Commoners Choir – Untied Kingdom
No Masters -March 2020
Community choirs continue to be much in vogue. It seems there’s a new one holding forth on the TV every week; some will have a designated, worthy Mission (perhaps steered by a specific fundraising initiative or soapbox “cause”, say), although the profile of this overriding Purpose may well overshadow any greater competence they happen to possess (especially if the actual material they choose to perform is mainstream, bland and/or tacky). But increasingly many of the nation’s community choirs have (albeit some more consciously than others) been drawing inspiration from the sterling example set three or four years ago by Commoners Choir. This being a flexible and fluctuating beast with anything up to 70 participants, one that was upon its emergence almost immediately – and quite conveniently – tagged a “rag-bag ensemble of Yorkshire commoner folk”. It was convened expressly “to sing harmonious insurrection, to rouse the rabble and to raise a smile or two”: and you can’t argue with that (nor would I ever wish to!)…
Checking back on the history then: Commoners Choir was the brainchild of erstwhile Chumbawamba singer-songsmith-playwright-activist Boff Whalley, whose own generous spirit of glorious and sometimes chaotic inclusivity both informed and enabled the Choir’s inception. In a nutshell, his modus operandi was to invite choir members to follow in the footsteps of accepted, inherited “folk tradition” by (in effect) themselves becoming the song makers (albeit with his own motivational expertise and guidance). Importantly too, members would thus have direct input into not only the writing but also the actual arrangement and performance of their songs. Although this collaborative practice had featured large on Commoners Choir’s eponymous 2017 debut CD, it’s even more intensely realised on that album’s followup, Untied Kingdom, whose deliberately non-typo title reflects not only the literal and metaphorical geographical state but also the unfettered – and all-inclusive – nature of both its method and vision. The Choir continue to sing loud and proud about “stuff that happens, stuff that should be happening, stuff that matters”. Their songs are still “fuelled by passion, politics and persuasiveness”, still expounding and exploring the state of the nation. But – and here their manifesto now draws a deliberate distinction – Untied Kingdom is “not a state-of-the-nation album, it’s a wondering-about-the-state-of-the-nation album”. For “it’s an album that asks who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. It wonders about our sense (or lack) of belonging in Britain right now; it’s a look around the past and present of the place we live in and how we can draw some meaning from it.” To do this, it places a fresh emphasis on highlighting the things we all have in common through the celebrating of personal or collective achievements, telling “the stories where people’s lives and actions are making a difference, where life has a value, not just a price”.
Untied Kingdom proudly continues the Commoners tradition begun on the Choir’s debut, in embracing and addressing key issues within today’s society while often drawing telling parallels with historical events. Disc opener The Skelmanthorpe Flag Song (read about their project here), written in defiance of the petty regional differences that keep us divided, takes its cue from stirring lines painted on a flag declaring solidarity with the victims of the Peterloo Massacre. It memorably concludes with the mantra “we’ve more in common than divides us”, entirely emblematic of the album’s strong unifying message of positivism and inclusivity. The songs that make up the album’s multi-cultural portrait are further tied together with small segments of (solo) songs sung in diverse languages (Welsh, Irish, Swedish, Punjabi, Spanish, Hebrew, Bulgarian and Arabic) voiced by people who live here, with us and around us: a fascinating, and surprisingly effective, linking device.
We Are The Descendants provides a roll-call of the Choir’s historic influences reaching down through folk-memory and legend into the present, while the brief Coiners Song posits their all-too-familiar “crime” as being indicative of a typically British local mistrust of national government and in the next song the spirit of George Orwell marches with the Commoners “on the road to Wigan Pier” to voice their message of revenge.
Come On In From The Cold celebrates a day when a school’s kitchen in east Leeds was opened to serve meals even though a heavy snowfall had closed the school itself; while the catchy Spinning Home, written for 2019’s Woven Festival in Kirklees, uses a drumbeat and a “humming” calypso-style rhythm to connect the immigration of Asian people with the earlier immigration of rural labourers into the newly-industrialised cities and towns of England. One Breath At A Time, on the other hand, deals with the nation’s epidemic of anxiety and depression – yet achieves the seemingly impossible feat of singing about mental health problems to a swinging, finger-clicking beat that takes the sufferer out of the bell-jar.
There’s also a clever juxtaposition where Hugga-Mugga (an introduction to a ritualistic chant for the pagan Festival Of Fools) ushers in the bipartite commentary Airstrike 1,2,3 whose jaunty, quasi-vaudevillian waltzing first section gives way to a cheeky ditty loosely based on a Yemeni children’s game to which the choir’s female contingent provides an anthemic counterpoint encouraging us into “un-making war”. It’s a stimulating and powerful earworm.
A seemingly odd choice for the album is its penultimate track, Carmen Etonense (aka The Eton School Song). Sounds familiar? Well, suffice to say that in typically rebellious stance, the liner note expends considerable column inches in stating all the reasons why Commoners Choir don’t have the right to sing it (yet it takes longer to read the note than it takes to listen to the one-verse-and-chorus fragment they actually do sing here!)… And I bet you won’t hear it sung with any greater degree of hollow enthusiasm!
The two remaining tracks I’ve not mentioned up to now provide further evidence of the progress of the Choir, specifically in terms of increasingly developed compositional skills, as manifested in even more ambitious and complex song structures. The concise air-punching accessibility of expression has been retained, but the aspirational agit-prop has been intelligently subsumed into a more wide-screen audio panorama. The rousingly gritty, extended True North sings of the dismantling of barriers between communities in the North and proclaims, nay positively shouts out, its hearty celebration of the region, recognising that “history’s needle points to North”. A masterwork by any other name…
And so we come to the album’s finale, quirkily entitled Not The National Anthem, whose genesis stemmed from a remark by comedian Mark Thomas. He’d suggested that these islands were in dire need of a new national anthem and that Commoners Choir ought to write it; debates and discussions ensued, finally resulting in this declaration of the impossible-to-define “British identity” (while admittedly taking some degree of listing inspiration from Reasons To Be Cheerful) and voicing the hope that “it’s where we go from here”. This sprawling “non-anthem”, a collaboration between Commoners Choir and Mark Thomas et al., has a piano accompaniment that to my mind reduces the impact of the singing and the message (and it almost feels redundant), with the result that at nearly 8½ minutes this composition rather outstays its welcome however much we may espouse its basic sentiment.
Untied Kingdom the album makes a truly inspiring and magnificently empowering sound: the voices of Commoners Choir combine a gutsy, edgy delivery with an enviably well-drilled precision (famously, they rehearse until they‘re brilliant!). Their tuneful a cappella incorporates lusty unison and adventurous, bold harmonies, along the way employing much ingenious, well-sculpted part-writing that (amongst other things) variously applies such niceties as fugue, antiphon and counterpoint without worrying about academie, and without compromising or submerging the intelligibility (or meaning) of the lyrics. The Choir makes a mighty and yes, overpowering impression live, that’s undeniable – but that it commands such a great presence on disc too is down to the skill and fairy dust-mastering of engineering supremo Neil Ferguson, who really “knows” voices and possesses an unerring ear for balance, timbre and internal dynamics.
All round, then, Untied Kingdom provides an exhilarating display of rousing natural togetherness, of pride and of passion.
Watch a short film about this place we call home, from the viewpoint of people whose roots are elsewhere. Filmed and edited by Phil Moody and Carolyn Edwards, ‘Untied Kingdom’ emerged from the recording of Commoners Choir’s album.
Photo Credit: Casey Orr