Singing out by Royal command

Nov 30 2007 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Philip Key talks to Jennifer John about Sense of Sound and their upcoming Royal Variety debut

IT HAS been since 1912 the glitziest night of the year for showbusiness, the night of the Royal Command Performance – as it was originally known – when the cream of British talent perform for royalty.

On Monday, the annual Royal Variety Performance comes to Liverpool’s Empire Theatre, a tribute to the city’s 800th birthday and its title next year of European Capital of Culture.

The Queen and Prince Philip will be there along with performers ranging from Bon Jovi, James Blunt and Joan Rivers to Russell Brand, Al Murray and Paul Potts, winner of TV show Britain’s Got Talent.

Liverpool’s Sense of Sound choir will be opening the show with the British-born soul singer, Seal. The number chosen? The Beatles classic, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

For the choir and its co-founder, Jennifer John, it will be one of many high points in a year filled with them.

It was 15 years ago that the cappella group Sense of Sound arrived on the local music scene, four women whose vocal gymnastics without any musical backing both surprised and delighted. For Liverpool, it really was something new.

It had all begun when singer Jennifer John, London-born of Trinidadian parents but settled in Liverpool, was working as a freelance music consultant. “People would ask me to come in and give talks and that sort of thing,” she explains.

Before she gave it up, she was given some cash to go away and write a research project on anything she wanted.

“So I wrote a piece about the lack of provision for women in music,” she says. “I spoke to 70 women across the city and they all seemed to be saying the same thing. There were people who wanted to be involved in singing, but had not been formally trained and didn't know how to go about it.

“I produced this document but it did not seem right to just produce that and not do something active to enable things to happen.”

She started a singing workshop and invited the women she had spoken to to go along and sing. And they did. “I realised there was no structure to it all, no beginning, no middle and no end and I needed to formalise it.”

She got together with three other women – Juliet Russell, Saphena Aziz and Perri Alleyne-Hughes – and set up Sense of Sound. They are all still involved.

“We looked through a thesaurus to find a name, and sense of sound was a description of a word but we can’t remember the word now.”

The group performed locally, gained a big reputation and Sense of Sound developed into an educational and training establishment – it still runs workshops in Liverpool and London – and finally the choir came into being.

It will be the choir which will perform with Seal in the opening number at the Royal Variety Performance.

Earlier in the year, the choir appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum to launch a Sing London festival. “There was a press launch leading to the festival and we were invited to the mayor’s office to give a demonstration with the press, a workshop demon-stration. So we got all the press singing to give them a taste of what was going to happen.”

As it was, a leader of Green-peace was there and told the choir his organisation needed 50 singers to appear at a project the following week. Could they help?

They certainly could. “It was a project with Brian Eno and Damon Albarn (from Blur) who had been commissioned to write a piece called Five Minutes From Midnight in protest against more Trident missiles being brought into the UK and we did it on the Greenpeace ship with thousands listening from the banks of the Thames.

“It sounded amazing. There were no words, but basically images which gave out facts about the detrimental effects of Trident missiles and war and that kind of thing, while we did 20 minutes of a really discordant choral piece of music that was quite disturbing in parts and uplifting in others.”

It was also the start of a working relationship between the choir and the two musicians.

Albarn had just produced his first opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, based on a traditional Chinese folk tale about Monkey and his journey to find enlightenment and he wanted Sense of Sound to provide the choral work in the pit.