Chaps Choir début at the Union Chapel, Islington

 The performance begins with a huddle of men in dark t-shirts, not-so-subtly assembling near a platform that might be a stage. There’s definitely a bulk to the group, but I’d like to think that we carry a certain nonchalance which will take our assembled guests off-guard. With a huge grin on his face, ready to burst from the excitement of the last few months, Dom raises his arm and mouths to the count of *one, two, three, four….*  

“ALLE” we chant, swinging our fists in a jovial, encouraging fashion, bringing conversation around the room to a stand-still. “ALLE” we repeat, bumping, shuffling and drifting our ways towards our prearranged positions in front of the stage. “ALLE” we boom, growing more confident now that this is actually happening. “A-LE” we echo, settling into position: a large group of tenors to the left, a thin slice of baritones in the centre and a gruff wedge of basses to the right.

Here we are, Chaps Choir, on the cusp of our first performance less than three months after we all first met. It's a début at the Union Chapel no less, albeit in the second room. The main space is currently being filled by rapturous applause for a pint-sized youth choir in red t-shirts.

I think it’s fair to say there’s some apprehension amongst the Chaps at this point. Many of us have never sung in public before - at least not whilst sober or in tune – a fair few have only made it to about half the sessions and, although no-one had said it out loud, the pre-show rehearsal was pretty awful. To top it all off, those kids next door are sounding pretty good. Now we have a room full of 150 friends, family, wives and girlfriends who have turned up to see what we've been up to every Thursday night since April. I've even invited some friendly clients along. Oh, and there are members of at least two other choirs here to support us. No pressure then.

We can’t really mess-up the Finnish reindeer chant so long as we all keep a close eye on Dom, our beat-boxing choirmaster. It‘s a nice number to warm up with and we’re re-assured by the surge of applause that greets its final notes. We can do it! We are doing it! Huzzah!

The real challenge is the first lyrical song of the set, a harmonized version of The Logical Song by Supertramp (yes, Supertramp). If you don’t know it (where were you in 1979?), the verses are essentially lists of four syllable words that end in –cal, -ble and –ful; all easily confused and bloody difficult to remember. We also have the task of expressing the increasingly unhappy sentiment of the song’s lyrics, from the gentle a optimism of youth to the crushing disaffection of adulthood - all followed by a breathless ahhhhhhh--ah-ahh-ahhhhh-ah-ah-ahhh in the chorus.

As we hit the second verse I realise that we sound better than we've ever sounded before. Something’s just clicked. I can feel the resonance of our voices working together in harmony. We've nailed it. The crowd goes wild. This feels great. We ease into How Soon is Now with confidence, slowly building the energy as we creep towards the angst-ridden chorus... “I am hu-man and I need to be lo-o-o-v-ed” (Chaps can have feelings too, you know).

There’s a moment in the audience participation section of Cry Me A River when I question the wisdom of inviting members of two other choirs to watch us, but we pull it back with a powerful and very male sounding ending. The final triumph is a gentle but powerful rendition of The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields, prompting a guffaw of giggles from the largely female audience after the first line - “The book of love is long and boring” - but rapturous applause to follow. We've done it!

There are cries for more, which we don’t have, so we sing Logical Song again with gusto: “Please tell me who I a-a-a-m, who I a-a-a-m”. More applause. We shake hands, we congratulate, we slap each other on the back. Some of us even hug. My wife (aka my greatest critic) who has banned me from singing in the house, tells me that we sounded brilliant.

We all arrived at Chaps in different ways, some through MeetUps or Facebook, a few through other choirs and many just through word of mouth. When we first croaked, clapped and squawked our way through Under the Bridge, I don’t think many of us imagined that we’d be performing to an audience by this point, but we did all enjoy the experience from the get-go.

