Review

Change

Community

Joy

Music

24 March 2025

6 min read

Sing it out with James Partridge’s joyous assembly

Bad days gets better when we sing together.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A pianist sits at a keyboard singing on a stage.

For the first time, in a long time, I can honestly say that last Friday night, I gave it large. I was at a singalong show at the Cheltenham Playhouse, with hundreds of other people belting out the words to some well-known and well-loved songs.

As an actor-turned-vicar, I am one of life’s unusual people for whom singing is a normal and expected part of life. Yet still, I was taken by surprise by what a truly fabulous evening I had, singing gustily along with hundreds of people I didn’t know.

Seen & Unseen’s Belle Tindall wrote an article some time ago about the power of Jacob Collier’s concerts to make strangers feel a sense of belonging. I’ve not been to one, but I feel like I went to a lower brow version of that on Friday night.

I went to James B. Partridge’s Primary School Assembly Bangers Live Show. Which is almost certainly more mainstream and on trend than you think. He arrived on many of our radars when he took Glastonbury by storm last year, but he’s also performed at the Edinburgh Fringe 2024, Latitude, and The Big Feastival. He has been featured on BBC’s The One Show, and ITV’s Loose Women. He featured live on ITV News and on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. His online videos have been written about in The Times, The Independent, Buzzfeed and featured in a number of podcasts. And now he’s even got a mention on Seen & Unseen…

For those of you who still have no idea what I’m talking about, let me take you back to Lockdown. Which may be triggering for some, and for that I apologise. Mr Partridge is a primary school music teacher and during Lockdown, he was trying to bring some joy into the lives of the children that he was still trying to teach online. And indeed, into the lives of their parents. He put some “Assembly Bangers” on YouTube, and the videos went viral; they just made people feel better by singing along. And so, it began.

Partridge is a great musician and all-round showman – he knew exactly how to play his audience – who were, by the way, really up for it. Some had even come prepared with fruit shakers and triangles to play. I kid you not. Although the bulk of his playlist were indeed Assembly Bangers, the nostalgic singalong extended beyond the Assembly Hall. He played a couple of bars of the intro and the entire theatre burst into the theme song of 90s Australian soap opera Home and Away. He delighted us with a medley of Alan Menkin’s Disney classics from The Little Mermaid through to Tangled. I even got involved in the SClub7 mash up. Get me.

Partridge told lots of great stories and anecdotes in between songs and one stuck in the mind. He’d recently received a message on Instagram from a woman who had had an accident in her early 20s and, because of brain damage, had lost all memory of her childhood. Until she listened to some of his Assembly Bangers. Through reconnecting with some of the songs she had sung at Primary School, memories attached to those songs started to come back. Amazing. Beautiful.

This is a widely known phenomenon. Music – and specifically singing – is increasingly becoming a feature of dementia care because, in trials, it has proved powerful in sparking memories, often long after other forms of communication have diminished.

There’s also research proving that singing releases endorphins – serotonin and dopamine – the ‘happy’ chemicals that boost your mood and make you feel good about yourself. Singing in the shower or with a hairbrush/microphone is, apparently, genuinely good for you.

At the same time, we all know that, if you can get over your self-consciousness, singing is a fantastic communal activity. Just go to a football match or a karaoke bar to find the proof. And the good news is, it doesn’t matter whether you think you can sing in tune or not: apparently the health benefits will still be the same. Although possibly not for those standing next to you.

With all this in mind, it’s interesting to note that much of the greatest classical music ever written (for choirs and orchestras) was composed in worship of the Christian God. Handel, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Hayden all churned out the bangers of their time. In the same tradition, John Newton, Charles Wesley, Matt Redmond, Chris Tomlin and Stuart Townend – all have written songs that have helped us, over many generations, to lift our eyes and our souls in song.

The saying, "the one who sings, prays twice," attributed to St. Augustine, helps us understand something about the spiritual power of singing and how it takes our words to the next level. There is something “more” happening when we sing; our whole being is connected, somehow; it’s physical, mental and spiritual all at once.

The Bible is full of songs and exhortations to God’s people to sing in praise of their God – because it’s good for us. As with so much cutting-edge psychological research, we are only catching up with what has been found in the Bible for thousands of years.

Sunday by Sunday in churches around the world, Christians sing songs. Songs that teach or remind us about who God is, songs that lift our souls and minds away from the cares and trials of our lives and the state of the world. Songs that take our eyes off ourselves and transport us into a place of worship. Songs that connect our memories of the past with God’s promises for the future. We sing to join together; we sing to join with the choir of Heaven and experience something of the Kingdom of God that we can all too easily miss otherwise. This is powerful stuff.

Singing along with James Partridge, the Assembly Bangers ranged from the obvious Morning has Broken and All Things Bright and Beautiful to songs steeped more deeply in Christian-ness, such as Give me Oil in my Lamp and Colours of Day (Open the door/let Jesus return[…] Tell the people of Jesus, let his love show).

