We're really looking forward to the Street Choirs Festival in Brighton this coming weekend - and to launching the Campaign Choirs Network book 'Singing for Our Lives!'

Also check out and support our other project Nuclear Refrain and the MAD Cabaret night this Thursday 28th June, also in Brighton.

Meanwhile, Scotland comrades Protest in Harmony have been nominated for Community Music Project of the Year, and you can vote for them.

Interesting article by Thomas Breeze, but it begs the question of when and which street choirs can justify maintaining exclusionary spaces? We're supportive of women only choirs, of LGBT choirs... Would it be okay if young people, older people, BAME people, for example, wanted to make a choir a safe space, a space of shared experience, a space of their own? So, how about men? The fairly recent advent of choirs like Chaps Choir and Spooky Men's Chorale - entry requirement: 'We can grow beards, if we want to - challenges Breeze's argument, which seems to hinge on numbers equal survival for choirs and that variety of voices, if not diversity of people, is always good. Discuss.

Spooky Men's Chorale can grow beards (and sing)

The team are currently very hard at work on the final proofread and edit of S4OL. What a learning experience! Who knew how many errors and typos could slip into a text unnoticed by three authors and an editor; who knew how complicated footnotes and referencing could get; who knew the scope for missing stuff and duplication of effort all at the same time! Anyway, we're definitely getting there and - mainly - still smiling. We're all so looking forward to actually seeing and holding a hard copy of the book - and then to the launch in Brighton at the (29th June - 1st July).

Meantime, Sarah Ditum writing in the Guardian discusses the need for feminist utopian thinking in a the context of an a seeming deluge of dystopian culture and literature at the moment. Her article echoes the issues we explore in Chapter 5 of S4OL, where we present street choir members imaginings of better futures. As David Bowie sang: " Please don't tear this world asunder / Please take back this fear we're under / I demand a better future (interesting remix by Air)

For 10 points, who is this woman? And for a bonus 5 points, what's the title of her classic dystopian/utopian novel from 1993?

One of the discoveries while researching street choirs was that we didn't officially exist! Try it for yourself: Google 'street choir', look in online (and off-line) encyclopedias and dictionaries... Online you'll find references to street choir festivals (our own entries, but no news reports?) and to choirs of homeless people in the USA and Australia, but we you won't find any defining hit on street choirs as political or campaigning choirs in the UK... Until now. Check out our new Wikipedia entry!

In the run up to book launches of Singing for Our Lives in Brighton at the Street Choirs Festival, Leicester, London and Sheffield, it's good to know that we officially (?) exist!

Exciting book news: Singing for Our Lives: Stories from the Street Choirs is open for pre-ordering! Publishing date is 15 June and we'll be launching it at the Street Choirs Festival in Brighton - can't wait!

When in doubt…
 
Listening to the BBC Radio 4 Songs of the Civil Rights Movement this morning I was yet again struck by the importance of music in campaigns. I was 13 when Martin Luther King was killed and remember crying in front of the telly, much more because of the singing and the raw grief on display than because I understood the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. ‘We Shall Overcome’ never fails to move me and it is the one we somehow always return to when we need to stand together in times of trouble.
 
In the broadcast Bob Zellner talks about a 1963 night march in in Denver, Virginia, where the Civil Rights protesters stood on the Town Hall steps, waiting to make their way to the church. Faced with a make-shift police force of deputies drafted in from fire and garbage collection services armed with fire hoses and table legs, and knowing that 123 people had been hospitalised the previous night in a similar situation, they sang Amazing Grace as they slowly walked towards the police ‘and they [police] parted’. Zellner quotes ‘an old Civil Rights saying: When in doubt, pray and sing!’
 
We feel empowered, moved and inspired by singing and we know it has an effect on others, as often reflected upon during the interviews for Singing for Our Lives: Stories from the Street Choirs. We'll never stop singing!

Artists 1 - BAE 0
 
BAE Systems have retracted their sponsorship of the Great Exhibition of the North (GEN) in response to an artist-led public outcry that art should be funded by arms manufacturers. ‘Art Not Oil’ comment that ‘The exhibition’s partnership with BAE Systems was not about money, it was about brand association: the artwashing of BAE’s corporate social licence to operate.’ BAE commented that they would ‘redirect our support to other initiatives’ better suited to its objectives. Currently those ‘objectives’ include arming regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, northern powerhouse minister and MP Jake Berry tweeted that ‘subsidy addicted artists’ and ‘snowflakes’ are supported by taxes paid by the 18000 BAE workers in the North, a vary-loaded statement: artists being on subsidies; not doing a ‘real’ job like the BAE workers; anybody receiving tax payers’ money not being entitled to an opinion, let alone a moral stand…. We are eagerly awaiting a snowflake song from the Commoners Choir!

Leon Rosselson on the power of song is not to be missed!

Stand up now!

Two interesting and complementary columns on music side by side in Peace News, 2614-2615, February - March 2018 (p.20). Jeff Cloves writes about 'the 10 best songs about peace', noting the absence of women's songs - either as composers or performers - in one online listing. Meanwhile, in her regular 'Rebel Music' Column, Penny Stone also uses the centenary of (some) women's suffrage in Britian to ask what songs they might have been singing back then, and which stand the test of time. Bread and Roses, which features prominently in S4OL, is also a song that penny notes retain its currency.