I’m usually skeptical about jumping onto the latest bandwagon (choirs were so 2011 aren't they? Gareth Malone and all that), but for someone who doesn't know how to control his vocal chords the idea of learning in a safe environment (a huddle of other blokes behind whom I could hide if things went wrong) was very appealing. The revelation that everyone was so friendly and keen to talk about the challenges and rewards of singing together made it a highly enjoyable social-bonding experience. The fact that The Craft Beer Company has a pub on the other side of the road was the icing on the cake.

None of it would have been possible without the energy, enthusiasm and optimistic ambition of our choirmaster Mr Dominic Stichbury. I went to school with Dom many years ago and used to play in bands with his little brother Jim, so it’s been a real pleasure to reconnect with him at a point at which he’s realising his potential to make things like this happen. I hope we've done him proud and eventually go on to sound like a choir who people might like to listen to.

The week of our first performance I saw two reports in the news that affirmed my own positive experience. The first, reported in The Independent, showed that singing in harmony with others actually has a positive effect on our heart rate in a similar way to yoga breathing. Having tried both, I have to say that singing is much more fun, so that’s good news. The second, from a group called Vocality claims that bringing people together to sing can foster cohesion and better understanding in divided communities. Chaps, as you might expect,  is mostly made up mostly of middle-class media types at the moment, but it is open to all and it's definitely brought us together. Now if only there were enough choirmasters to go round...

Chaps Choir is open to all with a Y chromosome. It reconvenes in Islington to learn a new batch of songs from September 19. If you’d like to give it a go before then, Dom’s also running day-long workshop with the Chaps on 17 August. For more info visit chapschoir.wordpress.com

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: And Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe

Poe was a literary pioneer, one of the first American writers to make a living from his work, during the 1830s and 1840s. Known for penning gothic tales of the macabre and some of the first known detective mysteries, his influence extends through the penny dreadful fiction of the Victorians and weird tales of the 1930s right through to the best horror and crime writers of today. Although I'd like to report that I was dazzled, thanks to Poe's peculiar early nineteenth century style of writing and rather long-winded method of storytelling I found this collection to be more of an enjoyable exercise in literary archaeology than a revelation. Most of the classic tales are in there, including ' The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Masque of the Red Death' and the eponymous title, but it's a shame that his most famous story 'The Raven' isn't included. If I were to pick a favourite, 'The Masque of the Red Death' manages to convey a brilliantly original idea with more flair and brevity than the rest. Worth reading for literary completion.

Read: In bed before lights out.
Filed alongside: Wilke Collins, HP Lovecraft

View all my reviews

BBC Your Paintings - art history for all

"If there's something that needs to be done, and no-one else is doing it, you damn well get out there and do it yourself"

Fred Hohler on why he founded the Public Catalogue Foundation, in 2003, with a mission to photograph the entire UK national collection of 210,000+ oil paintings and archive them online for the world to enjoy.

10 years later and I have had the the pleasure of publicising the completed BBC Your Paintings website, celebrated with a month of events and exhibitions at galleries and museums across the country this February. It was very much a return to my art history roots. Much of our time was spent contacting local galleries and museums about the stories behind paintings in their collection, then reporting the news to various media.

They included the discovery of a new painting by Anthony Van Dyck at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Having been photographed in storage, the picture was originally thought to have been a copy until it was spotted on the Your Paintings website by art historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor who is an expert on the Dutch 16th century painter and court favourite of Charles I. The process of correctly identifying the artist formed the basis of an entire Culture Show special, broadcast on 8 March 2013. You can read the full story on the BBC website here. 

The next step for Your Paintings is to tag all 210,000+ paintings with information that will enable people to easily search the archive. To speed up this lengthy process, the Public Catalogue Foundation has decided to crowd-source the work with an innovative 'Tagger' website developed in partnership with Oxford and St Andrews Universities. Whether you think you like art history or not, I can highly recommend you give it a go. It's like a having a free lesson in how to think about a painting, by just taking the time to look at it more closely that you might do otherwise. The clue is often in the title; just through searching the name of a sitter in a portrait or of an artist I've had great fun unraveling pockets of history about which I'd never have known. You don't have to go to this depth of analysis though, at the most simple level you can just label everything that you see. 

