The first choir rehearsal of February was led by Kate and was well attended, certainly by the sopranos and altos, although the men did seem a bit down on numbers. We did some humming and then the dreaded (for me) fruit salad warm up. I still cannot co-ordinate myself to do this properly. I noticed a couple of others in the same boat but most choir members seemed to enjoy it and get a lot from it. I hope my poor warm up didn’t make my singing any worse.
The first song we sang was ‘Drive my Car’ but firstly we practised the ‘beep beep yeah’, which we did with great enthusiasm and it did sound just like what it was meant to.
Then we started to learn the Coldplay song, ‘Yellow’. We had learnt this before, quite a few years ago and sang it at a concert in memory of Diane Burgess, who sang with the altos and sadly died too young. Many choir members have joined since then so the song was new to them. We spent about 40 minutes on it, 40 minutes well spent, as everyone seemed to enjoy it and it sounded good. The alto part is more engaging than some of the songs we do and the song perhaps not as challenging as some.
This took up most of the rehearsal time but we did have time to run through ‘Heave Away’, which I think is one of the choir’s favourites, probably because each section takes the lead at some point in this sea shanty. Before finishing we sang through ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, which us older ones remember from the 60s. A good rousing end to the practice.
Written by Sue Bradley