Review

Change

Community

Joy

Music

24 March 2025

6 min read

Sing it out with James Partridge’s joyous assembly

Bad days gets better when we sing together.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A pianist sits at a keyboard singing on a stage.

For the first time, in a long time, I can honestly say that last Friday night, I gave it large. I was at a singalong show at the Cheltenham Playhouse, with hundreds of other people belting out the words to some well-known and well-loved songs.

As an actor-turned-vicar, I am one of life’s unusual people for whom singing is a normal and expected part of life. Yet still, I was taken by surprise by what a truly fabulous evening I had, singing gustily along with hundreds of people I didn’t know.

Seen & Unseen’s Belle Tindall wrote an article some time ago about the power of Jacob Collier’s concerts to make strangers feel a sense of belonging. I’ve not been to one, but I feel like I went to a lower brow version of that on Friday night.

I went to James B. Partridge’s Primary School Assembly Bangers Live Show. Which is almost certainly more mainstream and on trend than you think. He arrived on many of our radars when he took Glastonbury by storm last year, but he’s also performed at the Edinburgh Fringe 2024, Latitude, and The Big Feastival. He has been featured on BBC’s The One Show, and ITV’s Loose Women. He featured live on ITV News and on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. His online videos have been written about in The Times, The Independent, Buzzfeed and featured in a number of podcasts. And now he’s even got a mention on Seen & Unseen…

For those of you who still have no idea what I’m talking about, let me take you back to Lockdown. Which may be triggering for some, and for that I apologise. Mr Partridge is a primary school music teacher and during Lockdown, he was trying to bring some joy into the lives of the children that he was still trying to teach online. And indeed, into the lives of their parents. He put some “Assembly Bangers” on YouTube, and the videos went viral; they just made people feel better by singing along. And so, it began.

Partridge is a great musician and all-round showman – he knew exactly how to play his audience – who were, by the way, really up for it. Some had even come prepared with fruit shakers and triangles to play. I kid you not. Although the bulk of his playlist were indeed Assembly Bangers, the nostalgic singalong extended beyond the Assembly Hall. He played a couple of bars of the intro and the entire theatre burst into the theme song of 90s Australian soap opera Home and Away. He delighted us with a medley of Alan Menkin’s Disney classics from The Little Mermaid through to Tangled. I even got involved in the SClub7 mash up. Get me.

Partridge told lots of great stories and anecdotes in between songs and one stuck in the mind. He’d recently received a message on Instagram from a woman who had had an accident in her early 20s and, because of brain damage, had lost all memory of her childhood. Until she listened to some of his Assembly Bangers. Through reconnecting with some of the songs she had sung at Primary School, memories attached to those songs started to come back. Amazing. Beautiful.

This is a widely known phenomenon. Music – and specifically singing – is increasingly becoming a feature of dementia care because, in trials, it has proved powerful in sparking memories, often long after other forms of communication have diminished.

There’s also research proving that singing releases endorphins – serotonin and dopamine – the ‘happy’ chemicals that boost your mood and make you feel good about yourself. Singing in the shower or with a hairbrush/microphone is, apparently, genuinely good for you.

At the same time, we all know that, if you can get over your self-consciousness, singing is a fantastic communal activity. Just go to a football match or a karaoke bar to find the proof. And the good news is, it doesn’t matter whether you think you can sing in tune or not: apparently the health benefits will still be the same. Although possibly not for those standing next to you.

With all this in mind, it’s interesting to note that much of the greatest classical music ever written (for choirs and orchestras) was composed in worship of the Christian God. Handel, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Hayden all churned out the bangers of their time. In the same tradition, John Newton, Charles Wesley, Matt Redmond, Chris Tomlin and Stuart Townend – all have written songs that have helped us, over many generations, to lift our eyes and our souls in song.

The saying, "the one who sings, prays twice," attributed to St. Augustine, helps us understand something about the spiritual power of singing and how it takes our words to the next level. There is something “more” happening when we sing; our whole being is connected, somehow; it’s physical, mental and spiritual all at once.

The Bible is full of songs and exhortations to God’s people to sing in praise of their God – because it’s good for us. As with so much cutting-edge psychological research, we are only catching up with what has been found in the Bible for thousands of years.

Sunday by Sunday in churches around the world, Christians sing songs. Songs that teach or remind us about who God is, songs that lift our souls and minds away from the cares and trials of our lives and the state of the world. Songs that take our eyes off ourselves and transport us into a place of worship. Songs that connect our memories of the past with God’s promises for the future. We sing to join together; we sing to join with the choir of Heaven and experience something of the Kingdom of God that we can all too easily miss otherwise. This is powerful stuff.

Singing along with James Partridge, the Assembly Bangers ranged from the obvious Morning has Broken and All Things Bright and Beautiful to songs steeped more deeply in Christian-ness, such as Give me Oil in my Lamp and Colours of Day (Open the door/let Jesus return[…] Tell the people of Jesus, let his love show).

For the big finale, Partridge took a vote, and the clear winner was Graham Kendrick’s beloved banger, Shine Jesus Shine. Funnily enough, the Sunday morning before this Friday night, I had thought of Graham Kendrick. As I pressed play on a CD player in a tiny medieval church in a tiny Cotswold village, I thought how Kendrick probably wouldn’t have anticipated Shine Jesus Shine to lift such ancient rafters. But he almost certainly wouldn’t have expected it to be sung by hundreds of theatre-going people who probably haven’t been anywhere near a church in years, if ever.