As with Google image search, there's also great fun to be had thinking of a word - such as moustache or umbrella - and seeing what comes up when you search the Your Paintings database for it. The more paintings are tagged, this better this resource becomes.

This brings me to the real stroke of genius in the whole project. By partnering with the BBC to host the archive, Your Paintings has given itself a huge advantage in search engine optimisation. It won't be long before this website will be in the top 5 results every time that you type in the name of an artist.

So what does the Public Catalogue Foundation do now? As well as an education programme allied to the website, there's talk of a national collection of statues to be archived, and with the current advances in 3D imaging technology and photography. I can't wait to see how that turns out. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/

Magazine Review: Interzone 242

I have to admit that I hadn't picked up a copy of Interzone before I spotted this issue poking out of the news stand, but, as the longest running British SF magazine, it's a read that's long been overdue. I blame the newsagents. Anyway, it turns out that this is the first edition in a new format, so what better place to start?

Let's look first at the cover, which caught my eye on the shelf in Wardour News next to TTA Press' sister mag for horror fiction, Black Static. It's pretty much entirely taken up by (regular Interzone cover artist) Ben Baldwin's 'The Priestess', a digital image of a hollow-eyed female in greeny blue tones plugged into some kind of super machine via an impressive head dress. Her raised palms are lit up like stigmata, emanating circuit-board-style geometric light-lines, perhaps representing her mind on some digital plane of consciousness. It doesn't really stand out from the genre style of psychedelic and digital art, but on the cover of a SF mag it suggested to me the possibility of original fiction and piqued my curiosity as to what lay inside, with stories and features well signposted along the bottom.

The magazine opens with a plain page on which a letter from the editors tells us about the new format, smaller pages, but fatter, leaving more space for stories and reviews. I'm not sure what it used to be like, but, with pages little larger than a hardback, this size felt comfortable to read. The artwork continues with a double index page, each story given it's own especially commissioned illustration by Richard Wagner, Mark Pexton, Martin Hanford, Warwick Fraser-Coombe; a really nice touch.

Next upfront is David Langford's Ansible Link, a well informed and entertaining SF diary-cum-news page (as you might expect from someone who's been doing it in one form or other since 1979). You might question what role a print newsletter has in a digital age, but as a well collated round-up this is an important part of tying the publication into the wider SF community of awards, lives and events. 

It's the stories that a magazine of new fiction should ultimately be judged on though. The collection opens with the suburban, Debbie Urbanski's tale of a single parent family in the American Midwest. It's written from the perspective of a child whose mother appears to have left a commune or cult. They're poor and their new house and new reality aren't as idyllic as the old life, but you suspect there's more to it than that. Blue aliens arrive in town, more like immigrants than invaders, and despite racial tensions the mother, through economic necessity, takes them on as clients. The story is layered with meaning and stands up to a second reading. Strange and refreshing.

A couple of stories centre on parent-child bonds. 'The Messanger', Ken Liu's space age tale of planetary exploration could have been written any time since Dan Dare were it not for the concerns of a middle age protaginist trying to bond with his estranged teenage daughter. The mystery of the alien civilisation is is intriguing, but the personal story a bit predictable. Still it did go some way to satisfying my space craving.

C.W. Johnson's tale 'Outside the Cone' is more of a gritty deep space thriller, set in a penal colony of  claustrophobic hulks held outside the normal rules of space/time, albeit with a first person narrator who sounds like a mother from the valleys. I like the way Johnson conveys the reality faced by the crew whilst introducing some mind bending quasi-physics as back story. You can almost see the twist coming, but it does raise some very different questions a parent's moral responsibilities.

The most original premise comes from Karl Bunker, who weaves a romantic myth for a couple of intelligent water-dwelling creatures that look like extras from Spore. Squid meets squid, squid falls in live with squid, romantic tragedy ensues. All quite neat again, but fair play for managing to suspend my cynicism.

