This is a little tribute to any Youth Leader, who having been asked to contribute to some Church event, has found themselves on stage with a number of semi-unwilling members of their youth group, feeling like they’re doing a solo, and yet somehow managed to pull it together in the end.
As a background to this clip, this was filmed at our village concert, and the Youth Group decided to sing a song which they had done as part of a Christmas production they had put on in aid of the Congo appeal a few days before. Prior to this they’ve been having real problems with the backing track, and as our clip commences, the backstage guys have just about got it sorted.
So are you fed up with X-Factor winners getting the Christmas number one spot? How about this as an alternative?
Â
This is the latest album from Voces8, who we went to see in concert on Tuesday night, and who were fantastic! The group is run by two brothers, Barney and Paul, who are also the sons of a couple of friends at Church, the concert on Tuesday being a fundraiser for the St James’ conservation appeal. Paul has said that he’s been offered odds of 25 to 1 on actually getting a Christmas number one, but he’s hopeful to do well in the classical chart. To buy or download from Amazon click the picture above, for which we get a small referal fee. Alternatively you can also pick up a copy of the album or the single from iTunes.
Okay, another bit of a gap in blogging, and another catch up!
Pregnancy wise, Beth has been back and forth to the hospital several times over the past couple of weeks with stuff related to the gestational diabetes. The dietary stuff didn’t overly work – indeed her blood sugar seems to go all over the place whatever she has actually been eating, as a result the hospital have given her insulin which she uses to bring her blood sugar back to acceptable levels. However as a diabetic, albeit a temporary one, we have had to notify both the DVLA, and the insurance companies for the cars. For the moment it is just a note on the policies – whether there is any change in premium is dependant on whether Beth’s blood sugar settles down again after the birth.
One thing I didn’t comment on last week was the final of Last Choir Standing. Unlike some of the shows of this ilk that we’ve watched, we actually had some idea what was happening being members of the choir. Pretty well from the start of the final stages, I’d been pretty sure the final two choirs would be ACM Gospel Choir, based our of the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, and Only Men Aloud, a modern twist on the traditional male voice choir from Cardiff. However things were thrown somewhat into disarray by the shock exit of ACM in the semi-final. Now I don’t know quite whether the guys from ACM got over confident and were caught out by the other choirs improving more, or whether they just had a bad night, but it did seem to thrown the competition open a bit. However by the end, despite some stunning performances – the improvement in Ysgol Glanaethwy, the youth choir from Bangor was amazing, and I’m still very impressed that a youth choir would attempt and produce such a fantastic performance of O Fortuna – but the ultimate winners were a well deserved Only Men Aloud. If you want to hear what some of the music was like, ACM Gospel Choir have an album newly released – although listening to it I can certainly hear the voices of some of the judges as a couple of things they spotted are present on the album.
Reality TV wise we’ve also had the finale of this years Big Brother. What perhaps is most interesting about this is that it was a bit of a bad night for the bookies as there was no clear winner. If you compare the final percentages for the 2008 finale with the results in 2007 you can see that each evictee on the final night was within a few percentage points of staying it – and the final winner was decided on only about three percent of the vote compared to a lead of over twenty percent last year – really it could have gone to almost any of the final five. Quite what will happen next year I don’t know – the programme got lower ratings than ever this year, and the show isn’t the guarantee of even Z-list status it once was. As this Times article from today quotes Craig Phillips winner of the first series:
“I speak to a lot of Big Brother contestants from the past few years and they’re all struggling. They can’t get work in the media but they can’t get a ‘normal’ job in a supermarket. It’s not going to be all red carpets for this year’s winner.”
I doubt they’ll drop the show before it’s tenth anniversary next year, but quite what it’s longevity will be after that I don’t know.
Along with our annual trip to see the Tappers, this weekend was also pretty busy as it was our patronal festival weekend at St James. As part of this on Saturday we had an evening from The Madding Crowd, a group of performers from Winchester, and then today we had the annual opening of the Church Tower, and a mini fete up at the Church.
