Watch the Kvetch Choir
Two years ago I made my public singing debut: I snuck into one of the best
amateur choirs in the country and my only obligation was to write about it
in The Times. I was a filler in the bass line of the BBC Symphony Chorus,
doing my best to blur into the background at the first night of the 2006
Proms. The Albert Hall resounded to the emphatically optimistic strains of
Dvorák's Te Deum. God was duly praised. The major chords multiplied. That
night in the hall all was right with the world.
And that, perhaps, was the problem. Outside the Albert Hall life was its usual
patchwork of fretting and frustrations. For one thing I had to try to work
out just what I was going to write about singing with the BBC. And there
were delays on the Piccadilly Line. And my shoe had a hole in it. And I'd
forgotten to pay my credit card bill.
But there are choirs around the world who would have gladly sung those
grumbles for me rather than cherubically soaring through Dvorák's pious
exclamations. There are choirs who sing fugues on the theme of “food has no
taste any more” and yodel to “I can't stop thinking about sex”. They chant
about tatty bus stops and harmonise on the insufficient length of their
vacuum-cleaner cord. In fact, every tedious aspect of modern life has
probably passed the lips of a complaints choir, a new kind of performance
art that is noisily taking root across the world. And now I am its latest
recruit.
Had it not been for a couple of enterprising Finns, the complaints choir would
still just be a figure of speech. In Finland, where the movement began,
valituskuoro, or chorus of complaints, was what angry schoolteachers called
recalcitrant pupils, until Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and his wife Tellervo
decided to take the expression at literal value. In the UK, they naturally
drifted to Birmingham first (“the city with most complaints about the people
themselves”, Kochta-Kalleinen says). It got its first complaints choir in
2005, at around the same time as Helsinki and St Petersburg. The simple
formula - meet, moan, set it to (mostly original) music - proved wildly
popular and easily exportable. There are now complaints choirs from
Jerusalem to Buenos Aires, Budapest to Toronto. Some take requests from
their local communities for complaints; others simply draw on their own
miseries.
It's thanks to the creative minds at the Jewish Community Centre in London
that I now have my own opportunity to sing my woes. The organisation has
created the capital's first complaints choir (a stillborn London Complaints
Choir got as far as a website inviting whinges but never as far as singing
them). Its so-called Kvetch Choir - the Yiddish expression for a whinge or
whine - is the world's first such choir to be organised on ethnic or
religious lines.
This, I soon realise, is a massive strength. Preparing for our first rehearsal
- the moaning bit - I blitz YouTube and the complaints choirs to suss out
the competition. And, to be honest, it's pretty poor. Birmingham drone
moronically, unmusically, their rhyming tortuous: “I want my money back/ My
life's a cul-de-sac.” In an obscure and unloved suburb of Hamburg they're
fretting about canal renovations and cycle lanes (would writing to the
council not be easier?). In Budapest, inane Europop frames some old twaddle
about yoghurts being too small “while beer is lukewarm”.
Chicago does raise the bar: their styles vary from Glee Club style sobriety to
Broadway sass as they knowingly remind us that “only tourists like deep-dish
pizza”. And I have a soft spot for the soulful woes of the St Petersburgers,
who ask “why do we keep loving when love is so painful?” and want to know
“why the opera is so expensive”.
But our choir is better. We are admittedly barely ten people at our first
group meeting, in the basement of a Hampstead pub. But we are directed by
the charismatic Johnny Berliner, who brought a hip-hop musical for tweenies
to the Edinburgh Festival (Dude, Where's My Teddybear), and, even better, we
were all naturally born to kvetch. In seconds we are inundated with
irritation. We can't find good bagels. We're sick of defending everything
Israel does (though also think it gets a raw deal, natch). My suggestion for
a line - “I've started sounding like my mum” - is adopted unanimously. It's
like some sort of bizarre mix between the Jewish Chronicle leader writers'
conference and a campfire confessional on a school trip.
