Scour the country. Nay, the universe. Pay what you will and marvel at the exquisite professionalism and expensive production values of the priciest extravaganza. You will not find a Christmas show with more warmth, joy and humanity than the Big Christmas Singalong. Nor, I suspect, will you find a Broadway-bound starlet as unabashedly immersed in their performance as Maureen.
Maureen is a member of the The Choir with No Name in Liverpool, which brings together people impacted by homelessness and marginalisation in the city for a weekly hot meal, conversation and rehearsal. Wearing a sparkly beanie hat and reindeer antlers, she led the audience at The Tung Auditorium in our vocal warm-ups (audience participation being obligatory) at the start of this year’s concert before giving the ensemble’s repertoire her absolute all for the next two-and-a-half hours. That repertoire ranged from the daft (Dominic the Donkey) and the predictable (Slade) to numbers that, in these hands, transcended their usual status as chart-bothering pop tracks to become both uplifting and moving
Olivia Carroll Photography
Into this box goes East 17’s Stay, about love and loss, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love, about love’s power to scare darkness away and clean the soul. The actual singing in places was patchy, notwithstanding the fierce enthusiasm and care of conductor Mersey Wylie, and some impressive harmonies at times. The sincerity was not patchy. We heard from Andrew, a gay man who has been HIV positive for decades and has experienced the deaths of loved ones as well as homelessness and mental health struggles but described the choir as his “soft place to land every week where I call home”. We watched choir members hug each other in solidarity after daring to step forward to perform brief solos, Wylie’s arms aloft in supportive triumph each time. We observed, inexplicably but enjoyably, one member sporting an orangutan hand puppet that mimed along. In short, it was inspirational but also, crucially, fun.
In pure musical terms, the highlight of the evening was probably the guest set by another marvellous choir, from Asylum Link Merseyside. Combining local people and asylum seekers from around the world, this smaller ensemble opened with a traditional song of welcome from Togo and took in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer via New Zealand and Congo. But this was a collaboration not a competition. Like the other guest act, a 10-strong choir from PSS Sing! Sing! Sing!, (a mental health wellbeing group), the Asylum Link singers joined the Choir with No Name for a joint number (Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday). This was a belter no doubt, but the audience sang with more feeling to the previous song, Liverpudlian Eoin Quiery’s Bridges Not Walls, with its refrains of ‘refugees are welcome here’ and ‘what happens next is up to us’.
In the run-up to a Christmas when it is easy to feel a bit helpless about the parlous state of the planet, its politics or even just the angry and polarised way in which our public conversations seem to happen, this number was the perfect tonic. As was the opportunity just to be in a room, singing, with so many community-spirited people. The power of that as an experience is the genius of the Choir with No Name as a concept. It was special to share it.
Main image by Olivia Carroll Photography
To support the Choir with No Name Liverpool, you can donate here.