The Madding Crowd primarily perform a selection of music originally written for the parish bands who in days gone by would have provided the musical accompaniment for church services in the days before the pipe organ. They augment the performance with readings and dances from the same period, drawing heavily on the work of Thomas Hardy, indeed drawing their name from his fourth novel. It was a great evening, and showed up some music that perhaps we could use in the Church choir – and some of the dramatic interludes showed up that very little has changed in the Church over the past hundred years – people still moan about the Rector, and choir practice hasn’t changed much at all, even if the instruments and the clothes have!
The main village fete alternates between being hosted by the Church and the school, so in years like this when it is the turn of the school, the Tower Opening and Mini-Fete are one of our major fund raising efforts for the year, especially important in a year like this when we have a big campaign in progress. Thanks to the vagaries of the British weather, even in July it can involve a lot of prayer for a nice day – and since all the way through this week there has been rain forecast for this afternoon, it was great to have such fantastic weather. As a result we got a lot of people through the doors and climbing the tower, and fingers crossed a goodly amount of money for the conservation appeal.
Needless to say I was around with my camera, so I’ve included a set of pictures below. As you might have noticed if you follow my Flickr stream, I’ve started to take a picture or two with the much maligned camera on the iPhone. Although some aren’t going to win any awards, especially in poor light, I have to say that some, in particular this one and this one are a lot better than I perhaps would expect based purely on the specs for the camera on paper.
Sometimes there are times when you really feel for people organising live shows, Friday night was one of those nights. Over the years we seem to have turned into one of the many Basingstoke Tappers groupies, and have been along to every summer show they’ve done for the best part of a decade. Reading through the programme before the show started, Tracey Kinchenton’s introduction was bemoaning the fact that several of the dancers had injured themselves, and also that Matthew Winchester, one of the singers for the evening had also had to drop out. However they had managed to get a singer called John Amobi, who had had a number of lead roles in West End shows as a replacement. However the problems hadn’t ended there, in the week before the show, and after the programmes had been printed, Steve Pert, who is as much a part of the shows as the dancers themselves, was diagnosed with glandular fever and had also had to withdraw. They had managed to get previous vocalist June Boyce along in his place, but needless to say at that short notice it had thrown the whole programme into difficulties as June had to do songs from her repertoire with little time to learn the numbers against which the dancers would be dancing.
The problems were probably more apparent in the first half, where the vocalists came and did songs on their own, plus we also had a little of the first night nerves as things perhaps didn’t seem quite as polished as in previous years. However I don’t quite know what happened at half time, but the second half was way better.
One of the things we really noticed this year, was how things have progressed. The third of the singers on the bill was Francesca McMahon, who has grown up as one of the Basingstoke Tappers. A few years ago she made her first attempts at singing on stage at a Basingstoke Tappers show, since then she has come on leaps and bounds, and now sings regularly, and looks set for a good career in the business. What she has which the other vocalists don’t is the fact that she can dance in with the rest of the dancers, and is perfectly capable of pulling off a pretty complex routine, whilst still giving a great delivery on the song.
Another noticeable change is in the number of boys Tracey has managed to recruit. A few years back there were just one or two, now she has sixteen, and a number of them are good enough to be able to dance on their own, so we had one number with John Amobi and all sixteen doing the Temptations classic My Girl, and the two most experienced as front row dancers elsewhere.
They weren’t the only talented men on the stage. All the way through the show we were wondering about the slightly odd staging at the back of the stage – at the end we found out why it looked odd. Tracey had managed to get her son and a number of his friends who spend a lot of their leisure time hanging out at the various skate parks around the town to come and participate in the finale, where they rode their bikes live on stage performing a number of the tricks they practise in the park live on stage. No offence to the dancers, but in that finale I really can’t tell you what they were doing as I was watching the fantastic performance from the guys on the bikes! As Tracey said in her introduction to the finale, she wanted to prove that not all young people are hanging around on street corners drinking – slightly ironic considering that the town mayor who had made a speech just before the item had talked about attending a conference where one of the subjects was precisely that – anti-social behaviour from kids.
As you may know, this isn’t the only dance show we’ve seen this year, a couple of weeks ago we were down seeing another great show involving a friend of ours down in Plymouth. Although the two shows were rather different in scale and content, one consistent thing between the two was that they both included a tribute to Thriller, the Michael Jackson classic that first came out twenty-five years ago. Down in Plymouth what they produced was recognisably close to the original routine. The Tappers with a cast about twice the size produced something that was more inspired by, including a diversion into a Missy Eliot track (isn’t Shazam great) part way through, and a forest of dancing trees along with the ghosts, ghouls and skeletons.
