00:00 [Singing]
00:07 Okay, so the Tuners' Choir is a choir for people who just like to sing.
00:13 They don't necessarily sing with the right notes, or maybe not in the right order, but they just love to sing.
00:20 They may have been told at school, "You can't join our choir, you can't sing."
00:23 They might have been told as an adult that they can't sing.
00:27 Many have joined choirs, actually, or actually didn't because they didn't pass the audition, whereas we don't have any auditions.
00:32 So it's for people who really just enjoy singing.
00:35 We sing like no one is listening.
00:37 We just belt the songs out, we give ourselves a clap at the end because no one else is going to clap us,
00:42 and then we move on to the next song.
00:44 So there's no auditions, there's no parts, there's no solos, there's no judgement.
00:48 People can come in, they can sit where they want, they can stand up, sit down, clap their hands, they just enjoy.
00:55 We actually laugh as much as we sing, don't we? We really do.
00:58 The newbies, as we call them, I usually get a message from them, either that night or the next morning,
01:06 just saying, "Thank you so much, we've been made so welcome."
01:09 We really do make a big thing about that.
01:11 We try and include them all, we try and sit them with people that have been coming for a while.
01:16 And there's plenty of opportunity to talk to each other and to laugh as well.
01:23 That's one of the feedback we get from the newbies, how welcome they feel.
01:26 Not just us, the whole choir make them feel very, very welcome.
01:30 And the ones that have been coming since April, they just love it, don't they?
01:35 They just absolutely love it.
01:37 I think it's a chance for them to have their own time, because it's predominantly female.
01:43 We don't advertise that, we'd love to have some men, but it's mainly female.
01:47 And I think they just have a chance to escape, really.
01:52 They come in, they do their own thing, it doesn't matter how they do, if they sing badly or not.
01:56 No one judges, we all just carry on.
01:59 Often, there's me and our daughter Hannah, and we're singing completely the wrong words anyway.
02:05 But it's not a problem, we all just laugh, clap and move on.
02:09 It's all positive, we don't get many, well, we don't have any, do we?
02:13 I feel like we had a couple of university students come with their mums, and they were just absolutely screaming.
02:17 I thought, "Oh, this might be a tough crowd."
02:20 But they actually were well into it.
02:21 In fact, I was amazed, because the songs they were singing were old songs, but obviously their mums sing in the kitchen or whatever.
02:27 If you get 25, 30 people singing, the notes cancel each other out, and actually the sound that comes out is actually really quite nice.
02:37 You advertise a tuneless choir, and then you go, "That wasn't tuneless, that actually was well in tune, that."
02:43 So it's quite nice.
02:46 I've had people visiting the hall, visiting the kitchens here, and have actually said, "Excuse me, your sign says you're tuneless."
02:52 "Yes, well, we didn't think you were."
02:54 But there are some songs that we ruin.
02:57 We don't. We don't mind, we laugh, we don't do that one again, and we carry on, don't we?
03:02 - Yeah, you are. (laughing)
Comments