19 October 2017

Ed welcomed those of us that came to Thursday night choir instead of going to see The Nutcracker Suite. Many apologies from sugar plumb fans were registered tonight. 

Our choir master has been with the WI this morning, and it put him in the mood for a sing-a-thong. Jack had all the tracks lined up ready to share on the big screen after a stimulating warm up with a Dum Dum Diddley Dum and some long vowel sounds...

Make You Feel My Love launched the sing-a-thong. And no the blogger does not have a lisp, Ed made it very clear to the blogger how to spell tonight’s extravaganza. 

And with the piano again for Lean On Me, for it won’t be long, til we need a backing track from backing Jack...

We love nights like this, laughing at the choir masters puns, So Happy Together! We got confused in the second verse. 

I Only Want To Be With You coz it’s the best choir in town, we are the only people to get to sing Song Of The Sea and fantasize about waving gills around. Mike gets a yellow card for singing ‘blue eyes filled with emulsion’ and more than once. 

And a new song for choir, O Holy Night and we got our Christmas on ... which can only mean Santa’s coming and Life’s About To Get Good. So Bring Him Home we prayed and filled the hall sounding like a proper nice choir. It was pure chips and gravy. 

Rosé was missing it’s meaningful gap. How many times do I have to blog it? 

Song number 10, Walk Right Back and we had half an hour of the night left! Keeping The Dream Alive was preceded by The Impossible Dream and this gave us Wings, and we nearly took off in the wrong key! We should try to walk before we Run. We sang that When We Were Young and I wrote that down exactly as Ed said it! 

And finally, to our feet we got. We may not Rule The World we really are, We Are The Champions,  W ow, well done DFS, that sing-a-thong was a marathon and you all deserve musical medals. Then we would really have the bling-bling. Remember this cheeky blogger loves you xxx

12 October 2017

Once more into the hall dear friends ... to begin our practice with a nice little scale, and a none-word version of You Raise Me Up. 

In notices, Ed said he does appreciate when choir give him feedback, and some people have voiced opinions on some of the songs, and also a preference of singing with Ed and his piano as oppose to karaoke tracks. 

We may not use karaoke tracks for the next few weeks, but we will still be using YouTube as we did next to listen to Life’s About To Get Good. And life in DFS is about to go into three parts. Our dear choir master broke these down for us! Concert Ready? Not quite. The middle part seems really hard to grasp onto, but we stood to perform it as we sounded ‘proper choir’...

We didn’t do the crooning version of Walk Right Back, just a nice jolly Ed-and-piano one. He spent some time breaking down the harmonies, which is good coz I think a few of us need to hear it more than a few times! Suddenly we ended up a little harmony heavy...

And next in support of this years nautical charity, we got Jack to dig out Song Of The Sea and Ed tried to remember the song that he wrote some years ago. I must ask the choir master if I can bring my seagull-on-a-stick that I made in 2010 inspired by this very song. We stood to perform and moved onto a slightly more uptempo version of Across The Universe, and the naturally up tempo I’m Into Something Good, right after someone who hadn’t read the blog asked what ‘jai guru deva om’ meant. 

We are just Keeping The Dream Alive when Ed explained which end notes go up and which go down and to encourage a bit of a fluffier flutter in the middle - I love you-ooooo! 

Soon choir will be having a lovely meeting to discuss choir plans and a future tour of course, and we finished with Bring Him Home with Mike’s love and blessing and the healing hands of May on my shoulders as she sang behind me. Choir sounded fab. 

So keep singing amazing choir, even when you’re not in the bathroom... love from Cat Blogger xxx

5 October 2017

Back in the hall again we found Alan the skipper was thrilled that this years charity for DFS Weymouth and Portland is in fact MV FREEDOM, and he gave a vote of thanks on behalf of MV Freedom, because boats can’t talk anyway. We may well be singing Song Of The Sea in fine support of this. Probably not out at see as MPF is a tad small for DFS. 

After our warm up, the screen lit up with the words of Across The Universe as thankfully the hall was free to use, the WiFi was working and a hat left behind last week was reunited with a head. Ed would love us to be brave and daring with some harmonies over the tops all nice and lovely! 

We are Keeping The Dream Alive even if no one knows the harmony, so another run-through was had, in the key of   A  G. And a capela. We did well. Are you sure which bits go up and which go down? I might post some useful arrows ...

Then we sang a song I’m much too young to know, Walk Right Back. It’s lovely to listen to DFS sometimes. A small slide is permitted in this song, but watch the timing of ‘I’m so lonesome every day’ because some so and so’s sing so too early. 

You tube was fired up, at the third attempt, bad internet, and we sang along to a karaoke version of Lay All Your Love On Me. Ed said this was a new one for choir but I couldn’t help thinking we had done it before. Then it hit me, one day in the old days of choir when we rehearsed in the music rooms, we once handed round some booklets containing the Mama Mia medley and had a reet good sing. Who was there?

You tube came into itself again to show us the new Shania Twain song, Lifes About To Get Good, and then some note bashing on the piano and our words on the screen. How we love the technology when it works. It really started to come together, apart from we need more roughing up ... eh? Sometimes our rythm goes all to pot and needs rediscovering. We have always learned songs quickly, encouraged Ed ... Then we had a stand and perform.

Back to YouTube for Beach Baby complete with bouncing pink letters on a fetching aqua

Background. 

And I’m also mostly much too young to remember that, and we moved to Seasons Of Love an old friend of choir, with our words and the piano. Nice. 

And tonight’s random-oke winner was Don’t Look Back In Anger. Boss. 

Keep up the good work DFS, I love you, sing your hearts out, especially in the supermarket! Xxx