All in all, despite the clear difficulties they’d had putting on the show this year, it was as much of an entertaining evening as ever, and we’re looking forward to seeing how Tracey and the Basingstoke Tappers better the bikes next year.
I was actually on iTunes trying to find if the Church of England were repeating their podcasting of the General Synod again – unfortunately not, they seem to have decided that making the proceedings available for download in a PC only format is better this year, hard luck for those of us using Mac’s!
Anyway, what I did find was that new for 2008, the Taizé Community have started a couple of podcasts. The first is their own, which is called Prayer from the Taizé Community, and is a ten minute weekly extract from one of their services. For those who are aware of the usual structure of their services it picks up from the Alleluia/Psalm, includes the reading in multiple languages, and then includes a couple more songs and prayers. If you want something a bit more for your Taizé fix, Domradio, a Catholic radio station in Cologne is retransmitting a complete recording of the Saturday evening service, which is also available on iTunes (although not surprisingly labelled in German).
This year was another Eurovision Song Contest, and another where the ongoing pattern of the UK entry doing spectacularly badly continued, as it ended up in joint last place with 14 points. As is often the case the general opinion is that although the UK entry wasn’t perhaps a winner, “Even Ifâ€? sung by Andy Abraham certainly didn’t deserve the placing it received. Having accurately predicted a win by Russia before the show even started, Sir Terry Wogan is now questioning whether he will commentate in future years, on the basis that in his opinion it has ceased to be a song contest, with his comments being backed by a number of other notable figures.
The UK press is rife with accusations of political voting – an accusation that would maybe hold water if it wasn’t for the fact that all the scores are delivered via a national phone vote. But as the BBC highlighted earlier in the week, there still are some complex patterns at play. For example Doctor Derek Gatherer who correctly predicted a win for Serbia last year using an analysis of previous voting patterns, predicted a win for the Ukraine. Serbia were disadvantaged by only being heard in the final – as the host they do not participate in the semi-finals, a similar situation to the UK, Germany, France and Spain, all of whom were placed in the bottom half of the results. Whilst he didn’t predict the winner correctly – Ukraine came second, he said that Russia, the actual winner would do well, and also said that Turkey and Greece would do well, placed seventh and third respectively.
What actually shapes the voting is decades worth of politics. Whilst the rules stop countries for voting for their own song, there is little they can do about the significant minorities in some countries, particularly significant being the Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the significant minorities in the former Yugoslav republics. Similar voting patterns have been around for years, for example the way Germany always gives a significant vote to Turkey thanks to the large Turkish minority in Germany.
The voting system itself also plays a part. By way of a quick recap (or introduction), the voting works like this. Firstly, each participating country holds a national phone vote. The result of this vote is taken and collated, and this is transferred into points for only the top ten in the phone vote, with twelve points for first place, ten for second, and then eight to one points for the remaining eight places. So for example if a song consistently scores mid-table in most phone votes, this wouldn’t be reflected in the points awarded – the voting system adds weight to songs which are locally very popular, so a song that goes down well in the former Yugoslav republics, but does really badly elsewhere, could easily have more points in the final total than a song that scored consistently, but rarely in the top ten across the whole of Europe. Along similar lines, the UK could probably do somewhat better if it participated as England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as the voting system gives more power to voters in smaller countries, with countries such as San Marino, Monaco and Andorra having equal voting power to big countries such as the UK, France and Germany.
However, the UK also doesn’t seem to play the Eurovision game quite as well as some of the new participants. When you look at the top three singers we have Dima Bilan, a big star who has had multiple number one hits in the Russian market, similarly Ani Lorak who sang for Ukraine is a well known artist across a number of European countries. In common with a number of other participants including third placed Kalomoira, they went on promotional tours with their songs around Europe in the run up to the competition. It’s also worth noting that all three of the songs came through the semi-finals so got exposure through those a couple of days before the main event. Compare this to Andy Abraham who came second in X-Factor in 2005, and one top twenty UK hit, and probably has never been heard of across the rest of Europe. Being heard once, very early on in the contest, and without much Europe-wide visibility for either the artist or the song, it’s not really surprising that it lost out as it did. Of course it is perfectly possibly for a Europe-wide unknown to win – just take a look at Lordi who produced a memorable song, along with a memorable performance, and received votes from almost everybody, but by going for an establish artist, and ensuring press coverage in other nations (Lordi made the UK news as arguments about their participation raged) ensures that people are aware of your song before they hear it on the night.
