Beneath thy Guiding Hand

There is nothing like doing something different. I have worked for the Girl Guides before remastering material, originally recorded on mini-disc for cassette duplication, to make it suitable for release on CD. But on Sunday I found myself recording them live for the first time in order to make their fifth CD release.

There were some thirty adult Guides, many of whom learnt their craft in the 1940s, in a room with a couple of guitars, a keyboard, a pair of bongos, some recorders and a set of hand chimes. The Guides had spent the previous day practising and we managed to record most of the fifty-two songs in one take. We started at 9 am and had finished by 4.30 pm. The live room, effectively a lounge, was so packed with performers that any hope of separating instruments was abandoned at the outset. I put a stereo mic by the conductor (who, herself, was jammed up against the fireplace) in the hope that if it sounded good to her it would sound equally good on the recording. I had another mono mic, my faithful Neumann, that I used to favour anything I thought might need a boost later: the bongos, spoken parts and the like. Half the kit I bought turned out to be unnecessary but with Be Prepared as my motto for the day I felt reassured by its presence.

Hautbois (pronounced Hobbiss) House is a former vicarage that was given to the Girlguiding Anglia by two sisters who were active in the movement. Its 30 acres of land host all sorts of outdoor activities although I dare say you could still find someone to teach you how to fold a napkin if you looked hard enough. The pictures show some water-based challenges being undertaken - training, in fact, for future instructors, along with the abseiling tower. I have also seen archery targets on previous visits and they have a fair number of canoes. I am sure I am just scratching the surface of all the things on offer.

The songs include secular and religious material and will be accompanied by a booklet to enable leaders to teach the songs to young Brownies and Rainbows. In all honesty it is not the kind of music I would usually choose to listen to but I did find it surprisingly uplifting. A lot of the subject matter was very lighthearted ("Banana's of the World unite..." and "Earwig O") and most of it was sung in a major key. And although I am not especially religious myself it was hard not to smile at lines like "Ho, Ho, Ho, Hosanna..." and "He, He, He, He loves me..." If you like happy clappy then these are the folk you need around your campfire. Whether I'll still be smiling on day four of playing with levels and putting it all together ready for duplication remains to be seen.

The singing competition (not)

At the end of the singing competition I went to last week the chief judge got up to speak to the audience and give her feedback to the choirs. She told us how she refused to judge competitions but enjoyed coming to Norwich to judge this one because it wasn't a competition. The problem with competitions, apparently, is that they can be very discouraging when all the choirs really want is some constructive feedback.

And then came the feedback, which was constructive, followed by the results. One choir got 'Commended Performance Plus', another 'Highly Commended' and another achieved 'Highly Commended Performance Plus' while the remaining entrants were given one of these. No choir was deemed to have achieved 'Outstanding'. If the object of this was to allow a head teacher to stand up in assembly and tell the school how well their choir did in the Festival then it succeeds very well. No one has to say their choir was beaten by the school around the corner.

If, on the other hand, it hopes to disguise from the children how they got on in the 'not' competition then I'm afraid it may have failed. My daughter knew straight away that her choir came last. Dressing numbers up as words wasn't enough to pull the wool over her eyes. Fortunately it didn't seem to bother her or her fellow choristers - they were in it for the fun.

The hard knocks and disappointments in education are often defended as 'preparation for the adult world'. I'm very glad the open-mic sessions and mixed, cabaret-style, events I sometimes play at aren't judged in this way. Yes, the feedback may be useful but as for the rest, I know if it's gone well or badly and the audience usually gives a fair indication of that, too. And speaking of the audience, the troop from Suffolk, presumably with the fewest parents in attendance, were the most enthusiastically applauded in spite of only coming joint second.

The singing competition

I suppose anything that gets people singing is, by definition, 'a good thing' and therefore be spared any criticism. So I should stop there really, perhaps just pausing to express my genuine admiration for those who put their spare time into running choirs. Last week I went to see a singing competition in a church in the city centre. It wasn't supposed to be a competition but more on that later. I normally avoid such affairs but my daughter was in a theatre choir that had entered the not-a-competition for the first time. I didn't stay for the second half as she needed to get back to be ready for an early start the next day but I saw all five acts in the first half.

First up was the junior choir from a rural area of Norfolk. The repertoire was almost exclusively religious, by which I mean Christian. No harm in that of course but if it hadn't been for the clothes it could have been the 1950s which was probably the era of both the conductor and accompanist. The theatre choir came next with 'Ave Verum Corpus' and a sweet arrangement of 'Cant Take My Eyes Off You'. And then the rural choir's seniors came on with 'Danny Boy' - a maudlin dirge if you ask me but beautifully sung and well suited to the room's acoustics - and two songs of praise. Less suited to the acoustic was 'Fascinating Rhythm'. I was upstairs in the gallery and the notes were playing pinball around my ears.

Occasionally I see something that makes me think 'Only in Norfolk...' and it usually involves a well-meaning attempt to recreate something from another culture. Watching this choir try to jive along to the Gershwin number and, later, to 'Down by the Riverside' reminded me that Norfolk is probably one of the few places on the planet where you will find people still clapping on the downbeat. Classical musicians really can't swing and it seems traditional choirs struggle too. It put me in mind of 'Can Blue Men Sing the Whites' by the Bonzos but I'm sure it was good enough for the doting mums and dads in a church in Norwich.


So a breath of fresh air, and a complete surprise, when a choir from rural Suffolk took to the stage with 'African Sanctus'. I've always loved this song since seeing the 1968 film 'If' starring Malcolm McDowell. McDowell had a good line in brooding obsessives, most famously Alex in 'A Clockwork Orange'. Here he plays a revolutionary schoolboy in an English public (meaning exclusive and private) school. The choir did this very well and followed it with a South African song sung in one of the native languages. It turned out that their conductor/leader was from South Africa. My partner is a dancer and wasn't hugely impressed by their attempts to move along to the music and get themselves on and off stage in an authentic fashion but it worked for me.

And finally the rural Norfolk choirs combined for a mixed choir. More of the same really. They were good at what they did but I had seen and heard enough of them. That's not their fault. The fact that only three choirs, in truth, had come along to the first half speaks volumes. I don't know how many made the second half but probably not many. And that is why, for all the 'like punk (or even Suez) never happened' ethos, it is very definitely 'a good thing' and should be applauded.