What a marvellous occasion! How lovely it was to be back singing together and hearing our voices!!! And it was lovely to see you all and watch you laugh and be happy together – it really was just like old times.

Here’s what we got up to:

We warmed up with Sunchyme – our original ‘drink your drink’ music to get us in the feeling of being back at choir.

All Together Now – this was just a song about togetherness – I’m not sure we’ll continue with it, depends on the poll. There’s quite a lot going on with the song in terms of harmony but we kept it simple last night (although that ending went on forever!!!!!! I’d edit that off…)

Viva La Vida – a throw back to our FIRST EVER choir night when we sang this. It never gets old or tired does it?

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – we learned this originally totally online and yes, we made a virtual recording, but I was really keen to hear how it sounds when it’s just us singing it for real. You did really well – there are 6 parts (of courses you only need to know one of them!) We might, for the future, lose the blue part and amalgamate it with the green as they are quite similar and I don’t think we’d lose anything if we did this. We’ll discuss next time. The harmonies for this are on the website and there are conducting videos for each part in the guides section on the Facebook group. These can be quite useful if you like seeing where the notes go through conducting as opposed to just listening. You can download the MP3s if you’d like to do that. I will continue to teach teach teach this during the sessions so don’t feel like it’s up to you to prepare.

Demons – It’s possible that everyone had forgotten their parts! I’ll check the poll and think about how much time we want to spend on this for the future.

Read my mind – I love this. I think it’s one of my favourites. We recapped the harmonies from the back of the song last night from ‘Slipping in my faith’ at around 3 minutes in. Again, this was a lockdown mix and so there are conducting videos for this as well as harmony parts on the website. All harmonies are now protected on a members area for which you’ll need your username and password to access (username is your email address, password is your own private thing! There’s a ‘forgotten password’ option – thank you Vicky). We’ll go through more of this song next time….

The whole evening was peppered with little moments of hilarity – we wouldn’t have it any other way!

We returned to our original version of Chasing Cars – I’ll put the harmonies for this out later this week as the old version is different. Barbara mentioned that some of the greens had joined the blues on this one which makes sense – we need that foundation – so we might tweak the parts slightly here and there.

The Best Day of My Life- another new song. Again, lots going on but I thought I’d see how it went down with you all before I spent 16 hours arranging and recording the parts! If we like it, we can move forwards with it.

Vienna – oooohhhhhh this is going to be amazing – I kind of thought it might……. we did just the chorus harmonies and we’ll do them again before we get on to the main event. Might well cut out the instrumental section which is so long and unnecessary for us!

Human – this sounded brilliant last night. Again, I’ll go through it in more detail in the coming weeks.

Sweet Disposition – we dedicated this song to the family and friends of Dylan Rich who died tragically at the weekend. A young man who’s life ended too soon. Our thoughts are with the community who knew him. Life is precious and short and we totally raised the roof with this song to celebrate this. Thank you all.

I can’t explain how amazing last night felt. The feedback from you all has been brilliant. You’ve embraced and respected the changes we’ve put in place and I thank you all for that. Our singing community doesn’t just live on, we have thrived and evolved and adapted and remained loyal to each other. It was lovely to welcome our new singers who joined us online and to see the familiar zoom faces laughing and joining in from all corners of the UK (Edinburgh, Leicester, Kent and Devon in case you were wondering!) as well as the local people who were unable to make it.

The only way is up. And I’m delighted to be able to share that journey with you all.

Thank you x