So assuming that the UK doesn’t just give up next year, what should we do? First off it needs to be a good song, and certainly gag John Barrowman when he spouts rubbish about what kind of songs do well – if you look back over UK entrants, the only time we’ve been top ten, indeed top three in the past decade was with a big ballad. But ultimately it’s also about how well it is promoted, about playing the game. Once it is selected by the UK, the people who are going to vote for it are spread across Europe, so it needs to be known there to figure in the minds of the voters.
Needless YouTube gives the opportunity for some comparison. First off, here is a clip of the UK performance:
Then this is the third placed Greek song:
This song came second from Ukraine:
The winning Russian song was this:
If you want to relive the whole set of twenty-five finalists, they have a special playlist just for you…
On Saturday I, together with ten other people from St James sang in what was quite possibly the biggest choir I’d ever been a part of. I’m not quite sure of the exact numbers, but the choir took up all of the space on the stage at the Albert Hall, and a good deal of both the stalls and circle, and was large enough that the orchestra and conductor had to be on the arena floor.
The event was organised by The Really Big Chorus who describe themselves as Britain’s largest choral society – their mailing list includes over 8500 contacts representing an estimated 35,000 singers. They do three major concerts a year in the Royal Albert Hall where essentially anyone can turn up and sing. By virtue of the old adage of safety in numbers there will be enough people around who will know the particular pieces of music, and will be able to carry you along if you are a weaker singer, as such it’s a great way to get an experience of singing in a major venue. This time it was Mozart’s Requiem, something I’ve done before, but not in quite such an illustrious venue.
This time we were going along in part to support the father of a friend of ours who at the end of last year bemoaned the fact that when he was younger and had sung in a choir he’d never done a big concert. As a result our friend and her sister arranged a special surprise for his sixty-fifth birthday and arranged for him to come along and sing with us. I dropped around a copy of the Chorusline Bass CD (a special series of CD’s that are useful for learning particular parts), which he sang along with at home, and then on the night he sat between a couple of our choir members who are also in other local choirs who were able to keep him on track. Things were made slightly more difficult by the fact that we were sat in the back row of the bass section, well away from the tenor and alto sections, and with some of the soprano section behind us – on the bass line we are usually used to getting cues from the alto or tenor part, taking them from the soprano isn’t something we’re used to, however after the one hour full choir rehearsal it was straight into the performance.
Not surprisingly there were one or two ropey bits, but in the main we made it through, and certainly it is a fantastic experience singing in the Royal Albert Hall with so many others. The atmosphere is certainly not quite like a professional concert, as the bulk of the audience are supporters, but it is still great fun, and I’m sure something I hope I can do again before too long.
Maybe I’m just overly critical, and perhaps I’d be different if it were my child playing, but I tend to not overly look forward to the prospect of school students being, how shall we put it, adventurous in their choice of concert repertoire.
This particular opportunity to experience a school musician came up as part of the combined Wellington College/Crowthorne Choral Society concert held last night at the school. This was their biggest concert of the year where they team up with the choir from the school, and bring in a full orchestra – in this case the Chameleon Arts Orchestra. As a side note it also means that they use the large sports hall at the school, were unfortunately the heaters are so noisy they drown out the music – hence we were rather cold by the end of the performance!
Anyway, the reason we were there was because the Choral Society were performing Mozart’s Requiem, the same work that I and various other members of the choir at St James are going to be singing when we join the Really Big Chorus at the Albert Hall on May 10th. However, as it’s a shared concert with the school, other parts of the programme were put in by Wellington College, and it has to be said that when various people mentioned that one of the students was going to be playing the solo in the Sibelius Violin Concerto there were definite hints of apprehension as to what it might be like.
If at this point you’re thinking I’m being overly critical, it is worth highlighting that whilst Wellington College has an excellent and well deserved reputation for it’s music, even with that, the Sibelius Violin Concerto is regarded as being a particularly difficult and challenging piece to play, and not something you’d expect a student to attempt, let alone perform well.