Admittedly being not a very good Jew, some of the gripes also leave me
flummoxed. That buying costly kosher food in a credit crunch is causing
misery across North London hadn't occurred to me; “finding a good synagogue”
is also not a problem when you haven't gone for almost 10 years. But then
singing someone else's whinge is part and parcel of a complaints choir. And
it's this group adoption of an individual's worry that gives the choir its
sense of shared belonging.
This is one of the key arguments of the philosopher Julian Baggini, who in his
recent book, Complaint, explained how the very act of a group whinge (for
example, office workers moaning about their boss) is a key form of social
association: mutual respect follows on.
That's the reason why a group of Finnish schoolchildren can simultaneously
assert that “girls are boring” and “boys smell”; why, in Chicago, “we're
always hungry” and “portions are too big”. When Berliner hits on the
brilliant idea of setting our chorus to the tune of If I Were a Rich Man, I
find myself happily warbling about wanting a Jewish husband on the bus home.
“Kosher food is pricey,” I sing gaily during the weekly shop at Sainsbury's,
while the checkout girl bleeps through my prawns and pork pies and gives me
a suspicious look.
By the second (and last) rehearsal we've swept up some more converts and are
surging with confidence. Klezmer-style harmonising is married to tunes
borrowed from the synagogue for the verses. We divide into parents and
children for some back-and-forth barbs about dating and food. “My mother
overloads my plate,” wails Claire, prompting an off-piste response from said
mother, also in the choir: “I never feed you, you're never available.”
What seems to add real bounce and verve to our efforts is that, unlike so many
complaints choirs, we don't come across as downtrodden, oppressed and
generally dreary, perhaps because the history of Judaism has always been
about turning misfortune into humour.
It's a shame our performance doesn't offer quite the same level of amusement
as the process has. Perhaps this is because we have a chronic failure of
nerve a few bars into our opening refrain and never really regain our
momentum. Perhaps it's because the venue and occasion (we're the
curtain-raiser to a JCC screening of the South African film about a far more
amazing choir, the Children of Agape) don't really mesh with our cheerfully
amateurish style and breezy irreverence. A non-religionspecific reference to
Facebook draws a chuckle from some twentysomethings; our line about the
Jewish Chronicle's habit of dividing death announcements into two sections
(“one for most and one for those with lots and lots of cash”) also gets a
nervous titter. Otherwise our kvetches are met with quizzical puzzlement,
and, largely, silence. Many have their heads in their hands.
Then again, what could be more authentic than a complaints choir that pours
out its frustrations to a completely impervious audience? As my kvetching
grows louder, so does my rage. I storm off to a smattering of applause that
can do nothing to smudge the shared sense of catharsis. And, for once, I
have the oddest feeling: I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
www.complaintschoir.org
Moan, moan, moan... Complaints choirs around the world
St Petersburg (pictured above)
“Petersburg, I'm not ready to die yet/
To drown in the waves of your River Neva/ Advertisements are filling all the
streets/ But there is no space for me.”
Chicago
“The Amateur Jethro Tull cover band/ Practising round the block will never
rock/
I am drowning in student loans/
And my gums are receding.”
Helsinki
“You can't get rich by working/
And love doesn't last forever.
In the public sauna they never ask/
If it's OK to throw water on the stove.”
Budapest
“I wax every month, but no one ever notices/ Pigeons shit on me, we hardly
ever smile/ My neighbour holds folk-dancing classes right above my place/
It's a pessimistic country and it's made me pessimistic.”
Hamburg
“The Hamburg public transport/ Doesn't get their buses and trains
co-ordinated/ My favourite underpants are out of stock/ The old ones already
fell apart.”
Singapore
“We get fined for almost everything/
Drivers won't give you a chance when you want to change lane/
The indoors are cold, the outdoors are hot/And the humid air, it wrecks my
hair.”
