The Spooky Men Chorale was the brainchild of “Spookmeister” Stephen Taberner.He sums up its genesis in a sentence: “I called up every guy I knew who could sing and seemed to be a tolerable human being, taught them three songs, and asked them to show up wearing black and with an interesting hat”. Thus began the glorious phenomenon that is the Spooky Men, so-called because it was planned that they would “sing deep, sonorous, resonant songs, in deep sonorous, resonant places” like “hip, agnostic monks on a roving commission amongst the crypts of the world”.
Well, the Olivier Hall couldn’t be further from a crypt! It is the first time I have attended a performance in this impressive venue in St Edward’s School, a large new hall with three tiers of seating and wonderful acoustics. And it was packed to the gunwales with a lively crowd of Spook supporters, clearly with great expectations.
The Spooky Men have gathered a huge following in their over-20-year existence, and I can see why.They celebrate the diverse glory of manhood and the diverse glory of music in unique combination, and the audience loves it. This “non-exclusive club” is an assemblage of the young and the old, the lean and the large, the tall and the short, the smooth and the hairy, all revelling in their uniqueness together. In this, they are almost the opposite of
Musically, the programme was as diverse as the singers, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and back.Their iconic We Are Not a Men’s Group set the tone for their refusal to be pigeonholed, either in terms of masculinity or musicality. We Will Be Magnificent illustrated the male double life of dreaming and doing, the primeval urge to hunt mastodon contrasted with the modern mundane realities of spreadsheets and Lego (“will be”? – you are already magnificent, I thought).
The two overtly, joyously humorous songs We’ll Give it a Go (celebrating men’s optimistic attempts to rise to any challenge, regardless of lack of expertise or experience) and Team Building Exercise (with enjoyable rhymes like “useless toothless doofus”) contrasted with the soulful beauty of Sweetest Kick in the Heart, for which the men stationed themselves round the perimeter of the audience, singing in low, low voices which demonstrated the glorious acoustic properties of the auditorium, making the whole air hum so you could almost feel the molecules vibrating against your cheek.
The performance incorporated gentle, non-intimidating elements of audience participation; such as, indicating when a “retrofitted” well-known song was recognised (it is amazing how long it can take, when a normally feisty female number is performed in a slow, sombre, melancholy manner by a group of men).
Although the tenor of the evening was primarily humorous, the programme also included serious subject matter, performed with moving solemnity, including Georgian and Ukrainian songs (one asking, where will you bury your son when he dies?).The audience joined in singing out the three key words of the anthem demanding
The exuberant climax of the evening was an utterly outrageous rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, followed by the coming together of the Spooky Men with the three local community groups, the Man Choir, the NHS Choir and Best Sing Since Sliced Bread in an ecstatic performance of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody, which had half the audience up and dancing in the aisles.
I don’t believe the Spooky Men needed to advertise at all to secure a packed house in
The happy buzz of departing audience members said it all: “best thing I’ve seen in a long time” and “they just get better each time you see them”.
The next Riversong Collective event is Choir in a Day, on 20th July 2024, 10.00 - 16.30, at St Barnabas, Jericho, Oxford