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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Review

Art

Culture

Joy

Suffering

19 April 2023

4 min read

Carving joy and suffering – what Donatello’s sculpture captures

The pioneering sculpture of Donatello presents emotional urgency. Sara Schumacher reflects on his art.

Sara Schumacher

Dr Sara Schumacher is Academic Dean and Tutor and Lecturer in Theology & the Arts at St Mellitus College.

A relief sculpture shows the Madonna hold the infant Christ close to her face.

Donatello's Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna) sculpture.

Donatello, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the weather turns and trees take on their sheen of green, with the seasonal change comes the major spring exhibitions in the nation’s museums. Running from 11 February – 11 June 2023, the Victoria & Albert Museum are hosting a significant exhibition of the work by the Renaissance master, Donatello. Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance traces the sculptor’s life and career, introducing us to his artistic collaborators as well as tracing his legacy within Western art history. A summary of the exhibition has been well described elsewhere and the curators do a fine job of providing context for the viewer that allows one to understand the significance of Donatello’s work. Instead, in this article, I want to try and capture what is felt in what is seen for I think Donatello, in his subject matter and style, is able to hold in tension the paradox of joy and suffering. This paradox is an all-too-common human experience, something that has been explored as Christians journeyed together through Holy Week. While Christian theology has a way of helping make sense of why this paradox exists, art has a way of helping us all to process our lived experience of it.

Through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented.

As the exhibition shows, Donatello is famous for being the first in the Renaissance to sculpt a free-standing form. Sculpture, especially free-standing sculpture, requires something of the viewer. In order to see it properly, you have to position yourself in relation to the work and move around it. And while Donatello was clearly a master at this artform, what he invented was rilievo schiacciato, meaning ‘squashed relief’. The stone or bronze is carved with only a few millimetres of depth. In a way, it is like ‘painting’ with stone or bronze, and in doing so, the two-dimensional and three-dimensional are fused. As you move around it, light refracts off the medium, thus highlighting different aspects of the work and changing what you see. Put another way, through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented. This embodied connection can start to cultivate empathy as we place ourselves and identify with who or what we see.

The touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh.

Donatello’s work also evokes empathy in the way that he sculpts the human form. In his work, the touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh. This is at its most poignant in the multiple Virgin and Child sculptures displayed throughout the exhibition. And it is here, particularly in the Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna), where the paradox of joy and suffering is presented most evocatively.

It is not uncommon to see artistic renderings of the Virgin and Child where distance is held between the two forms. Sometimes, the child looks out at the viewer, away from his mother, inviting devotion through his gaze. In other depictions, the Virgin adopts a posture of worship before her son. The reason for this is theological: the visual divide was a way to bring to the fore the divinity of the human Jesus. However, what we find in the Donatello renderings is something different.

In the Pazzi Madonna, using his trademark schiacciato, Donatello presents a sculpture of emotional urgency. Instead of distance between Virgin and Child, we see a mother who has her face pressed up against her son’s. While the child has a look of contentment and the beginnings of a smile, the mother looks at her child with intensity, marked by sadness. While a worshipping Virgin indicated her awareness of her Son’s glorification through his crucifixion and resurrection, this face tells of a different knowing. The beginning of this child’s life is already marked by the end. And while the end will bring salvation to the world, the anticipation of the end brings suffering for the mother. Mary knows that her son, the one she has borne and is called to nurture into adulthood, will suffer on her behalf and on behalf of the whole world. It will be this suffering that she cannot stop or protect him from. And while the work tells of joy in the intimacy and tenderness between mother and child, this joy is held in tension with the suffering that will come from their respective acts of obedience. The worst that a mother could imagine for her child must happen because in that worst moment is, paradoxically, the hope for the world. Where their faces meet in this sculpture, joy and suffering are visibly held together.

What does it mean for us to press our suffering faces against the face of Jesus? As we look into his eyes of joy, how does that transform the way we see the world and our circumstances? The Christian story is one of hope. In the end, all things will be made right and there will be an end to all suffering and tears. And while we live with and through real pain, as we see with Donatello, we see that this human paradox can be held now for its resolution will come.