This is a little tribute to any Youth Leader, who having been asked to contribute to some Church event, has found themselves on stage with a number of semi-unwilling members of their youth group, feeling like they’re doing a solo, and yet somehow managed to pull it together in the end.
As a background to this [...]

So are you fed up with X-Factor winners getting the Christmas number one spot? How about this as an alternative?
 

This is the latest album from Voces8, who we went to see in concert on Tuesday night, and who were fantastic! The group is run by two brothers, Barney and Paul, who are also the sons [...]

Okay, another bit of a gap in blogging, and another catch up!
Pregnancy wise, Beth has been back and forth to the hospital several times over the past couple of weeks with stuff related to the gestational diabetes. The dietary stuff didn’t overly work – indeed her blood sugar seems to go all over the place [...]

Along with our annual trip to see the Tappers, this weekend was also pretty busy as it was our patronal festival weekend at St James. As part of this on Saturday we had an evening from The Madding Crowd, a group of performers from Winchester, and then today we had the annual opening of the [...]

Sometimes there are times when you really feel for people organising live shows, Friday night was one of those nights. Over the years we seem to have turned into one of the many Basingstoke Tappers groupies, and have been along to every summer show they’ve done for the best part of a decade. Reading through [...]

I was actually on iTunes trying to find if the Church of England were repeating their podcasting of the General Synod again – unfortunately not, they seem to have decided that making the proceedings available for download in a PC only format is better this year, hard luck for those of us using Mac’s!
Anyway, what [...]

This year was another Eurovision Song Contest, and another where the ongoing pattern of the UK entry doing spectacularly badly continued, as it ended up in joint last place with 14 points. As is often the case the general opinion is that although the UK entry wasn’t perhaps a winner, “Even Ifâ€? sung by Andy [...]

On Saturday I, together with ten other people from St James sang in what was quite possibly the biggest choir I’d ever been a part of. I’m not quite sure of the exact numbers, but the choir took up all of the space on the stage at the Albert Hall, and a good deal of [...]

Maybe I’m just overly critical, and perhaps I’d be different if it were my child playing, but I tend to not overly look forward to the prospect of school students being, how shall we put it, adventurous in their choice of concert repertoire.
This particular opportunity to experience a school musician came up as part of [...]

Thank heavens there are some of the British public who have their heads screwed on and can recognise a half-decent song. I only watched about ten minutes of the main show, and the results show of this weekends annual effort to pick the British entry to Eurovision, and that was enough.
At one point, John Barrowman [...]

So perhaps rather as expected, last night the second series of The Choir concluded with Gareth triumphantly leading his choir to sing on stage at the Royal Albert Hall.
Having said that, there were differences between the conclusion here and what happened at the end of the first series. Watching the retrospective of the first series [...]

We’ve carried on watching The Choir over the past couple of weeks, and although it’s been enjoyable, and it’s great to see the progress, the programme has followed a familiar path with Gareth pulling together a choir. Although it’s been frustrating at times, Gareth himself summed it up pretty well this week when he said [...]

Our choir master has laid us a bit of a Lenten Challenge – and it doesn’t involve giving anything up…
Last week he told us that he has put down Crucifixus by Antonio Lotti as our main anthem for the service on Good Friday, and handed out the music. The anthem is in eight parts, and [...]

Last night was the first part of the second series of The Choir – subtitled “Boys Don’t Singâ€?. The format was slightly different from the first series last year in that rather than coming in purely to lead the choir, this time Gareth Malone was actually joining the staff of the school. The school itself [...]

Over two years ago, I blogged about the Airwolf Themes album, the soundtrack CD that holds the record for the most expensive soundtrack album ever – and indeed regularly breaks it’s own record whenever a copy comes up on eBay.
I said back then that as the only soundtrack album related to the series, indeed the [...]

Just had a nice little article forwarded on to me. Martin, a friend of ours in Peterborough has had his recent trip to play with the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band, well known as a result of the movie Brassed Off, reported in his local paper. Needless to say, the forward comes from his rather proud [...]

Yesterday night I was up at the Church for a musical event where for once I didn’t have to do anything at all!
The event was the launch of the St James’ Handbell Ringers “Take it From Hereâ€? initiative – where they are planning to take their music into a variety of the local care homes, [...]

Back at the tail end of 2006, the BBC showed a programme called The Choir, where Gareth Malone, who runs two choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra, went into Northolt High School and started a choir that he took to the World Choir Games in China. The programme was obviously a success, as starting next [...]

So tonight I finally got around to watching at least part of one of my Christmas presents, The Corrs – All The Way Home / The Story Of The Corrs which is a two DVD set pairing a pretty extensive documentary covering the story of the band, along with one of their last concerts in [...]

TechCrunch UK posted this clip alongside an article talking about Apple’s announcement that they are going to try and standardise the cost of downloads across Europe by getting the record companies to standardise their charges. Possibly a little optimistic – but then they did manage to have the clout to get their own way with [...]