We visited the Tuneless Choir in Newcastle
A group of people who love to sing have come together in Newcastle as part of the Tuneless Choir. Anyone can join the choir and you don’t have to be the best singer either. We visited the tuneless choir in gosforth to see how they are giving people a chance to sing without any pressure.
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00:00 [Singing]
00:07 Okay, so the Tuners' Choir is a choir for people who just like to sing.
00:13 They don't necessarily sing with the right notes, or maybe not in the right order, but they just love to sing.
00:20 They may have been told at school, "You can't join our choir, you can't sing."
00:23 They might have been told as an adult that they can't sing.
00:27 Many have joined choirs, actually, or actually didn't because they didn't pass the audition, whereas we don't have any auditions.
00:32 So it's for people who really just enjoy singing.
00:35 We sing like no one is listening.
00:37 We just belt the songs out, we give ourselves a clap at the end because no one else is going to clap us,
00:42 and then we move on to the next song.
00:44 So there's no auditions, there's no parts, there's no solos, there's no judgement.
00:48 People can come in, they can sit where they want, they can stand up, sit down, clap their hands, they just enjoy.
00:55 We actually laugh as much as we sing, don't we? We really do.
00:58 The newbies, as we call them, I usually get a message from them, either that night or the next morning,
01:06 just saying, "Thank you so much, we've been made so welcome."
01:09 We really do make a big thing about that.
01:11 We try and include them all, we try and sit them with people that have been coming for a while.
01:16 And there's plenty of opportunity to talk to each other and to laugh as well.
01:23 That's one of the feedback we get from the newbies, how welcome they feel.
01:26 Not just us, the whole choir make them feel very, very welcome.
01:30 And the ones that have been coming since April, they just love it, don't they?
01:35 They just absolutely love it.
01:37 I think it's a chance for them to have their own time, because it's predominantly female.
01:43 We don't advertise that, we'd love to have some men, but it's mainly female.
01:47 And I think they just have a chance to escape, really.
01:52 They come in, they do their own thing, it doesn't matter how they do, if they sing badly or not.
01:56 No one judges, we all just carry on.
01:59 Often, there's me and our daughter Hannah, and we're singing completely the wrong words anyway.
02:05 But it's not a problem, we all just laugh, clap and move on.
02:09 It's all positive, we don't get many, well, we don't have any, do we?
02:13 I feel like we had a couple of university students come with their mums, and they were just absolutely screaming.
02:17 I thought, "Oh, this might be a tough crowd."
02:20 But they actually were well into it.
02:21 In fact, I was amazed, because the songs they were singing were old songs, but obviously their mums sing in the kitchen or whatever.
02:27 If you get 25, 30 people singing, the notes cancel each other out, and actually the sound that comes out is actually really quite nice.
02:37 You advertise a tuneless choir, and then you go, "That wasn't tuneless, that actually was well in tune, that."
02:43 So it's quite nice.
02:46 I've had people visiting the hall, visiting the kitchens here, and have actually said, "Excuse me, your sign says you're tuneless."
02:52 "Yes, well, we didn't think you were."
02:54 But there are some songs that we ruin.
02:57 We don't. We don't mind, we laugh, we don't do that one again, and we carry on, don't we?
03:02 - Yeah, you are. (laughing)