Voicemale - Harmonies and happiness 🎵🎶🤩

Dear friends

It was a relatively quiet night at a warm (😅) and cosy hall last night - a good turnout again despite the Toon playing (and comprehensively beating) Wolves. [There was a noticeable core of us surreptitiously consulting our phones at regular intervals to catch up on the score - I’m sure Jon didn’t notice - well you can take the lads oot of the toon, but ya can’t take the toon oot of the lads!!!]

For some of us the evening had started early in the Tap n Spile with our once a term Committee meeting. It was a lively and constructive session with some welcome interventions by Paul W and David M who had taken up our invitation to attend and contribute. We heard that Jon is pleased with the choirs continued progress on the singing front, that there are a number of gigs in the pipeline and that the finances are no cause for concern. Hopefully you’ll have noticed that the web site is regularly being updated (thanks John) and that our social media presence is constantly improving (thanks Gez) and you’ll have got the vibe that there’s a lot happening on the VM front this year.

As you’ll have gathered by now we’re trying to make 2025 a bit special to celebrate 25 years of VM and there are a few exciting possibilities ahead of us not least of which is exploring a potential opportunity to take the choir to Germany in October to perform - there was a lot of early interest in this - a long way to go to make it happen but hopefully we’ll find out more in due course. On the gigs front it is relatively early days but we may be in the position of having to turn down gigs as we could end up with too many!!!! Generally we have targeted 12 a year (last year was 13) - but with our increased choir members perhaps we could stretch this to 15 or 16??? What do you all think???

We had some good ideas on special events - ranging from pub crawls (quite a few votes for that!!) to flash choirs at Newcastle Central Station to a possible choir tour to Largs. On that theme you’ll all be pleased to know we’ve just confirmed our first gig of the year at the Alnwick Brewery on Saturday 8th March at 4pm - great beer available 🍻 🍺… more details to follow.

Alan mentioned our annual dinner which this year will be on Wednesday the 12th February (nb the hall session will be cancelled that night). All members and partners are invited. The proposed venues are all in Morpeth and are Lollo Rosso, Giovannis (where we went last year) and The Martino Lounge. Alan distributed some sample menus and he will be asking next week for our preference.

Finally, please let me know if there is any one out there who fancies themselves as a bit of an artistic designer and who is able to produce some quality promotional material for our forthcoming gigs… answers asap on a post card please!!!

Have a great weekend all - enjoy the sunshine and blue skies - and be kind to each other.

Onwards and upwards Voicemale👆 😍🤩🎵🎉🍺🍻🤸🏽‍♀️ 🚀.

Chris