue for the piece, providing short choral interventions, making connections between the songs of the amateur choirs, leading the refrains.

Ouch. I stand in front of the choir leaders at a meeting at the Welsh Centre, waiting for a phone call to tell me whether or not my father has survived a massive heart operation, while a man from Gwalia gives me a hard time about the lyrics of the refrain that Richard & I have written.

A late entry: Maspindeli, the Georgian Choir. On the face of it, the choir is a nonsense –a Georgian choir with only one Georgian person in it. Makes the Maoris look like buffalo mozzarella. But the sound is wonderful – raw, gutsy, committed, folk-like but sophisticated. A must.

A sequence of songs is emerging – leading from the exotic, distant (Armenian liturgy, Renaissance polyphony) to the familiar (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, The Internationale). A high proportion of religious music, but wonderfully varied. Very few love songs for some reason. We’ll end with each choir singing a different well-known song, simultaneously, a choral Tower of Babel. But very quietly!

A problem with the Saturday performance. The Jewish choir must not set out for the Roundhouse until after sunset.

The Gay Men’s Chorus stupendous arrangement of The Crying Game doesn’t fit into the sequence. And the choir themselves don’t want to sing it – fools! They suggest the Kylie Minogue song Keep YourDisco as a replacement, but it won’t work without a backing track & amplification.

The first ensemble rehearsal at the Roundhouse. The choirs are initially (understandably) nervous, wary of each other; by the end of the day they are giving each other ovations. Particular support for the Swiss School. Ah! this is why we decided to do the project.

The Shout, whose members all have the same job, parades its diversity; the singers wear what they like. Most of the amateur choirs have uniforms, some gorgeous, some less than gorgeous.

The wonderful Kingdom Choir decide that they cannot bear to share a stage with the Gay Men’s Chorus. Oh God.

Two years after Michael’s phone call, the first performance. Muezzin-like calls from Richard & Wills are answered by the choirs. The Jewish choir are singing in Arabic. Wonderful.

Enormous sets of stairs lumber round the room like a herd of elephants. The audience has to scatter, reform itself in readiness for the next song. Alain has ensured that each song is an event in itself, each choir shown off at its best.

Standing in the middle of 600 people singing the refrain, the sound is unbelievable. It’s like drowning in warm water, but you’re still alive at the end of it…..

The audience is initially not sure whether to clap after each song, but quite soon they can’t help themselves. After you’ve heard Gagneurs d’Ame sing Mpeve Ya Nlongo it’s impossible not to cheer.

The Jewish choir gets a response which takes them completely by surprise.

The Gay Men’s Choir & the WI Singers have an intertwining sequence of songs – the Battle of the Queens, as the Gay Men’s Choir call it. Enid is in heaven (& so am I). Plans are laid for a joint concert later in the year.

Many of the choirs are used to performing to their own people – the London Jewish Male Choir to Jewish people, the Deaf Choir to deaf people – so the experience of performing at the Roundhouse to a very mixed audience is exciting & daunting. It seems to me incredibly brave, & generous for the Armenian Choir, in particular, to emerge from their hermetic environment & sing in a secular event.

After the second, delirious performance, several of the singers want to know when we’re going to do it again. Aiiiieeeeee!