Of Choirs and Comedians

On Saturday night we went for one of our occasional visits to Downstairs at the Kings Head, Crouch End’s spectacularly low-ceilinged comedy club with the slowest-serving bar staff known to humanity. The comedy on offer this time was rather below par, but I guess that’s the risk you take. Comedians working the circuit are familiar with only two points about Crouch End: one, that it’s not on the Tube, and two, that it’s a suburb full of terribly nice middle-class people. So nice that the audience at the Kings Head are invariably polite, even when a performer is so poor that they’ve resorted to making spluttering noises down the microphone in a bid for laughs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a heckle there.
On Friday I attended an open rehearsal of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, a fairly impressive and respected amateur choir who perform regularly at the Barbican and the Proms. They have a challenging repertoire that they intersperse with the mainstream loud choral numbers. At the moment they are working on Verdi Requiem, which I can never resist an opportunity to go and sing. And they insist that members audition to weed out some of the tone-deaf chaff that tends to turn up at these institutions. But with these high expectations, I instead found Crouch End at its most middle class and most terribly nice and that the CEFC was like every other amateur choir in the country, full of 50-something women called names like Binky and Fifi and Nena, who gush over the conductor but sit gossiping amongst themselves whenever he tries to teach them anything. I won’t be going back.

REBECCA