By the end of James B. Partridge’s Primary School Assembly Bangers Live Show, I have to say I felt brilliant. I had had a bad day and somehow the joy of singing had made me feel better. The joy of singing with other people and making a shared noise, singing words of prayer and praise as loudly and as freely as my lungs could support, just made me feel better. If you can get tickets, I heartily recommend catching the tail end of his sell out tour so you can experience it for yourself. It’s a bizarre event, a glorious mish mash of secular and sacred but one that the church can learn from and which I can’t help thinking makes God smile.

By way of Epilogue, as we all poured out of the theatre, and towards our cars, I heard a gaggle of strangers-become-friends skipping across the car park singing,

Flow, river, flow

Flood the nations with grace and mercy,

Send forth Your word,

Lord, and let there be light.

To which I say a happy and hearty Amen…

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Interview

Community

Culture

Loneliness

S&U interviews

27 March 2025

5 min read

Why we need friendship more than romance

Friendship Lab's founder opens up on opening up.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A speaker, standing in front of a screen, beckons with one hand, holding a mic with the other.

Voysey at the Lab launch.

Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer, and theologian, wrote in Reaching Out of an encounter with one of his students who entered his room with the disarming remark:

“I simply want to celebrate some time with you.”

Recently, I had the great pleasure of celebrating some time with Sheridan Voysey, the founder of Friendship Lab, which is the first non-profit organisation dedicated to enabling adults to reach out and making friendship thrive.

Sheridan, an Australian by birth, describes himself as a ‘writer, speaker, and broadcaster with ‘a keen interest in what makes life deeply worthwhile’. Beyond that, he goes on, “I am a husband to Merryn” and “big dog” to a cockapoo called Rupert, and he makes Oxford his home.

He and I met in the Liddon Room of Pusey House, one of the chaplaincies to the University of Oxford, which is where I have made many of my adult friendships over the years. We had tea.

We began our conversation by talking about solitude and silence. Sheridan told me that the Friendship Lab, which launched in London last month, had its genesis in a solo spiritual retreat he went on in 2019. He left thinking about friendlessness and wanting to write a book about adult friendship. The pandemic played into this, creating an opportunity for Sheridan to broadcast about this issue when he was made Creative Lead of BBC Radio 2’s four-day Friendship Season in 2020. People pondered, when they were apart from one another, why it is that friendship is so difficult in the modern world. Sheridan led the way.

“You’re thinking too small” were the words he heard on his second retreat at St Katherine’s House, Parmoor in 2021. He told me he was scared. Rather than writing a book, Sheridan resolved to rectify our world’s obsession with romance at the expenses of what he calls “its less glamorous sibling”. Friendship Lab, which provides courses and resources to build friendships that make life deeply worthwhile, was the result.

Sheridan told me that he did not have many friends growing up in Brisbane, Australia. In the 1970s, he remembers, Brisbane was “a bit coarse, a bit rough”, and “to be an Australian male in Brisbane then was to be into beer, barbecues, football”, he said with a laugh. As a child, Sheridan stuck out. He was tall. “I was the kid who would be walking around the playground at lunchtime, constantly moving around to cover up the fact that I had no friends to sit with.” I asked him how this might have contributed to his thinking about friends as a fifty-year-old man.

The answer was rooted in his childhood experiences—and his faith. His parents were Jehovah Witnesses when Sheridan was growing up, which he told me meant that his family were “absolute outsiders”. Then, his mum had “a wonderful encounter with God” in the late 1990s, where she came to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. It was, he said, “profoundly transformative” for the whole family. He had been “trying to find [his] life” “among the flashing lights and throbbing beats of Brisbane’s nightclubs” but felt “completely empty inside” until he made a commitment to Christ himself, aged 19. He told me that fostering friendship in others, matters to him because of his faith. “I have always had a heart for those on the periphery, and I want to bring them in.”

Reaching out is connected to comfy silence in the company of others.

Another factor which has shaped Sheridan’s sure-fire purpose to recover the lost art of friendship has been his marriage to Merryn. His book Resurrection Year recounts the decision he and his wife made in 2011 to move from Australia to Oxford, to recover from the death of a dream to have a child together. Merryn started out as a medical researcher within the University, soon earning a PhD through the college in the building where we met for our time together. Sheridan tells me, he had a “real identity crisis”. His own came through leaving a successful career broadcasting and speaking in Australia, which on top of the childlessness, gave rise to questions about his legacy. He also told me, it was “a great stimulus to think very deeply” about his friends. “How intentional am I being?”

I can tell you, having spent one hour and a half with Sheridan, that he oozes intentionality in how he engages with others. This is why I was reminded of Henri Nouwen. The ‘twentieth-century Kierkegaard’, Nouwen was able to announce the arrival of another way to relate to others in the world. Reaching out is connected to comfy silence in the company of others, which Sheridan knows well. After some time in silence with Nouwen, his student said, ‘“From now on, wherever you go, or wherever I go, all the ground between us will be holy ground.”’ I might have said likewise to Sheridan as our time together drew to a close.

Sheridan said,

“I hope that Friendship Lab in its tiny little embryonic state will one day grow to the point where we can actually have some kind of cultural influence, and we can turn the tide.”

I hope so too.

Friendship Lab aspires to a world in which every adult has at least three ‘2am friends’, people who will help ‘at 2am when everything has gone wrong’. Sheridan Voysey is no longer thinking small.

Like the Lord Jesus Christ, whom he believes to be the Son of God, Sheridan is looking unrelentingly at what makes life deeply worthwhile: love, and not just the romantic kind. Reaching out, this man is making friends.

Find out more about Friendship Lab

Visit the Lab

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief