Very pleased to say that young rider Peter who did so well in the RDA regional competition (coming in the top 3 of two events) was placed 5th in his section of the Nationals at Hartpury College in July.  Everyone at Patchwork Riding for the Disabled is very proud of his achievement.

JFR at Proms in the Meadow – July 2016

Once again Junior Fascinating Rhythm had the privilege of opening Iron Acton’s Proms, and this year the theme was Spain.  Dressed in pink and black, their hair adorned with a pink flamenco style flower, the girls opened with their first Spanish contribution – ‘The Tango’, from Roald Dahl’s Cinderella. This was followed by ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ sung in four-part harmony, then our younger contingent sang a medley of Abba’s ‘Super Trouper and Dancing Queen’ in two-part harmony.  Sharon Marshfield, one of the FR ladies who assist each week at rehearsals, debut as Director for a bespoke four-part arrangement of the Beatles ‘Help’ sung by the secondary school age members.  This year’s repertoire also included Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ featuring a very confident duet by Alice and Georgia.  JFR’s second contribution to the theme of the evening was ‘The Spanish Flea – featuring our youngest member, Lily Howse, as a very cute flea.

Nine of the girls are lucky enough to have their mothers (who sing with Fascinating Rhythm) along at each rehearsal and these six lovely ladies, including the MD of JFR, help to coach and support the girls with their singing. To celebrate this they performed a round together in their family units – a proud moment for the Mums (though no doubt mild embarrassment for some of the girls!). This piece was also dedicated to two of the Mums and daughters who are sadly leaving JFR.

For their finale – ‘We’re All in This Together’ from High School Musical, the girls had the audience up on their feet and joining in – a great ending to a lovey gig.

AND …  entertaining the WI 25th June 2016

Junior FR were delighted to be invited to provide the entertainment for Iron Acton WI’s annual dinner for senior citizens at Rangeworthy Village Hall and the audience agreed they put on a fabulous show.  The icing on the cake was that, unbeknown to the girls, there was a very special person in the audience … Sally McClean, awesome MD of the multi-gold medal winning White Rosettes chorus.  Sally gave the girls some wonderful complimentary feedback when she came backstage and spoke to them at the end of their performance.  This upped the girls’ elation by several degrees and comments like ‘OMG – that’s Sally from the top barbershop chorus in the country!’ could be heard.  Fabulous end to another great gig.

Thursday, 30th June and, thanks to some great teamwork, we were all risered up to take our rehearsal  to the very impressive Tudor Room in Thornbury Castle as part of the Fringe Festival.  It was a ‘warts and all’ production in front of two separate and very appreciative audiences who had booked seats as we took them through the journey of tweaking, polishing and blending 4-part a cappella singing under the direction of Jo Dean, who also kept up a running commentary throughout.  During both sessions, members of the audience were invited to join the Chorus to have a go – and both times the brave participants were just brilliant.
Email comments from one of the organisers, Chris Saich:
“You will shortly receive a formal thank you from Ian Walker on behalf of the Friends of Thornbury Carnival Committee for the great performance you organised on Thurs 30 June, as part of Thornbury Carnival Fringe week.  However, I just wanted to add my personal thanks for your willing support for this community event and your suggestion to bring your rehearsal to Thornbury.  As anticipated, Thornbury Castle proved to be an ideal setting and we were very appreciative of you taking the trouble to join us, with the logistics of travel and the physical set-up required.  The chorus sounded tremendous, as witnessed by the great reception from our two audiences.
We hope your ladies enjoyed the evening as much as we did and please thank them all for giving of their time to support our community event.  It was great to meet you and we send our very best wishes to Jo Dean and the Chorus for your future engagements.”

Photographs courtesy of Garry Holden of G Holden Photography.  (gholdenphotography@hotmail.com)

Update from Free Range:

So, Prelims 2016 came and went in a blur of excitement and fun!
When you are competing against 35 (yes 35!) other quartets, you appreciate there is every chance that it’s going to be tough to qualify as in reality you have to beat 19 of them.  Our performance felt good and this year we decided to watch our recording straight after we had come off stage. Having made the decision not to watch any other quartets prior to our own stage time, we watched the final section of the competition and waiting for the results… it was a very long day for the judges!
For those not aware, the process is that if you qualify, your name goes into a hat and then randomly selected, which gives your place to sing at Convention.  Very nail biting stuff; when “and singing 12^th…” is announced and you have not been mentioned…. With each further place your emotions start to sink and we had that look between us all thinking that we had not qualified… .  Then – “and singing 16^th…… FREE RANGE!” Well, there were a few whoops and screeches as you can imagine!
When the score sheet was produced we were absolutely thrilled to have been placed 13^th, with a score of 67.5 which was a lovely jump from 62.9 at convention 2015 (and 63.3 from Prelims).  We are delighted of course, but also appreciate that we need to work even harder to continue to improve so Convention will be a big focus for us (once our holidays are all done of course!).
We’d like to take this opportunity to say Thank You to our family, friends and coaches for all their support and help, plus a Big Shout Out to Fascinating Rhythm, whose support and enthusiasm is immense.

Dot, Di, Lesley & Mads

Approximately 160 ladies joined us for our annual Fascinating Fashion Show at the Armstrong Hall, Thornbury on Wednesday 15th June and, with many excellent top end high street bargains to be had, we all enjoyed a very therapeutic fun evening of good company and shopping.  The quality and choice of clothing this year was outstanding and meant most ladies went home with something new.
A number of FR  bought the same white top (with black spots, which suited everyone) and mischievously decided to wear them to rehearsal the following evening;  MD Jo Dean definitely went home with spots before her eyes!  The tops did look very smart though – we may have to change our walking out gear and buy another 60.

