"Like a school trip on steroids"
Thank you for the music: in praise of choirs
“It’s like a school trip on steroids.” That’s how the choir trip I’ve just been on was originally sold to me. Fifty-five of us – the youngest aged 16, the oldest 78 – piled onto a coach to France and sang our hearts out in churches and cathedrals in the Loire Valley.
Some members sang in choirs before joining the community choir: at school, in church, barber shop quartets, gay men’s choruses. Some have simply enjoyed karaoke or belting out show tunes in the shower.
Several families have three generations singing in the choir. For some, choir IS their family; the chance to socialise and sing once or twice a week and be part of a group.
At home in England, we cover anything from show tunes, to pop, to classical, to sacred music.
Proof of how broad our repertoire is: we introduced superstar DJ Fatboy Slim to the stage at the Common People Festival in Southampton in 2015 in front of 30,000 people with a choral rendition of Eat Sleep Rave Repeat, arranged by our choir director.
It involved warbling in our purest choral tones:
“Shit! Here come the cops!
This fuckin’ cop just looked at me!
And then he said…
Eat Sleep Rave Repeat…”
That was my first performance with the choir and it’s hard to top it.
So, yes, usually secular.
But on tour in France, we perform uplifting gospel repertoire. Churches and cathedrals are glorious venues to sing in and it’s a thrill to fill the pews and feel the warmth of the audience.
The feedback after the concerts was heart-melting.
A nun who we’d spotted singing along with us at the church in Tours, said she had known some of our songs all her life, but had never dared to join in before.
There was something quite meta about that, as a couple of our songs were from the movie Sister Act, in which Whoopi Goldberg leads a choir of rockin’ nuns.
A waiter who served some of us at lunch in Tours said he was sorry he couldn’t come along to our performance, as he had worked sixty days straight and this was his first night off.
He showed up in the first row of the audience that night and said to our director afterwards that, though a choir concert was not his usual thing, he felt by the end that he had had sixty days of rest.
A man who had recently come out of a psychiatric unit following a suicide attempt was encouraged to attend our concert by a nun who was mentoring him while he adjusted to independent living.
He told our director afterwards that he was unsure why he was still alive, but during the concert he realised this was why. Our music gave his life meaning.
Each of the three venues was stunning and atmospheric. In Le Mans cathedral a bat emerged as we sang, flitting to and fro across the arched ceilings.
When we left, the entire cathedral was bathed in a spectacular moving light show. It wasn’t for our benefit – it happens throughout August – but it was a magical end to our performance.
The ‘school trip on steroids’ description was accurate. We were tourists as well as performers that week, sampling wines and chocolates and visiting chateaux.
We shared bunk rooms and found out who snores and who needs a wee in the night.
One evening while we dined by the Loire, white mayflies filled the air. Their annual appearance is described as “summer snow” and the restaurant had to turn off the outdoor lights. One of the sopranos felt a tickle and found two mating down her bra.
A botanist in our group identified them as Ephoron Virgo, which swarm on one night of the year and die within a few hours. The streets were littered with their corpses.
At the final night party back at the hostel, our choir director – who has the voice of an angel – sang Eva Cassidy’s Over the Rainbow for one of the wonderful coach drivers to whom the song means a lot. It wasn’t just him, though. I looked around the room, my own vision misted, and there was not a dry eye.
During the week, I’d had deep conversations with people in other sections of the choir who are usually down the other end of a rehearsal room.
I read this excellent essay by
on Substack while I was away. Called The Blind Spot because she has to adjust the rear view mirror every time her 6ft 1ins son has used the car:“When I get in my car to drive somewhere after he’s driven, I have to adjust the seat forward and adjust all the mirrors because the blind spot is in a different place for him along with everything else - he sees the world from a different perspective than I do, quite literally. But the truth is, that’s everyone. We’d probably do ourselves a favor if we remembered that more.”
I thought about it a lot on tour. There were 55 of us on the coach, each with a unique perspective. Scratch the surface and everyone has a fascinating life story. And usually there is vulnerability not far underneath, which you only discover once you start talking.
We shared much laughter, a few tears, and a whole lot of blissful music.
Roll on 2026!
© Wendy Varley 2024
Do you sing in a choir? What does music mean to you?
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This brilliantly sums up our choir's Tour de France. What a great time we all had. Thanks Wendy!
I went on a choir tour to Ukraine in 2017. Not given to smiling much, our Ukrainian choir leader told us, so we were expecting a cool reception. Met with crowds annd warm applause, we were on every tv station and sang to packed spaces in each town. But the final concert, which we gave in our leader’s small home town was the one I’ll never forget. We had learned a folk song in Ukrainian, at the end of which the audience spontaneously sang back to us a traditional song of welcome, bringing us in as their family. We in the choir all held hands on the stage and tried to hold back tears as the love flowed our way. No other language than music could have brought us so close.