However, I’m glad to say that all the doubts proved to be entirely unfounded.
The solo violin was played by Claire Sledd, a sixth former at the school who comes originally from Seattle in the US – indeed her grandmother flew in from across the pond especially to hear Claire play. She is at the school on a music scholarship, and has been accepted by the Royal Academy starting in September. Certainly if I didn’t know she was a student at the school, I would have said that she was a professional musician, certainly the performance was as good as both the professional orchestra, and the professional soloists who sang on the Mozart Requiem, if not better!
Needless to say when we talked to various of our friends in the Crowthorne Choral Society during the interval (the Mozart Requiem made up the second half of the concert) they were all wondering how they were going to follow the virtuoso performance we’d just seen.
It has to be said that the Crowthorne Choral Society stepped up to the challenge and delivered a great performance too, but certainly Claire was fantastic, and deserves to go far. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her playing solo in somewhat more illustrious halls than a rather draughty sports hall in Crowthorne in a few years!
Thank heavens there are some of the British public who have their heads screwed on and can recognise a half-decent song. I only watched about ten minutes of the main show, and the results show of this weekends annual effort to pick the British entry to Eurovision, and that was enough.
At one point, John Barrowman came out with the comment that ballads didn’t do very well in Eurovision – you only need to listen to what won for Ireland over a number of years – all big ballads… Based on their voting it is pretty clear what the judges thought would be good – cheesy, gimmicky songs – possibly true, you only need look back a couple of years to Lordi to confirm that, but what it also needs is a half decent song to go along with the gimmick. The gimmick to some extent is there to make your act stand out from the other forty odd in the competition – but once you’ve got that reminder it needs to be a decent song. To my mind there is a common misconception of what is a “Eurovision Song”, but when you look at the reality, that’s not correct. For example following on from Lordi there was a noticeable increase in rock numbers the next year – not that they did overly well. Cheesy europop has won at times, but other years it’s totally the opposite. The trick is producing a song that is memorable for the right reasons, and of course one that can rise above the political voting.
On Saturday, and from the pre-publicity, it was pretty clear who everybody was pushing as our act. However Michelle Gayle’s seemed to be all gimmick and no song – they tried that last year, and look what happened…
True, I don’t think this Andy Abraham’s effort is stand out enough get through the political voting, but at least the public voted for a decent song…
So perhaps rather as expected, last night the second series of The Choir concluded with Gareth triumphantly leading his choir to sing on stage at the Royal Albert Hall.
Having said that, there were differences between the conclusion here and what happened at the end of the first series. Watching the retrospective of the first series a few weeks ago it was apparent that once Gareth had gone, the choir had disbanded. Members were carrying on singing, but the school hadn’t continued.
This time around there was explicit focus on getting a music culture into the school, so we saw a gathering of the school governors where pupils described there experiences. In this weeks and last weeks episode the headmaster of the school featured much more prominently, indeed even taking part in the audition process for soloists, and attending the final performance. Also right the way through the programme the head of Music has been featured, and she too had her own big moment as Gareth asked her to conduct for part of the final performance – where she looked as nervous as the people in the choir.
Time will tell I guess, but I am certainly looking forward to an equivalent retrospective and to see where music has gone within the Lancaster School following the work done by Gareth in the programme.
As an example of how far they have come in nine months, here is a YouTube clip of their final performance. Remember this school had no choir at all nine months before this was filmed…
We’ve carried on watching The Choir over the past couple of weeks, and although it’s been enjoyable, and it’s great to see the progress, the programme has followed a familiar path with Gareth pulling together a choir. Although it’s been frustrating at times, Gareth himself summed it up pretty well this week when he said that it’s pretty straightforward to pull a choir together with a good group of interested boys.
However, his stated aim is not only to get a good choir, but to get a ‘singing school’. Back in the first episode he had a notable failure with Imran, one of the boys who although he had a great voice, was part of the playground MC’s, a group of boys who beatbox and rap, and are obviously pretty musically talented, but have no interest in the sort of conventional music that Gareth is exploring with the choir.
