8:18am Thu 19th Nov 09:: written by Heather Clifford

If you happen to come across me this week and I’m humming a gospel song and clicking my fingers like an extra in Sister Act, don’t be alarmed - I’m practising.

There are few occasions when I have performed in public in my life. There was a disastrous attempt at Summer Lovin’ on a karaoke machine in a hotel bar in Minorca in the mid-1990s and some impromptu sing-offs with friends on PlayStation SingStar. But Saturday is the big one - I’ll be on stage in Castle Hill, Windsor, under the inscrutable gaze of Queen Victoria, as part of the entertainment before the Christmas lights are switched on, singing somewhere between the band of the Irish Guards and the choirboys of St George’s Chapel.

I won’t be on my own, of course - there will be at least 100 of us, all members of Maidenhead’s newest choir - Rock Choir™ - performing four feelgood numbers before Wendy Craig and her Aladdin co-stars flick the switch.

We’ll kick off with the Judy Garland classic Get Happy, followed by Can’t Hurry Love, by The Supremes (or Phil Collins, depending on your age), then Cher’s 1988 hit Shoop Shoop It’s In His Kiss, finishing off with the gospel music standard Oh Happy Day.

The musical phenomenon that is Rock Choir™ opened a branch locally in September and has been an instant hit; many wanting to join have had to be placed on a waiting list. It is one of 60 Rock Choirs, the first being set up four years ago by a professional singer and musician, Caroline Redman Lusher, in Farnham, Hampshire. Her winning formula was to welcome all-comers - no auditions are held and there is no requirement to read music - and to select upbeat songs from the world of pop, Motown and gospel. 

One of the women in her choir wrote a piece for a national newspaper about it, which led to an appearance on Channel Four’s Paul O’Grady Show and the idea caught on. Her choirs have now mushroomed across the Home Counties. She employs 10 choir tutors and has 5,000 signed-up members,  each paying £90 a term (£80 for juniors). More choirs are on the cards - another is due to open during the daytime in Maidenhead in January. 

There’s a website - rockchoir.com - where members can download lyric sheets and MP3 recordings of the original songs, buy T-shirts or pay for their next term. 

Aiming high, Caroline has even had a meeting with the Olympic organisers about Rock Choir™ performing at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games.

Holyport Rock Choir™ seems to be so popular because, as member Nic Rippon, a Maidenhead mother-of-three put it: “It’s good for the soul.”  Every Tuesday at 8pm, up to 150 people - the majority of them women in their 40s and 50s, and a handful of men - file into the hall at Holyport Manor School,  Ascot Road, with their bottles of water and song lyrics for a 90-minute session with choir tutor Glen Harvey, 24, a musical dynamo who made the final 15 of ITV’s Pop Idol in 2003.

The graduate of Contemporary Music runs eight Rock Choirs, and Holyport is his biggest.  We take a seat in our respective sections – bass, alto or soprano - to face Glen, up front at his electronic keyboard wearing an earpiece and microphone. Ten minutes of warm-up exercises on our vocal chords ensue - lots of oohs and ahhs and mmmmms, and singing tongue twisters up and down the scales as fast as we can - red lorries and yellow lorries and ‘papa’s got a head like a ping pong ball.’ Then we work our way through the songs, with Glen gently chivvying us to pronounce the words correctly, to stand up straight, to smile.

Glen demonstrates everyone’s harmony for them, going through the vocal ranges and breaking into falsetto for the sopranos, and counting each section in and out. When it comes together as planned, there’s great excitement and usually spontaneous applause. 

“When I am standing there, it blows my mind every week, to hear this wall of sound. When it finally clicks, it’s magical,” said Glen. There are also a baffling number of accompanying moves to master.
For Can’t Hurry Love, we step as one to the left then to the right, clicking our fingers, and for Get Happy, we start off with our backs to the audience, then swivel around on the beat to face front. Half way through Oh Happy Day, there’s a ‘dance break’ when we are expected to break into a freestyle boogie, and end the song with our arms outstretched above our heads. Humour is never far from the surface.

Last week, one of the sopranos kept ending her ‘shoops’ half a beat too late, to everyone’s amusement.
Sometimes Glen will go off plan, and start blasting out a Dolly Parton or Take That classic on his keyboard. Other times, he’s been made to blush with innocent comments taken the wrong way by his audience, most of whom are old enough to be his mother. Plugging the dress rehearsal last week, he said: ‘You’ve got to dress up for me next week’,  which brought a big ‘whoooa’ from the women.

“He’s highly entertaining. It is a tough gig for a young man.  He’s very funny,” said mother-of-three Lou Williams, of Gringer Hill, who runs a psychometric testing business. Her neighbour Beth Osborne, employment adviser for the Society of Local Council Clerks, said:  “He’s a very talented musician. I think of him as talented as someone like Bill Bailey, with the ability to play and sing from any era and inject a bit of humour into it, like a stand-up comedian with an electronic keyboard.”

Choirs are enjoying something of a renaissance in the Noughties; think of the popularity of the BBC’s Last Choir Standing and The Choir.  And the all-inclusive nature of membership of Rock Choir™ seems fill a void in the community. “I have always wanted to sing but I was put off by formal choirs. I thought they would be too hard,” said ‘alto’ Lucy Thorpe, a former Radio Five Live presenter and mother-of-two from Switchback Road South. 

“It can be quite tricky but you get a real sense of achievement when you have mastered it and you are all singing together and you make a brilliant sound. Sometimes you don’t feel like going but when you get there, it’s uplifting.”
Caroline Rhucroft, a mother-of-two from College Avenue, said: “I did it for the social side, not the singing. When you leave you’re guaranteed to be in a good mood. It lifts your spirits.”

And Beth, who has not sung in a choir since the late seventies at Altwood School: “I wanted to do something musical and creative in my spare time. “I find it really absorbing and relaxing. For one and a half hours I don’t think about anything else apart from where I come in or where the key changes are. “When it all comes together, it’s quite moving – it’s like being in a place of worship. From the very start, it has been very friendly.  You feel a sense of belonging.”

Rock Choir™ Holyport is due to sing at Castle Hill, Windsor, on Saturday November 21 at 4.20pm