It is just over a year since an event occurred that has left an indelible marker in the memory.
It was on a wet and windy Saturday night, in early October 2019, in a little seaside town on the North Wales coast. The venue, whose size is almost out of proportion to its host, is international in its scope and contains a theatre that was packed to the gunnels, on all levels; and at £30 a ticket this is some achievement. What happened next was unexpected and quite extraordinary, at least for a group of amateur hobbyists, who sing for the love of it.
This group came together here, because they had been invited to be the guests of a large collective of women, who, like the men, happen to sing for love, not money. This is a routine invitation that happens every year to the chorus of men, who have won the chorus gold medal at their own annual convention. They neither opened the show nor closed it as the ‘headline’ act, but rather perform somewhere discreetly in the middle of the show. Somehow their performance turned into something quite different, something that few of us had experienced before, even those who had been on the stage with this chorus times many over the years in the winning of an amazing eight chorus gold medals in the forty years since they first came together in 1978.
We stood in silence, watching our Musical Director mouthing and miming instructions to us, to be alert and ready to perform, listening through the back of the stage curtains to a quartet singing their songs with huge hearts. Then, following applause for the quartet, we were announced ... reigning UK Champion men’s chorus, Hallmark of Harmony! But, as the curtains opened, there was a brief moment of time travel.
It is always the case that every time we do a show, those ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or forty minutes on stage seem to pass us by so quickly that it is easy to forget how it felt, whether I got all my words and notes right; whether I retained the right posture, facial expression, vocal quality, how I sang, whether I performed as I should. In that moment, I thought we had finished and the audience, which filled the theatre, were applauding, cheering, it felt like some were even standing to thank us. After that brief moment, it quickly became apparent that we hadn’t yet sung a note! We were being charged with energy from a very appreciative crowd, who, it seems, were either offering us the warmest of welcomes, or simply expecting great things ...
I imagined in that moment what it must be like for a successful sports team or singing star, at the top of their game - with a large following of tens of thousands of fans - whose game is lifted by the energy of the crowd, its enthusiasm, its support. Well, ours was lifted that Saturday night. We were given wings ... and I believe we delivered on the promise.
It took only four songs, with their well thought out and entertaining links in between, telling stories of fun, joy, the value to the spirit of singing and gratitude for what we had achieved; for what the Sheffield Barbershop Harmony Club had done for Barbershop, for singing in the UK. Yes Sheffield. Once, in close living memory, the City of Steel; now, a city of music and of culture. A city where one of the four UK Assay Offices was created nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, to enable the accurate hallmarking of those highly valued objects made of silver and gold. Now a greater value is placed, maybe not by the establishment, but by so many extraordinary people, on creative endeavour, on helping both artists and audiences feel better about their lives.
So how do we value the art of harmony singing? How can we put a stamp on it? How do we hallmark it? In short, we cannot. In countless testimonies, the health and well-being of those who take up singing in groups, particularly in harmony singing, receives unquantifiable reward, not often with silver and gold medals, but every day, by raising the status of the human spirit. At a time when we are faced with burgeoning evidence of the corruption of politics, self serving interest and selfish greed ... for ‘things’, for stuff that provides, at best, only short term value and salve to damaged minds and spirits and now bodies, damaged by a cruel virus. You cannot put a price on it; on making music and art with friends. I don't know about you, but to me this is my idea of a successful life.
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Epilogue
That was the recording of our 24 minutes on stage in Llandudno. The quartet that joined us for that final iconic song, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was OC Times, an International champion quartet from the USA. After this performance, as ever we do, the singing continued in the large bar of the Venue Cymru at what is always called the 'Afterglow'. As we stood with our beers, when the show had finished, the audience trooped out from the theatre. We found ourselves once again surprised and flattered at the apparent adulation we seemed to be receiving from those passing by us to queue at the bar. It was quite extraordinary. We did eventually perform “Without a Song”, arranged by our own Sam Hubbard, in what was by then a very large and crowded bar, where we managed to squeeze in a rather large gathering of singers from Hallmark of Harmony, along with two of the UK’s top ladies choruses, the Cheshire Chords and the Leeds White Rosettes to reprise the song, directed by Tim Briggs standing precariously on a chair, to resounding effect, along with some tears ... tears that recognise the fragility of the human condition, the frailty of the human spirit, but above all this, how full of joy the human heart can be, especially when we are in harmony with each other ... and with a song.
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