Community 1: The Chorlton Sing

Last Tuesday, and this, I have been attending ‘The Chorlton Sing’ which is a community choir and meets at an upstairs room in the Lloyds hotel, handily located minutes from my flat.
It’s run by Simon, a man too tall for his jeans who unloaded his keyboard from the car and put out chairs in a manic fashion whilst explaining that everyone comes late, that people probably won’t come on the first one back and that they’re a sort of ‘Radio 2’ singing group rather than ‘that sort of gospel African group’. I smiled and nodded and drank my wine but it didn’t mean much as I’ve never been to a singing group before unless you count a singing workshop at a festival which was spine-tinglingly beautiful (but given the money we’d all paid to feel that way it should have been).
I said as much but Simon said ‘oh if your voice doesn’t have a ceiling just sit with the sopranos, otherwise just sit anywhere’. Well my voice does have a ceiling (a low one) and a floor (high) and walls (narrow) and a bloody great lumpy object in the middle so I sort of veer between low and high, missing the middle, loudly bellowing and school assembly quiet and crisply pronounced and pub-singer slurred in an unpredictable manner that even takes me unawares.
The group is around thirty voices, about fifteen turned up both last week and this despite Simon’s fears of post-christmas laziness. He manages the group with an enthusiasm that reminds me of a music teacher at school gallivanting between his keyboard and the centre of the floor with a tiny banjo, singing all our different parts to us (variously high, middle and low, or high and low or John, Paul and George) with confusing speed. My ears find it especially confusing as, obviously he can sing, because he runs a singing group, and no one else seemed to struggle but a lot of the time he seemed to be singing all the parts in a high falsetto.
Of the other singers there is Dominic – his brother who has a great deal of volume I found tonight when he was stood behind me, Paula with the flicky hair and glittered eyelids who laughed so much in the song ‘Bald Man’ at the line ‘When your dog disrespects you’ that she made me laugh so I tried not to look at her but I knew she was laughing anyway and could see her shoulders juddering from the corner of my eye, Janine who makes a face like a (beautiful) wide mouthed frog when she hits the high notes and some others – that’s as far as I got with names although there was a girl from Toronto and one from Malta.
Last week we did songs I didn’t know and this week we had a Monkees fest with ‘Daydream believer’ and ‘I’m a Believer’ and the ‘Off the Wall’ which Simon said should be jazzy but ended up sounding more ‘Gregorian-chanty’. At the end we stand up and sing all the songs which is the best bit.
I didn’t chat with many of them but there seemed to be a deal of chatting going on in the break and before and after and they’ve been going nearly three years so I think community was definitely in the air. I shall persevere but I suspect that with my singing voice I may well make more friends by leaving than by joining!