This week though came a breakthrough. In order to try and get the MC’s interested, he brought them along to a workshop run by Sense of Sound (you can also hear more of their music on their Myspace Page), and watching the faces of the boys – especially Imran – was great. Sense of Sound although being a choir, blended the kind of beatboxing techniques the boys were using, and really piqued their interest. They followed that up with starting another choir at the school following the kind of style that Sense of Sound had demonstrated – getting boys were were otherwise disconnected from the new singing culture in the school connected, and getting Imran to actually sing.
The fundamental point it underlines is that you need to be clear whether you are trying to get music into the lives of young people, or your kind of music into their lives. It somewhat echoes with the announcement earlier in the week that schoolchildren were being promised ‘quality culture’. Having heard the announcement, the real danger in that is although you interest some, it is very easy to disconnect others by labelling their kind of music, art or whatever as not ‘quality culture’. What the programme last night showed was that if you make an effort to connect with their culture, rather than trying to shoehorn kids into your culture, you actually get somewhere, and the young people go from the singing is boring, to actually singing and taking part.
If you missed the programme, or want to enjoy it again, you can watch on BBC iPlayer – Sense of Sound appear in a sequence that begins about 35 minutes in.
Our choir master has laid us a bit of a Lenten Challenge – and it doesn’t involve giving anything up…
Last week he told us that he has put down Crucifixus by Antonio Lotti as our main anthem for the service on Good Friday, and handed out the music. The anthem is in eight parts, and to be honest when we sight read it last week about the only thing that was right was the first and last notes – everything else was a bit of a mess.
This week we listened to a recording of the anthem on “Images of Christâ€?, and managed to get the first page or so vaguely right. From next week we’re having sectional rehearsals to sort out the rest…
So fingers crossed we can pull it all together over the next few weeks, and if you want to hear how it should sound, check out the recording on iTunes…
Last night was the first part of the second series of The Choir – subtitled “Boys Don’t Singâ€?. The format was slightly different from the first series last year in that rather than coming in purely to lead the choir, this time Gareth Malone was actually joining the staff of the school. The school itself was somewhat different, being one of the largest single sex comprehensive schools in the country, The Lancaster School in Leicester.
The exact details of how he came to be invited to The Lancaster School are not explained – although he is met on arrival by the head of Music at the school, and the commentary does say that she has been trying and failing to get a choir off the ground before. What is interesting is to note that it wasn’t always like that in the school. A long standing member of staff shows Gareth some old pictures of various school choirs – and highlights that assemblies at the school used to include singing, but that was stopped sometime in the mid-eighties when the school grew and the music staff (who played the piano for the singing) became form tutors. That comment did actually get me thinking, and realising that when I was at school, and we sang a hymn in the lower school assembly we had a music teacher play – so perhaps Rickmansworth also didn’t allocate a form to the music teachers.
There were definitely some amusing moments, in particular the point where the music teacher shows Gareth some of the stuff that happens musically in the school – just watch his expression during some of those sequences. He also challenges the head of year nine and ten, very definitely an alpha male within the school community, prior to telling the whole staff that in order to achieve the goal of forming a choir, it needs backing from the teachers. Thinking again about my school, we always had a number of staff, including the headmaster in the choir, and indeed a number of them would participate in the school productions too.
Although he looked mightily nervous at times, Gareth did seem to fairly swiftly work out a plan of action, starting with the GCSE music class, and moving on from there. As before he seems very determined, and driven by the belief that being able to sing is an opportunity that all young people should have. Certainly a belief I share. As with the programme last year there were people who liked singing but were keeping it quiet, but who seemed to find the increased acceptability of singing in the school as an opportunity to come out of their shells somewhat. Equally there were other students who despite being talented, proved to be troublesome, and a source of headaches for Gareth.
Perhaps the biggest counterpoint to the testosterone fuelled attitude that seemed to be being portrayed, that singing was for girls, and that boys did sports, was towards the end of the programme, where Gareth took the step of launching the choir. The trailer only showed the very beginning of that sequence – Gareth sitting in an empty hall. What it didn’t show was that 170 students, about a tenth of the whole school population, turned up to sign up for the choir. Boys don’t sing? Maybe that’s the impression – but about ten percent of the population of that school do, or at least want to learn.
If you missed the programme, it can be found for the next few days on the BBC iPlayer.
Over two years ago, I blogged about the Airwolf Themes album, the soundtrack CD that holds the record for the most expensive soundtrack album ever – and indeed regularly breaks it’s own record whenever a copy comes up on eBay.
I said back then that as the only soundtrack album related to the series, indeed the only recording of the theme actually conducted by the original composer, Sylvester Levay, it deserved a wider distribution. The people making money off the soar-away prices on eBay weren’t the original producers of the album, and with the crazy prices copies of the music were available on the file sharing networks however much the producers tried to get them removed.
When you went to the Airwolf Themes site the most commonly asked question on the forums seemed to be whether there would ever be a re-release of the album.
Eventually last year, Mark J Cairns, the person behind the album relented and started taking opinions about a release online. After multiple delays, today the album finally appeared on iTunes, at a cost of £15.99 – somewhat less than the cost of an original CD.
The majority of the tracks are Mark’s recreations of the original episode soundtracks and some of the variations of the themes, all done on synths. However the real stand out tracks from my point of view are the last three, which are a new arrangement of the main theme, and two medleys conducted by Sylvester Levay himself, along with a full orchestra, streaks ahead of any of the other arrangements of the theme that are available. One point to note when listening to the music that is worth mentioning is that if you’re only ever used to seeing the show on reruns in the UK, the tempo of the main theme especially will seem a bit slow, this is what it is supposed to be, but thanks to the conversion process that the episodes go through to be shown in the UK, we’re all used to hearing it slightly differently!
You can read more about how the original Airwolf Themes project came about here.
Yesterday night I was up at the Church for a musical event where for once I didn’t have to do anything at all!
The event was the launch of the St James’ Handbell Ringers “Take it From Hereâ€? initiative – where they are planning to take their music into a variety of the local care homes, doing various activities related to music therapy with the residents. The video below includes a demonstration of the kind of things they are planning to do by Sandra Winter, Secretary of the Handbell Ringers of Great Britain, who already does this kind of work.
This is quite an impressive level of progress as it is less than two years ago that the team were absolute beginners – as one of the representatives of the Handbell Ringers of Great Britain said during her presentation, when she first heard them, they were a group of people all ringing their bells individually, now they are a team.
Initially, the team had no bells of their own, and were borrowing a set. A full set costs over £7000, so they raised some money, and the PCC provided about £3000 to get the bells. From there they have now obtained grants from various local bodies, and grant of over £8000 from the National Lottery to enable them to launch their initiative, and this was a special concert, attended by the local mayor, to launch the initiative to the public, and officially receive the cheque from the lottery.
I have to say, that I’m not the greatest fan of handbells – although I suspect that is mainly having sat through a number of really bad handbell renditions where the timing goes off as the team struggle to keep in time – probably the hardest thing to get right with a group of handbell ringers I’m sure. However, with all their hard work, the St James team really don’t seem to have any of the timing issues that usually bug me about other groups that I’ve heard in the past. All in all it was a really enjoyable evening of great music.
I also tried out the video recording on the new camera, the results of which can be seen below – although I will say it’s slightly more fiddly to work with video off the new camera as it seems to be producing movie clips in a non-iMovie friendly format…
Update: A few related items that might be of interest:
Back at the tail end of 2006, the BBC showed a programme called The Choir, where Gareth Malone, who runs two choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra, went into Northolt High School and started a choir that he took to the World Choir Games in China. The programme was obviously a success, as starting next Friday he’s taking on a somewhat bigger challenge, in that he’s trying to get a choir together in The Lancaster School in Leicester – an all boys school for The Schools Prom at the Albert Hall. The subtitle for the second series, which is “Boys Don’t Singâ€? sort of gives you an impression of the struggle he’s got.
However, before the new series starts next week, we had a one off retrospective programme last night, that looked back over Gareth’s time with Northolt High School, and also asked the same question that I asked in my post about the programme when it was first shown – what happened next?
The programme inter-cut highlights (and lowlights) from the first series with interviews with some of the participants filmed almost exactly a year later. Interestingly, the person they focused on probably the most was Chloe Sullivan, who got a lot of attention first time around. To be frank Gareth had to make a real effort with her. She regularly missed rehearsals, and was frequently in trouble at school. What is fantastic though is that the effort he put in to get her into the choir, and to get her to China does seem to have made a real difference, to the point where a girl who admitted to being incredibly shy, and struggled to even sing solo at the beginning is now in a job working in a job for Hillingdon that involves giving presentations, something she is shown doing. She also says during her interview that being in the choir has made a big difference to her.
