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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Column

Change

Character

Psychology

23 May 2024

4 min read

Look out for the outliers

Seeing the good qualities in others lifts them, benefits us, and makes the world better.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A office worker wearing headphones looks out of a hectic and loud office space around which people are moving

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

I was talking to someone the other day. She is a website developer and she’s just changed jobs. She is not a loud person, but anyone who meets her knows she is a person of quality, of depth and presence. She emanates a humble confidence. In her old job, she worked in a quiet, fairly sedate, office where she was given the space and the time to bring all her creativity to bear on whatever brief she was given. She was known and appreciated.

But her new job – the job she started last week – is a bit different. Her new colleagues are loud and outspoken. Silence is unknown in their office. They like to work to a soundtrack. The drum and bass keep thumping, and the banter never stops flowing. She’s finding it hard to fit in with her new team. And things weren’t made any easier when, after a few days, her new boss took her aside for a pep talk.

What was the problem? She was ‘too quiet’.

It hurt to hear that. It broke my heart to think that anyone could be so blind. How shortsighted do you have to be, to view the grace and peace someone carries as a problem to be solved? In a world of distressing noise and clamour, she is precisely the kind of person every office needs to temper the insanity.

I’m not worried about her. She’s bright and innovative. She’ll work it out. Either her new boss will see sense, or she’ll leave. And if she does, the queue of employers looking for someone just like her stretches round the block. She’ll be okay.

But it got me thinking about the kind of psychology I study. In my research, she would be called an outlier. One of those people in a team or a family who don’t quite fit in. Not because they are weird or awkward, but because they possess some positive quality the rest of the gang don’t have. They are the creative exuberant in a team who prefer doing things by the book. The hilarious joker in a pack who like to take things seriously. The conscientious worker trying to get on with the job in an office that would rather play now and work later. The kind one in a family of cutthroat competitors.

At the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated.

The thing is we all have a unique contribution to make to the world, a one-off fingerprint of strengths and abilities never to be repeated in anyone else. In research these have been called Signature Strengths, the unique combination of positive qualities that make you you. And the weird thing is that we don’t have to try that hard to be them. If you are naturally kind, or wise, or grateful, or disciplined you won’t be able to stop yourself being that way. They come effortlessly to us. And if someone tries to stop us being the loving thoughtful faithful person we know ourselves to be, it is like losing a limb. If we find ourselves in a context where the most beautiful things about us are unwelcome – like my friend the website developer – it is like being rejected, right to the core.

But here’s the cool thing. If we can live by our Signature Strengths – if we can wake up each morning and ask the question, how can I use my unique positive qualities in a new way today? – it leads to remarkable improvements in wellbeing. Multiple studies have shown that those who live like this, thinking about how they can bring what is best in them to the opportunities and obstacles of each day, report increased happiness in living. Not only that, but they also show reduced anxiety, stress and depression. It turns out being good is good for us. Who knew.

That’s not the whole story though. To really be our best, we need other people to spot these strengths in us. If they don’t, we feel confined, unable to be ourselves in some way. When I ask people what it is like not to be able to bring their best qualities to the people around them, they come up with some pretty dark images. It is lonely, isolating, a desert, a fog, a prison, like being trapped in a cage. And when researchers ask people why they consider leaving their current job, their answers often reflect something like this. Work-life balance and salary are no doubt important, but often, at the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated. Something good we wanted to give has not been received. We feel unseen.

So that’s why I say: look out for the outliers. Who is it in your family, your workplace, your neighbourhood, who goes underappreciated? Who do you know who has something good to give, but needs some help to give it? Because if we can learn to see those invisible beautiful qualities in the people around us, we not only give them the joy of being known, we also invite more light and flavour into the world. Life becomes a little less grey.

I just hope my friend’s new boss can learn this while he still has the chance. It is tough for her to feel so misunderstood, but it’s worse for him. She can move on, but he has to remain in an office deprived of the humble compassion she would have brought to it. It’s a question worth asking. What gift of beauty and goodness are we excluding from the world because we failed to see past the packaging?