I can’t help noticing Harry Cruickshank, because he’s tall and he’s half a second off the Stevie Wonder beat. I don’t know if he can sing or not, because of the sheer volume of sound from this 170-strong choir, mostly women, stepping mostly as one to the right, then to the left, and snapping their fingers. All raise their arms in supplication to the dark-haired woman on the keyboard at the end of the assembly hall and roar in three-part harmony: “Ooooh, ooh, baby, here I am! Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours! Ooooh, ooh, baby . . . ”
“This choir took a bit of finding,” says Cruickshank, 48, a marketing director from Woking, Surrey. “Most demand a certain quality of voice, and I haven’t had that since I turned 13. Here, you don’t have to audition; it’s about singing to the best of your ability, with energy and passion. And there’s something about the atmosphere of singing in a group — well, it’s quite powerful. It’s visceral.”
Rock Choir™ is visceral. Audiences are perplexed to find themselves in tears as the unashamedly populist home-counties phenomenon belts out pop, gospel and Motown hits in ever bigger venues, three times a year. (When the choir opened Guilfest last year, the Radio 2 stage almost collapsed under the massed weight of 300 hip-shimmying, finger-snapping bodies).
Choir members get watery-eyed in rehearsal. I did myself last week: excusable with Handel’s Messiah, but frankly embarrassing over Labi Siffre’s “Something inside so strong, I know that I can make it, but you’re doing me wrong, so wrong”. I think it’s to do with massed endeavour, with the miracle of 170 ordinary voices melding to create an astonishingly rich and funky wall of sound. There is also the poignancy of the faces behind the voices: anxious or liberated, wrinkled or glowing; housewife, teacher, barrister, widow; marketing director with bobbing adam’s apple.
Choirs are enjoying something of a renaissance. In the City, choral societies attached to banks have seen numbers swell even as workers are shed. Singing is cheap, it brings people together and it is clinically proven to be good for stress. But Zadok the Priest and Schubert are not for everyone; nor can everyone sight-read music.
Rock Choir’s formula is unique. Learning by rote (repetition, not sheet music), amateurs rehearse harmonies and choreographed movements to those hits that everybody knows and impulsively sings along to: You Can’t Hurry Love, I Want to Break Free, I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, Walking on Broken Glass. It is the Radio 2 of choral societies.
From a modest start in Farnham, Surrey, four years ago, it has caught the zeitgeist and is growing like a virus. Twelve Rock Choirs, each with up to 170 members, are in rehearsal for the Easter performance, with some 60 more set to open across five home counties and central London from September.
When the BBC ran its Last Choir Standing competition last year, Rock Choir™ was begged to perform as “the only one of its kind in the country”. The founder, Caroline Redman Lusher, 34, turned them down because it clashed with her wedding (where 300 performed Oh Happy Day, followed by a choreographed dance routine to Blame It on the Boogie). She is now talking to the shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, about the choir performing at the 2012 Olympics. There could be 4,000 members available by then.
Lusher is the key to the choir’s success. Others have attempted a similar formula, but none has turned an amateur group singing pop songs into a brand this powerful. She stands out for her rigorous classical training (Grade 8 piano and violin by 15; a degree in popular music from Salford, a thesis on Annie Lennox’s songwriting style) and her insistence on a slick, professionally run outfit. Rock Choir™ works with a variety of people, from rights lawyers to web technicians to sound engineers. The selection and harmonising of the music — sometimes up to seven-part harmony, no mean feat — is done by Lusher herself.
Then there is her charisma. You can’t take your eyes off the woman as she leads the rehearsal, resplendent in stiletto-heeled patent-leather boots, tight leggings and a waterfall of dark hair. Members agree that Lusher is the lure: “To be honest,” one says, “a lot of our husbands like going to concerts so they can watch Caroline while she’s conducting.” It is the brand’s energetic teaching style, Lusher believes, that is the key to its success.
The Guildford Wednesday-night warm-up is led by a new recruit, Tom George, 30, who has a music degree, Grade 8 piano, teaching and performing experience, and “a bit of rock’n’roll” (all minimum requirements). We sing, to the William Tell Overture, “Papa’s got a head like a ping-pong ball”, over and over, faster and faster.
Then Lusher, in a Madonna-style headset microphone, takes over. She sings effortlessly and can orchestrate a crowd by raising an eyebrow. One hundred and seventy voices attack a three-part-harmony version of the Zutons’ Valerie, as sung by Amy Winehouse: “Cause ah . . . since I’ve come on home — well, my body’s been a mess. And I’ve ah . . . missed your ginger hair and the way you like to dress.” One hundred and seventy right arms are raised as one and fingers start clicking on the off beat.
It is impossible not to be swept up in this horribly cheesy, deliciously infectious mass rendition as we “box step” into a right/left sway as if one organism. Glancing at my lyric sheet, I see that Tina Turner’s version of the Tramps’ Disco Inferno is up next. Burn, baby, burn!
Rock Choir™ is clearly a cathartic occasion for many. Lusher confirms that there are plenty of divorces, redundancies and illness among members (cancer and depression in particular). This is one guaranteed bright moment in the week. “You come out and you’re grinning,” says Jan Glynn, 40, a property developer. “You sing in the car. You can’t sleep. It’s a chemical reaction.”
Liz Barber, 55, director of a publishing company, joined after a run of dispiriting classical choral-society experiences: “With classical, there’s more pressure. You have to hit the notes. Whereas Rock Choir™ . . . well, it’s confidence-building, it’s life-affirming. It’s better than sex, isn’t it?” she says matter-of-factly. Nobody disagrees.
