Only Men Aloud may have given Welsh choirs a showbiz sheen, but in the valleys numbers are falling. Jude Rogers on the battle to save a cornerstone of Welsh culture
A school canteen after-hours, the shutters closed and the chairs stacked, makes for a peculiar music venue. But this is home to the oldest amateur male-voice choir in Wales, which I'm watching rehearse on a quiet Monday evening in the village of Dunvant, near Swansea. The room is a sea of white hair and pink scalps, and bellies booming out tenor and bass notes.
The sound made by the Dunvant Male Choir is a cornerstone of Welsh musical culture; it's the soundtrack to everything from the chapel to the rugby field to the rowdy pub singalong. It's also something I particularly cherish, both as a local girl who has long flown the nest ? and as the elder sister of the choir's 28-year-old conductor, Jonathan Rogers, who is one of the young men taking this centuries-old musical tradition into the future.
In 2011, the Welsh male-voice choir is entering a new, challenging age. On the one hand, choral singing ? and all-male choral singing, in particular ? has never been more high-profile. Its most prominent flag-wavers are Only Men Aloud, the Cardiff-based winners of the 2008 BBC choral talent show Last Choir Standing. They bagged a multimillion-pound deal with Universal Records, recently sold out the 7,500-capacity Cardiff International Arena, and performed on Strictly Come Dancing on Christmas Day.
But membership of the more traditional Welsh male-voice choirs is falling. Last year, Welsh philanthropic organisation the Hywel Williams Foundation commissioned a study to look at why this might be; among the factors under scrunity are the increasing ages of choristers, and the scarcity of available funding.
It's an issue that Only Men Aloud have also been addressing. Last April, their founder, Tim Rhys-Evans, set up 10 youth choirs in the Welsh valleys, encouraging young boys to follow the traditions of their fathers and grandfathers. A few months later, all 220 members of these new choirs ? who all operate, naturally, under the name Only Boys Aloud ? performed at Wales's national arts festival, the National Eisteddfod. Their set, which followed traditional pit songs and hymns with a showstopping a capella Welsh-language version of Journey's Don't Stop Believin', brought the house down.
Get a job, join a choir
But if these shiny new versions of the traditional male-voice choirs are proving so popular, then why are people battling to preserve the old choral customs? Back in Dunvant, once a thriving mining village and now a sleepy suburb of housing estates, the choir members have much to say about the history of C�r Meibion (as the male-voice choir tradition is known in Welsh) ? and, with most of them over 60 (unlike Only Men Aloud, who are all in their 20s and 30s), they have the benefit of long-term experience.
Dunvant Male Choir was formed in 1895 in the town's Ebenezer Congregational Chapel, by a group of miners, steelworkers and quarrymen. Many of the current members were taken along by their male relatives, including Dewi Morgan, 64, a former tinplate works engineer, who has been in the choir for 35 years. "Choirs were part of quiet village life when I was a boy," he says. "You went to school, you left school, got a job, joined a choir."
Times have changed hugely, however. Morgan's own sons aren't interested in joining him in the choir, in part because it requires a significant time commitment: rehearsals are twice-weekly. "The modern malaise of the male-voice choir is that there are too many other things to do," Morgan explains, plainly but perfectly. The rising age of the singers remains a concern, too. In Dunvant's annual magazine, recently deceased singers are noted under the membership lists, and given lavish tributes.
The choir have, nevertheless, maintained their core membership of 80, and their choristers are determined to move with the times. Only Men Aloud's Tim Rhys-Evans was himself Dunvant's conductor over a decade ago; he incorporated more modern songs, like You Raise Me Up, popularised by Daniel O'Donnell, into their hymn-heavy repertoire.
"It was a hurdle at first," says widower Bill Davies. At 82, he's one of the choir's oldest members ? but he's still spry as a whippet, and known playfully by his choirmates as the Gower's most eligible bachelor (on his last birthday, Davies stood on a chair in the rugby club and gave an impromptu solo rendition of Elvis's Can't Help Falling in Love With You). "But soon we got into it," Davies adds of the choir's new material, "and now we enjoy it."
