Men United on BBC Radio Bristol

Geoff S and Neil B flanking Ali Vowles after their fun time on BBC Radio Bristol this morning.  

Listen to the interview.

And in case you haven't already, hear more about what is shaping up to be an awesome event of singing in lower registers in this helpful video.

BBC Music Day - Get Singing!

A great idea from the BBC to celebrate the power of music and the amazing role it plays in our lives, BBC Music Day.

Lots to look at and be inspired, talking of which, why not be inspired to come to our Workshop on Saturday 6th as part of our Magnificent MASSIVE Man-Sing for Men United to raise a voice and awareness for Prostate Cancer UK at St George's Hall in Bristol.  Get your tickets here.  It's open to ALL singers of ALL types who enjoy singing in lower registers.

Hear more about what is shaping up to be an awesome event of singing in lower registers in this helpful video.

Blokes on BBC Wiltshire

Some intrepid blokes ventured on the BBC Radio Wiltshire program to speak about all things blokey and singy.  

Have a listen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04y55pv#play and have a see tonight http://themagnificentak47.com/tickets/.

Hear all about it!

BBC Radio Wilshire's Sue Davies is show is a magnificent piece of local radio brought together by a dedicated team and fronted by a lovely chatty presenter.

Saturday morning around 10:30am it should be even more Magnificent with the appearance of several blokes touting their wares and promoting their show just down the hill in that there Swindon town when we steam into The Platform.  So remember to tune in to the Sue Davies show.

Tickets still available, but not for long... from http://themagnificentak47.com/tickets/.

Beautiful? Us?? On the BBC Radio again

One of the ladies who visited us the other week has been busy editing what she recorded and, dare we say it, has made us sound actually quite good!

You can judge for yourself on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04h5y5w if you scroll in around 1 hour and 12 minutes and you can hear Marie come out with quite a remarkable statement towards the very end.

We've never been called beautiful before...

Rosie Hood and Alfred Williams on the Radio

It was with great pleasure and to much excitement within Magnificent circles that we heard a local voice on the radio talking about a local hero we much admire.  

Rosie Hood is a very up and coming young folk singer who grew up in our neighbouring village of Minety and was on Radio 4's Front Row program last night speaking about her various projects with particular reference to Alfred Williams.

As long term readers will know we have been admirers of Mr Williams for a good while (see 
http://themagnificentak47.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=alfred+williams) and to hear her singing his praises and songs is a great pleasure.

Check out the clip from the program at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03c7t71 and find out more about Rose from http://www.rosiehood.co.uk/ and watch this space for more news...

Listen to The Choir on BBC3

 

Following on from the excitement of last week's Voices Now pre-event jaunt there should be a mention or two about that day and the evolving event itself on this afternoon's edition of The Choir on the venerable BBC3 presented by Sara Mohr-Pietsch.

Those who were there at the event last week may remember Sara as she was wandering around capturing the day on a rather impressive bit of kit and hopefully will make mention of that and some interviews with people on the show the today.

Point your browsers to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051ccr8 for more info.

The Full English

Another tasty nugget from that nice young man on the radio, Mark Radcliffe and his, that there, Folk Show regaling us with The Full English, a majorly significant project, about which you can learn more at http://www.efdss.org/efdss-the-full-english.

Listening to the show they played a piece call "Man In The Moon" which was based on words salvaged from oblivion by Alfred Williams, the "Hammerman Poet", known to several members of our group and a regular local hero.  A snippet of the show appears to be available here.

Full information about our growing connection with Alfred's legacy will escape over time as certain plots are hatched and progress beyond mere "pubtalk".

Reading through the blurb on the Full English website it really is a remarkable resource and voluminous archive, one of which our members will be encouraged to plunder in the quest for material relevant to our burgeoning repetoire and needs of BlokeFest (more on the 2014 version soonish).

Everyone should cherish this resource and also consider patronising the gigs that are scheduled including one nearby(ish) in that there Bristol Town at the Colston Hall - see http://www.colstonhall.org/?s=full+english.

Do drop us a line at themagnificentak47@gmail.com if you are interested in attending as we may well be semi-organizing a "Class Outing" for the gang to go along in an Elliison's charabanc - more on a more local possible "Class Outing" and top Ukranian singing soon.

The Spooky Men's Chorale on BBC Radio 3's The Choir

Before we finally bid farewell to the immenseness that is The Spooky Men's Chorale and the joy they have sprinkled on the summer all over the UK (no coincidence the weather has been so much better this year??), there is one more nugget of Spookyness to unearth.

You may not have noticed, but the blokes were in action on the BBC again just before their last emotional concert at the Union Chapel, and what an interesting piece of radio it is.  The programme in question is The Choir presented by Mary King who was looking at the growing interest in natural voice singing which lead her to meet with the Spooky Men's Chorale and others.

Events like this probably don't happen enough, but the programme was full of very interesting material including a decent length interview with the SpookMeister himself as well as a lady called Phoene Cave, a member of the Natural Voice Practitioner's Network.  This is another website worth exploring where you might find reference to someone we know very well.

But, unfortunately if you haven't heard the piece by the time you see this posting it could be too late to head over to the BBC Website to listen again, however some decent soul has manage to scrape the recordings together, trim them down and posted them so you can enjoy them for a little longer.