If you missed out on the fun, put this date in your diary – Wednesday 14^th June 2017 – Armstrong Hall – 7 for 7:30 and join us next year for a bargain.  We look forward to seeing you there.

Harrogate – Spring Bank Holiday, 30th May 2016 and the last day of the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual convention saw the inauguration of the very first Mixed Chorus class.  Very proud to report that no less than six of the 24 singers in the group were from Fascinating Rhythm, including our two gold medallists – Ali Jack and MD Jo Dean – with Chloe Roberts, Hanna Davies, Emma Richardson, Brenda Roberts and Julie Morgan.  Other members of P24 came from The Brit Pack, Black Sheep Chorus, The Great Western Chorus, Jigsaw Quartet and a special guest from Zero 8!  There’s something rather marvellous about this combining of voices from different choruses which also fielded 3 sets of couples.  Harmony indeed.

Overcoming the almost impossible job of getting tight diaries lined up, the group had just five rehearsals to pull it all together, with only a full number at the last rehearsal.  The songs offered were ’My Foolish Heart’ and ‘Undecided Medley’ which saw them romp into 3^rd place, with a Highly Commended.

Peter, one of the young riders from Riding for the Disabled (Patchwork RDA – FR’s charity for 2016) has covered himself with glory by being awarded 3rd place in both of the classes he entered for at the Regional RDA Championships. This qualifies him to go forward to the National Championships at Hartpury College in July.  Hartpury Equine is one of the largest equestrian centres in the world, providing top class education alongside elite equestrian training.  Peter goes to Tuffley Junior School, Gloucester.  We’re very excited for him and his family and highly chuffed to have been able to support him in this venture.

Rehearsing before the ‘off’.

It’s a weird fact that every time FR have a whole day somewhere, be it workshop, coaching, competition, etc – the weather is always glorious while we’re warbling away indoors.  We did manage a quick half hour in the sun for lunch at our rehearsal hall before She Who Must Be Obeyed gave a discreet cough, then it was back to polishing the three songs for our first class, Songs from the Shows.  We were pipped to the post by the excellent Wessex Male Voice Choir (who also won Male Voice Choir and the Gold Cup) but we got a ‘Highly Commended’ and some good comments from the adjudicators.

Always a careful balancing act …

Back to the rehearsal hall for a recap on our next three songs and perhaps a nibble or two of cake, then returned to the Town Hall  for our second stint in the Female Voice Choir category.  This session (now running well over an hour late!) was very well supported by the Barbershop fraternity, fielding 5 of the 6 entries so a big Hurrah! for Black Sheep, Harmony Inspires, Bristol Fashion and Cleeve Harmony who competed alongside community choir Take Note – and we’re very pleased that our sister chorus Bristol Fashion gave a great performance and came away with the trophy.  Fascinating Rhythm had a wonderful audience reaction to both our performances and many, many nice comments afterwards; we may not have bagged any silver, but we certainly entertained!
And well done to our two new baritones Sue and Carolyn who joined us just a few months ago and got all 6 songs under their belts to a high standard in record time.  Welcome to the madness …

‘Newbie’ Sue

‘Newbie’ Carolyn

The drive to get to the beautiful BeauDesert School in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire on Saturday, 7th May was a treat in itself, though we did get a little concerned about the amount of traffic trying to get away from the last day of Badminton Horse Trials.  Nearly started on the dot of 7:30pm, just waited for late arriving audience who got caught up in the equine exodus.  We had to skimp on risers, so singing sardines with the barest of choreography was the order of the day but we had a really great time with a lovely responsive audience and no serious injuries, entertaining with two 40 minute sessions, supported by our in-house septet RhythmMix.  Our MD, Jo Dean, is the Scheme Manager for HomeStart Sedgemoor and knows from first hand experience what a difference this charity makes to families in need so we dedicated one song in particular – ‘Fix You’* – to their group of volunteers; its very emotive words touched many of the audience and FR learned yet again how difficult it is to sing well with a wobbly bottom lip.

HomeStart is a national charity with over 260 schemes running in the UK and also covering families of British Forces in Germany and Cyprus and their aim is to help make the formative years of these children and their parents in need just a little easier. The volunteers, who use their own parenting and home management skills and experience, give thousands of hours each year of their time to stand alongside the families whilst they travel the sometimes treacherous road of parenthood.  The majority of singers in Fascinating Rhythm are mothers & grandmothers and, as such, appreciate the pressures of parenting (just escaping to get to a rehearsal can prove a challenge) so it seems very fitting that as a chorus we should support our local HomeStart scheme and hope our contribution goes some way to raising their profile in Stroud.  We are very pleased to have raised £1,449 which will pay for approximately 700 hours of support for families in the Stroud area

*Covered by ColdPlay and arranged for us by Pete Nugent (www.noojtracks.co.uk).

Fabulous, fabulous coaching with Sally McLean over the weekend of 16/17th April, working on the six songs we’re taking to the Cheltenham Music Festival in May (actually it’s nine songs – two of them are medleys).  We worked our socks off and had such an inspiring couple of days; still buzzing at the end of Sunday afternoon, but most of us catatonic on Monday!
Hugely looking forward to Sally’s next visit in June.