Christmas!

Plans are well underway for our Christmas socials! These events are traditionally member organised so a huge thank you to the Social Committee for their hard work – and to you for supporting their efforts! We all know that, without the hard work of these fantastic folks, these celebrations simply wouldn’t happen.

Bury St Edmunds and Thetford will be celebrating at Croxton Village Hall on Friday 4th December, just outside Thetford. Full details are on the popclubchoir.uk/calendar so please confirm whether you’re coming or not. Tickets will be £10 and will include a welcome drink and lots of other goodies. The proposal is that you can bring some kind of food or nibbles and Carolyn will coordinate this a little nearer the time.

The Ipswich Christmas do will be taking place Wednesday 16th December at our regular home (Ipswich Sports Club on Henley Road) and Elaine with publish more details soon. Brian and Carole are on the case searching out a suitable venue for Diss and again, as soon as we have that confirmed, I’ll be back at you with more details.

As always, please let us know if you'd like to come along by updating your status for the event at popclubchoir.uk/calendar

Christmas Gigs!

Lots of Christmas gigs coming up too, so do sign up for them. I’m very happy we've been invited back to Jimmy’s Farm this year (14th November) and hopefully we’ll get Jimmy himself to come and have a sing with us again. The following week we have a fantastic Gala Concert at St Peter’s Centre in Brandon.

After that, another busy weekend of choir events. On Friday 27th November we’ll be singing at the Thetford Christmas Lights Switch On and also new for this year, on the Sunday (29th November) we’ll be guests of the Be Well Barn (Redlingfield IP23 7QP) for their hugely popular Christmas Fair – the organisers are offering choir members 10% off food and drink on the day - there will be pizza from the pizza bar, soup, cakes, coffees and lots of festive treats too! And of course, mulled wine! Do sign up and make a day of it!

I don’t want to ask too much of you so (as mentioned previously) we’re not going to do the Mundford Christmas Lights event this year which would have fallen in between those two performances. It was really fun last and the organisers are lovely so I hope they’ll have us back in the future. If you have signed up for that event, please mark yourself as something other than coming on the popclubchoir.uk/calendar so I know you’ve seen this.

Christmas Songs!

This year’s new Christmas song is complete and I may even play it for you next week at rehearsal. I do like a big reveal. Slightly more modern than previous years but with a funky little reference to something much, much older in the bridge.

See if you can spot it!

We’ll be resurrecting the old favourites from previous years such as Fairytale of New York, Ed Sheeran and Elton John’s Merry Christmas, a handful of Christmas Carols and our sing-along-Christmas-hot-hopeful, Merry Christmas Everyone.

Website

I’ve done a bit of work on the website this week and there’s now a new feature on the popclubchoir.uk/resources page allowing you to look at all the resources as a list, with some handy filter buttons to narrow down your choice. There’s a even a search bar so you can go straight to the file you need. It’s in beta at the moment, meaning that I’m pretty sure – but not certain – that I’ve ironed out all the bugs. Let me know if anything doesn’t work as expected.

As always, audio, scores and lyrics sheets are on the popclubchoir.uk/resources page for you to download. You can also order a printed copy of stuff there which I’ll bring along to rehearsals for you. Unless I happen to be having a very tardy start to the day you’ll need to get any printing orders in before midnight on the day before the rehearsal you want to collect at.

Video and audio is all still on the http://popclubchoir.uk/player

My Life

I’ve loved teaching this one and it’s starting to sound amazing. We’ll complete the formal learning of this next week and then it’ll be over to you to use the Recap and Rehearsal videos available on the popclubchoir.uk/player to consolidate.

If you're new here, a little explainer about the videos may be useful.

Reherasal Videos are just that, videos of the actual rehearsals, with all the parts being taught together. These are a great starting point if you just want a reminder of what went on, a game of Eddy-Joke-Bingo, or if you missed the rehearsal.

The Recap Videos are done here in the studio and are voice part specific. Broadly, it's me teaching just your part, to camera, with the lyric sheets on screen for you to sing along. You'll get a few extra musical pointers plus some suggestions of how to practise the tricky bits.

All the resources are now uploaded for My Life and you'll find them here in the members’ area as usual. I had a few camera problems when recording the Recap Videos so apologies if you find the quality is a bit variable. I also (perhaps foolishly) filmed them the afternoon following our Bungay Market gig, starting with the bass part. So, by the time I got the sopranos my voice was getting a bit tired. I struggle with those high notes at the best of times so… well, I hope it’s not too unpleasant for you, Sops!

If you have any questions then do get in touch. You can email me at ed@popclubchoir.uk, or WhatsApp, call or text on 07973 110075.

Ed