That is an answer that is repeated again and again through all the interviews. For some it’s as simple as the fact that they now have a broader appreciation of music. Many have continued to sing, joining Church choirs and other local choirs. Disappointingly there is no comment about whether Northolt High School have kept the choir going – certainly the impression given from the fact that many of the choir members are still in the school, but are singing elsewhere implies that they didn’t, which is a great pity.
The programme also provided a good few amusing moments, especially when they asked the choir members what they first thought when they saw him – much the same as the rest of us I think:
“You’re not from around here…â€?
and
“He looked about ten!�
both being thoughts that I had. Certainly the impression that he really didn’t know what he was letting himself in for going from volunteer choirs with the London Symphony Orchestra to trying to organise a choir in a large, ethnically diverse comprehensive school in London was very clear to me.
Interestingly, many of the choir members were cringing looking back on their audition pieces. On of the sixth-formers who was featured hoped that a change in hair colour before the programme was broadcast would make a difference – it didn’t. Another of the girls, who has joined another choir and said that her experience has had a major impact in what she wants to do with her life, but did a memorable rendition (with dancing) of Tainted Love says that it is the thing that most people tend to remember about her on the programme.
Ultimately what the programme really serves to highlight is what a difference being in a choir can make to young people and their confidence – and definitely what an opportunity is missed if that possibility is not available. Whilst it’s true that there are other ways, and music doesn’t work for everybody, there are perhaps a number of young people shown on the programme whose lives have been either fundamentally changed, or they have opened their eyes to new possibilities as a result of their experiences in the choir. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to seeing how Gareth copes when presented with the boys of The Lancaster School, a look at the school website gives some clues, but from the preview we got at the end of the programme this week, it certainly looks like it will be hard work…
So tonight I finally got around to watching at least part of one of my Christmas presents, The Corrs – All The Way Home / The Story Of The Corrs which is a two DVD set pairing a pretty extensive documentary covering the story of the band, along with one of their last concerts in Geneva in 2005 – significant in that it marked the return of Caroline – at least for part of the gig – following time out to have a baby.
Tonight I watched the documentary – the concert will be saved for a time when the neighbours are out as it really needs the surround sound speakers turned on for the full effect.
I would say that The Corrs are probably the band I’ve been a biggest fan of in my fairly eclectic music tastes – certainly I’ve probably got most of the stuff they’ve released in the UK, and a couple of rarities on import to. Having said that, even I stopped buying CD’s when it got to the multiple greatest hits albums with even more obscure remixes as the record company tried to squeeze money out of a band that weren’t recording any more. They’re also the band I’ve seen most live, from the first time as a support act, where all you could see of Caroline was a pony tail bobbing up and down behind the drum kit, through their major UK tours where I managed to see them at Wembley Arena and also in Birmingham. Ironically the point where their activity started to shift away from performing coincided with the point where I started to lose interest with pop music, hence why I only got the DVD this Christmas!
Anyway, the documentary really was extensive, starting right from the beginning with the Corrs as children, covering their involvement with The Commitments, then their early success in Ireland and Australia, and lack of success in the UK. From there we get their big break UK wise with the Royal Albert Hall Concert on St Patrick’s Day 1998, and then their mainstream success worldwide, leading on to the point where Sharon and Caroline get married, and the band starts to take a back seat to their families. The documentary was made a little before the official decision to go on hiatus that came in 2006, but it’s pretty obvious from the interviews in the documentary that this is the way it is going, with comments that the 2005 tour was probably the last. Having said that, we’ve seen Take That and the Spice Girls return, so who knows whether we’ll see the Corrs back again in the future. Whether or not they do, the music still remains eminently listenable – suffice to say that all their albums are on my iPod…
TechCrunch UK posted this clip alongside an article talking about Apple’s announcement that they are going to try and standardise the cost of downloads across Europe by getting the record companies to standardise their charges. Possibly a little optimistic – but then they did manage to have the clout to get their own way with the phone networks…
Anyway, the clip is worth posting just for the entertainment value…
Follow me on Twitter 