For the big finale, Partridge took a vote, and the clear winner was Graham Kendrick’s beloved banger, Shine Jesus Shine. Funnily enough, the Sunday morning before this Friday night, I had thought of Graham Kendrick. As I pressed play on a CD player in a tiny medieval church in a tiny Cotswold village, I thought how Kendrick probably wouldn’t have anticipated Shine Jesus Shine to lift such ancient rafters. But he almost certainly wouldn’t have expected it to be sung by hundreds of theatre-going people who probably haven’t been anywhere near a church in years, if ever.

By the end of James B. Partridge’s Primary School Assembly Bangers Live Show, I have to say I felt brilliant. I had had a bad day and somehow the joy of singing had made me feel better. The joy of singing with other people and making a shared noise, singing words of prayer and praise as loudly and as freely as my lungs could support, just made me feel better. If you can get tickets, I heartily recommend catching the tail end of his sell out tour so you can experience it for yourself. It’s a bizarre event, a glorious mish mash of secular and sacred but one that the church can learn from and which I can’t help thinking makes God smile.

By way of Epilogue, as we all poured out of the theatre, and towards our cars, I heard a gaggle of strangers-become-friends skipping across the car park singing,

Flow, river, flow

Flood the nations with grace and mercy,

Send forth Your word,

Lord, and let there be light.

To which I say a happy and hearty Amen…

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Column

Community

Culture

Football

Sport

26 March 2025

4 min read

I’ll miss football’s disappearing cathedrals

Sharing the same physical space as those that go before is a spiritual act.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A CGI image of a son and dad holding hands on the concourse of a modern stadium.

The 'new' Old Trafford.

MUFC.

On the way back from a gig a few weeks ago, my dad asked me a question. “Are there any artists that you’d be so up for seeing that you’d pay anything for a ticket?”

Paul McCartney? Julian Lage? Stevie Wonder?

That’s about it really. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m running out of internal organs to sell to afford gig tickets nowadays, it struck me that a lot of the people I’d pay anything to see are now all dead. Some of them died long before I was born: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon (as part of The Beatles), John Bonham (as part of Led Zeppelin). And then there are the bands who split up before I was born, especially Waters-Gilmour-Wright-Mason era Pink Floyd and Gabriel-Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins era of Genesis.

But there are a few artists I wish I’d had the chance to see in the fleeting moments we were alive at the same time. David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Neil Peart (of Rush), Jeff Buckley (although as a 4-year-old when he died, he probably would have been lost on me back them.)

I was thinking about this question again while watching the Merseyside football derby in February. It was a proper Merseyside derby. By this, I meant that it ended up with fans on the pitch, fights, two players being sent off, and both Liverpool’s manager and assistant manager being sent off too. A proper Merseyside derby.

It was also the last ever Merseyside derby to be held at Goodison Park. And that made me profoundly sad.

I’ve driven past Goodison a fair bit. You catch site of it looming over Stanley Park as you walk up to Anfield. But I’ve never actually been to a match at Goodison. And now I never will. Goodison will soon join a growing list of football grounds that no longer exist: Highbury, Maine Road, White Hart Lane, The Dell, the Boleyn Ground. All gone.

Along with Goodison, another stadium has been added to the scrap pile in recent days. You may have heard of it: Old Trafford.

Yes, Manchester United – who last month announced 200 redundancies at the club, having previously made 250 members of staff redundant last year – have made the decision to spend £2bn on leaving the historic and iconic, if crumbling, Old Trafford stadium to move to a new 100,000-seat stadium. Turns out I only have a few more years to go to Old Trafford before it becomes another page in my book of regrets.

Highbury. Maine Road. White Hart Lane. The Dell. The Boleyn Ground. Goodison. Old Trafford. These are football’s cathedrals, and they are disappearing.

And all of this reminds me about the kind of debates that pop up whenever a church building – whether active or defunct – is used for a purpose that some Christians find disrespectful or blasphemous. Church buildings are often contested spaces; what goes on within them is policed in a way that simply isn’t the case for many other public spaces. Should they host heavy metal gigs? Should disused churches be converted into housing, as this slightly bizarre article seems to revel in.

When I used to live in Nottingham, there was a bar in the centre of town located inside an old church. It’s a gorgeous old building and it has largely survived the conversion into a bar. It is, it must be said, a lovely place for a drink. But it’s difficult not to feel at least a tinge of sadness that, where that place once reverberated with the sound of praise and worship, it now echoes with the thrum of drinks orders and club music. It feels haunted with the presence of God.

Look, things change, I know that. I’m not so nostalgic as to think that everything needs to stay as it was when I was a child. But it’s hard not to wonder about the histories that are being lost, and the stories that are being forgotten, when we demolish or repurpose our church buildings, or our football stadia.

There is a reason why we preserve our history, and our cultural heritage. Sharing the same physical space as those that go before us is a supremely spiritual act. We visit castle ruins, old churches, and war-torn battlefields because they connect us to those that went before. We enter the stories of those people and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different from our own stories.

Come May, the Gwladys Street End at Goodison will have sung its last song. In the near future, Old Trafford’s Stretford End will fall silent, too. Liverpool’s owners FSG have come in for a lot of criticism since taking over in 2010. But, along with appointing Jürgen Klopp, their decision to renovate rather than move away from Anfield will surely go down in history as an unqualified success. It is a place that reeks of history, of stories past. And those stories shape and underwrite the club’s stories in the present.