Chaps Choir plays Graffham on its mission to get younger men singing together

London-based and 25-30 strong, they will be performing at The Empire Hall on Saturday, October 29.

Choir leader and founder Dom Stitchbury said: “We have been going for almost ten years and the project is really to try to get men, particularly younger men, into the singing community. I would say that particularly men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s don't participate in group singing as much as older men do once they have retired, but all men don't participate in singing anywhere near as much as women do. And the thing is that it is so beneficial for you. It's a wider cultural thing. It’s the culture that we grew up with where singing was seen as an activity that girls did rather than boys, those ideas that we gained when we were teenagers, those ideas about what boys do and what girls do.”

For Dom the best way round that is to create a situation where singing is very clearly permitted for men: “And I think that by having a men only choir you do create that permission. It feels like an encouragement for some men who would feel it was a barrier to participation if they went along to community choir and there were 30 women but only three men. With this it really does make you feel that you can join in. The other thing is that singing is very expressive emotionally and physically and we often see that is something that men find harder to take part in, just to show themselves in that way. So again having a men only choir helps in that respect. There is a level of vulnerability that singing brings about and that's what we tried to get round.”

The odd thing is that so much of rock and pop is male dominated with plenty of male frontmen and plenty of male solo singers while perhaps women are underrepresented, and maybe that's another reason, Dom suspects, that it is harder to get men into the notion of collective singing, a form of singing where it isn't remotely competitive, where it isn't about showcasing one particular person: “In a choir it is not about the individual so much. You want to succeed through the group with everyone succeeding.

“So I've done that through creating this container for men which can perhaps bring down some of the barriers. And also the thing is that we sing songs that you would not normally expect men to sing. We sing some pop and rock songs and we also do a really slow version of I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It is all about trying to change the context with the songs so that the approach feels right for us.

“I'm the founder of the group and it's coming up for ten years next year since we started. It has been an amazing journey. There are lots of male choirs around the country but not many that work in this way to attract younger men into their numbers.

“The pandemic was tough. We went on Zoom like many choirs did. We turned to Zoom and we kept the choir alive in that way. We just did what we could. We did a couple of videos together and it all helped. It could have gone two ways for the choir but we have been lucky. We've had some really good retention and a lot of people came back with real vigour, a real realisation just how much it matters to them in their lives.”