The change of repertoire, he says, made the choristers realise that the singing should not be all about nostalgia. "It's the camaraderie you get from a choir that's important. That's something that younger lads need as much as us older ones. Singing makes you happy, after all." His eyes twinkle. "How else do you think I've lived to this age?"
The evident joy that male-voice choir members take in their singing has always moved me. It also moved Robert Plant in 2007, who happened to sit in on a Dunvant recording session, as his friend was the sound engineer. Many of the older members didn't know who Plant was, but he was so entranced by Dunvant's version of Welsh hymn Myfanwy, that he played it as the crowd left the Led Zeppelin reunion gig that December.
C�r Meibion emerged in Wales in the 19th century, fuelled by the industrial revolution that was bringing Welsh men together in large numbers, and the nonconformist Christianity dominating Welsh churches. Another 19th-century invention, rugby union, also boosted the connection between singing and national identity ? and while religion may have declined in the country, sport has not. The performances of unofficial crowd anthems at international matches ? such as Sosban Fach (Little Saucepan), a folk song from west Wales, and the popular hymn Cwm Rhondda ? have become expressions of national pride. In the 1950s, Welsh captain Cliff Morgan said that the singing at matches put a yard on every stride, and 20 yards on every kick.
For years, Tim Rhys-Evans has been fascinated by the dichotomy between Welsh men's gruff machismo and their love of song. He comes from New Tredegar in the Rhymney Valley, 50 miles away from Dunvant. Before going to Cardiff's Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, he learned to sing through local chapel and youth choirs. He then returned to the male-voice tradition in his spare time after he became the director of Welsh National Youth Opera. "It shocked me," he says, "that for every seven girls that sang, only one boy would sing. It made me think there's something really going wrong here, in a country where our most famous choral heritage has been a masculine one. I realised it's all do with the fact that it's not cool to sing, or you must be effeminate if you're interested in singing."
To address this, he set up the Only Boys Aloud network of choirs in the valley communities he came from, many of which remain depressed by the decline of heavy industry in the 1980s. It was important for Rhys-Evans that rehearsals were held in sports clubs rather than chapels or schools, and that the boys would be singing with people the same age as them, both to feel less intimidated by older men ? "and," he laughs, "less uncool".
Rehearsals in Manics T-shirts
The fact that Welsh identity is no longer stigmatised has also helped swell numbers. Since the 1993 Welsh Language Act revived the mother tongue, and the Welsh Assembly was created in 2000, many bands and TV personalities have made a virtue of their Welshness ? including groups such as Manic Street Preachers and Lostprophets, whose T-shirts many of the boys wear to choir rehearsals.
Most of those who sang in front of 9,000 people at the Eisteddfod had never sung in public before. The opportunity has, according to 18-year-old chorister Emyr Jones, changed their lives. He joined the Aberdare branch in April, and fought through the snow in December to perform alongside Only Men Aloud at their homecoming Christmas concert ? not in a lowly chapel, but at the Cardiff International Arena.
"To have said that one day I would sing there, I would have laughed out loud," Jones says. He also thinks that their singing carries a political dimension. "We youngsters can finally stand up and say that singing is still alive in our traditions, and that we are not all tarred with the same brush as the rest of British youth."
This year promises a packed concert programme for Only Boys Aloud, and the old boys at Dunvant are also ramping up their ambitions ? they'll be leaving the school canteen behind, and packing their blazers and ties for a summer tour in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. As they do, I will be listening to them sing again on my hi-fi, for the millionth time, their voices reminding me that there's no place like home.
? Dunvant Male Choir perform at Tabernacle Chapel, Swansea on 5 February and the Majestic Choir festival, Torquay on 19 February. Details: dunvant.org. Only Boys Aloud concert details: onlyboysaloud.com.
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