I'm not so keen on period dramas or royal court fantasies though, and sadly Priya Sharma's story doesn't rise above this for me.

I'm also, like most of the reading population, pretty sick of vampires, yet Lavie Tidhar's story of a young female Strigoi managed to draw me in with a solar system-spanning back story, a well fleshed out future and a rather grisly piece of artwork. Probably the most satisfying of the bunch to get your teeth into (snare cymbal).

At the back of the magazine there's a good number and spread of book, DVD and film reviews. Those that I read were good and well informed, with a whole page dedicated to China Mieville's comments at the recent driver's conference in Edinburgh. It's also nice to see an interview, this month with David Brin.

Overall I felt there was a good balance between the stories and regular features. The stories themselves were varied enough to please a broad church of SF readers, even if nothing jumped out at me as strikingly original (on that front, this review of 2012 anthologies in the LA Review of Books is essential further reading). I enjoyed it enough to head back to Wardour News and try another issue though.

Rating: ***

Book Review: Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman

A mystery thriller mixing pugalism, etomology, Nazi memorabilia and sex might not be your first choice of reading material, but if you can get over your inhibitions this ambitious debut is well worth it.

Switching between the present day and 1930s London, Beauman eases us into the narrative by way of introduction to an affable young collector who confounds our pre-conceptions and quickly finds himself at the centre of a murder mystery so unlikely that his 'fishy' nickname is probably part of the joke. The hidden history that he discovers, linking an East End Jewish boxer and an upper class fascist entomologist, is equally bonkers, yet Beauman's description of pre-war London, with it's protection rackets, dive bars, gentleman's clubs and their denizens, is so compelling that you're pulled right through. On the way there's some surprising sex, a few more murders and an (un)healthy dose of Ayran conspiracy theory.

The only time I really felt let down was the last third of the book in which everything culminates far too neatly. My disbelief grounded as soon as the mystery dissolved. I suspect this is intentional though. Conspiracy theories are all a bit too neat aren't they? It's as if Beauman's suggesting that if you can buy into this, you're as susceptible as the mad Ayran eugenicists of the early 20th century. A great tongue in-cheek read and well executed idea. Look forward to the next one.

Like: Not much that I've read before
Read: At speed on trains, August 2012
Time on bookshelf before reading: 10 months

Book Review: The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn

Don't be misled by the 'comic' label. This is an accomplished novel that ties together themes of aging, ambition, social cohesion, media, celebrity and urban regeneration, whilst keeping it personal and acutely poignant. There are undoubtedly lots of comic moments and characters, but they seem almost to reflect rather than exaggerate real life. I picked this up for a light read but ended up quite affected. Touching.

Book Review: Perdido Street Station

In this other-worldly, steam-punk fantasy, China Miéville introduces us to the fetid streets of New Crobuzon, a city rife with corruption, teeming with strange races, humming with thaumuturgy (magic) and clamouring with the din of steam-powered constructs.

Bas-Lag is not the tired old fantasy realm of elves, dwarves and orcs, though, but a refreshingly original land of water-dwelling vodyanoi, cactae men, beetle-headed kephri and the remade, pitiful mash-ups of flesh and machine.

Through this mélange of cultures, Mieville explores notions of race and identity set against bigger themes of poltics and the polis, whilst propelling us through the book with a thrilling tale of horror, intrigue and pursuit. Like a ramshackle Victorian London, the city itself is beautifully described, not so much a backdrop as part of the action. The characters, despite their alien appearance, remain endearingly human in action, emotion and capacity for thought. As with most fantasies, this is a book about humanity after all.

Perdido Street Station is a dauntingly fat volume, yet I don't think I've ever got through 800+ pages so quickly.

Like: Clive Barker takes on a steampunk Discworld with a dash of HP Lovecraft
Read: Summer 2011, everywhere I could grab 5 mins