ONLY slightly less startling than the prospect of electable Tories is the emergence of cool choirs. And the 14 professionals in the Shout are deeply cool. They prefer to play nightclubs rather than cathedrals. They dabble with satire and sing about sex — things you don’t often encounter at, say, the Royal Choral Society.

Their music, mostly written by their composer-directors Orlando Gough and Richard Chew, is a fashionably eclectic mix, very much “late-night Radio 3”: minimalist riffs, rich jazz harmony, sensuous world-music modes, overlaid with heavy breathing, yelping and other avant-garde effects. And they sing mostly from memory. That’s vital. Not only does it allow whole medleys to be staged as dramatic narratives; it also immensely heightens their communicative powers. Alone among the performing arts, classical music still wrestles with this huge visual and psychological problem: that performers have their heads buried in their scores. The Shout’s virtuosos show what a difference a little eye-contact with the audience makes.

In any case, they are an intriguing bunch. Drawn from jazz and pop as much as from classical backgrounds, they give the impression that they have knocked around a bit, tasted fruits both sweet and bitter. Very different, then, from those chillingly pristine, baby-faced choral groups that come out of Oxbridge every year.

And on their latest tour, Deep Blue, this feeling of seasoned emotions wryly recalled is beautifully exploited — especially in the programme’s second half, which strings together choral reflections on love’s pleasures and woes, interspersed with a wonderfully droll narration of one guy’s encounter with his dream woman. Hit of the night? An infectious rap built on the names of history’s great lovers: Casanova, Don Giovanni, Sven- Göran Eriksson, David Mellor and, er, John Major — whose name brings the whole thing crashing to a halt.

This was true cabaret. And it suited the venue — a packed cellar with surely the noisiest air-conditioning on the South Coast — better than the serious, dissonant stuff earlier. Even here, though, were ingenious touches, none neater than the idea of starting Richard Rodgers’s If I Loved You by playing an ancient recording on a wind-up gramophone, then gradually overwhelming those crackly ancestral voices with luscious 14-part harmony delivered live.

The Shout now move on to the Cambridge Corn Exchange (November 17), the Spitz, London (18) and the Michael Tippett Centre, Bath (19). Go and hear them, even if — especially if — you think that choirs are as hip as hot-water bottles. This lot, you will find, are worth a shout.