You really should give it a listen as the two pieces have a lot of interesting material in them and some revealing insights into some of the inspiration and the methods of the SpookMeister and how he pieces the Spooky's songs together.  There is a particularly interesting insertion of a genuine traditional Georgian choral piece Riding Song, Tskhenosnuri, performed by the excellent Ensemble Rustavi (well worth an amble over to explore their site).  You can purchase a recording of this piece (bizarrely enough captured whilst in Australia) from here - if you are interested in Georgian male choral singing it is highly recommended.

Ending their tour on yet another high (how will they cope returning to normal life?!) with this final comment from Mary King in conversation with Mr Stephen Taberner, "Anything that gets men to sing is a good thing", Agreed!

Spookys on the Radio

Would you trust these men with your delicate lugholes and your BBC Licence money?  Rest assured they are out there somewhere, up to no good, but hopefully at a safe distance, but imagine the excitement for the Spooky fraternity when these marvelous chaps appeared on national radio not once, but twice in the same week!

First was their ground breaking performance on Radio 2's Folk Show hosted by Mark Radcliffe on Wednesday 14 Aug 2013.  The show notes can be found on the programme's BBC website but the replay facility has now lapsed.  (But read on . . .)

Next up, the very next day, the blokes performed on the In Tune show on Radio 3 and were interviewed Suzy Klein who mentions the "beautifully named" Magnificent AK47, thanks to our friends Nigel and Katie Holt, and acknowledged that "men who need to sing, can find a space in the UK to do so" - heart warming stuff.

Sad to say that the iPlayer no longer has the programmes but maybe you might find something of interest here.  Listen out for mention of The Magnificents at around 17:30 on the In Tune recording.

Sea Shanties ahoy!

Tapping into the myths of The Magnificent AK47, the venerable Auntie BBC is broadcasting a series of programs about Sea Shanties starting this coming Tuesday evening at 22:00 on Radio 2.


The program is presented by Richard Hawley and according to the the BBC website "explores the rich and fascinating tradition of the shanty, a very specific type of folk song that's connected with - but not necessarily about - the sea.

A work song, the shanty has a purpose and a rhythmic structure designed to help mariners carry out their work more easily and divert them from the sheer slog of hauling on ropes to raise sails, pushing capstans round to lift anchors, and manning pumps to empty the bilges.

The heyday of the shanty was around 1840 to 1880, when the Seven Seas were filled with the great full-rigged ships, the barques, the clippers, the windjammers, plying their trade to all points of the compass. It was a century of expanding imperialism, when the Royal Navy did rule the waves and its power and prestige enforced a peace often referred to as Pax Britannica."  Should be fascinating stuff, even for us land-locked scurvy lake-lovers!

A few more links that might be of interest to you include an interesting video of every Mum's favourite TV Choir Master, Gareth Malone, on a program about the book "Songs of the Sea" and the marvellous Port Isaac's Fishermens Friends performing in Cheltenham very soon.

Keep calm and carry on singing

Not that we would want to give the impression that when not writing these little nuggets that are windows into the world of a singing bloke that all we ever do is watch TV, far from it. . . However, as we have been shovelling some sustenance down one's neck on occasion of an evening, the TV has been on and bizarrely there have been a lot about choirs and the therapeutic benefits of singing, especially in groups.

The latest example witnessed was that provided by the redoubtable Ian Hislop who presented his programme on the fascinating topic of the "Stiff Upper Lip".  In the latest episode he makes reference to how those things called emotions were bottled up for so many generations and finally began to be unleashed in the 1950's and increasingly so in the 1960's.  He then went on to discuss the aftermath of the Aberfan tragedy and how camera crews entered the mainstream consciousness by interviewing survivors and relatives of those who did not, and all the emotional impact that had.  Following through on this theme he then interviewed a number of people linked to the Ynsyowen (Aberfan & District) Male Voice choir that was formed after that terrible event.

As one member comments about the choir it "keeps the spirit alive" and Mr Hislop continues to say "The choir is an extraordinary vehicle for both emotional control and emotional release".

The programme can be watched for the next few days via BBC iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nhccs/Ian_Hislops_Stiff_Upper_Lip_An_Emotional_History_of_Britain_Last_Hurrah/ - well worth a viewing for this excerpt and the rest.

The Choir

Not being one to normally have time spare to indulge in the luxury of sitting down of an evening, it was an unexpected pleasure to happen across the second episode of "The Choir" on what we believe is call the iplayer, a new fangled device from that august body, The BBC, which apparently allows one to travel back in time to when a program was first broadcast to be able to see it again.  This technological revelation reminds one of the first days of VCRs when one used to be able to "tape" a program.  Nowadays if one mentions this terminology to the young they give you quizzical looks, much as they did when they first saw a vinyl LP record!

But we digress.

In short, the choir was one of those occasional gems one finds in amongst the normal slurry on modern TV and soars above the likes of "Made in Shouty Cook's Essex Gypsy Wedding Kitchen".  Quite simply, it was inspiring.

It takes the simple premise of dropping that lovely choir master chappie, Gareth someone-or-other, into a modern workplace where there is nothing but talk of "change management", bosses vs workers, general grumpiness and by starting up a choir they rapidly break down all sorts of barriers, uncover all sorts of talents and fundamentally make a pretty decent sound in a very short time.

Much like us blokes!  To be even more inspired visit The BBC iplayer thing.