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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Article

Comment

Community

Nationalism

8 October 2025

5 min read

One flag two nations: the view from Leicester

Raising the national flag won’t secure the future for our grandchildren

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is a curate in Leicestershire

A suburban English street with St George's Cross flags on lamposts.

Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I was in the local pub the other week and overheard a conversation at the bar prompted by Operation Raise the Colours, the campaign group that advocates for the Union flag and the St George’s Cross to be hung in public places.

Striking was the opinion of one man who repeatedly stated that he was not a fascist or a racist but supported anti-immigration policies and the deportation of migrants and asylum seekers for the sake of his young granddaughter. It was a lack of hope for her future, he kept asserting, that meant politicians needed to take a more aggressive stance against people arriving in this country hoping to live here. He therefore supported the raising of the St George’s Cross as a sign of the national identity he hoped his granddaughter would grow up to experience.

In the last hundred years the St George’s Cross has been a sign of Empire, military might, hooliganism, English Nationalism, xenophobia, fascism, and other violent and oppressive worldviews. It meant for many who did not want to be associated with these things that they could never raise or recognise the flag at all.

But there has also been some reclamation of our national symbols. Cool Britannia and Britpop under New Labour saw a new pride in the Union flag; England’s football team under Gareth Southgate and the ‘proper’ English Lionesses were successful, articulate, and diverse under the Cross of St George. It's why even now it’s hard to discern whether someone with a Cross of St George stuck to their house endorses Tommy Robinson, or whether they’re showing their support for the England women’s rugby team, who are swept all opposition before them whilst cavorting in pink cowboy hats and redefining all kinds of feminine stereotypes.

These myriad options for painting identities onto national colours seems particularly clear in Leicester, where I live and work. We live in the outer suburbs, meaning two miles in one direction, humans are outnumbered by sheep, and two miles in the other is the incredibly diverse edge of the city.

Leicester famously has the most diverse street in the UK, Narborough Road, where people from many nations live and work, generally in relative harmony. Skills are shared: help with government forms for those without good English are informally bartered for meals, haircuts, or produce. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and many other faiths worship within close proximity. It seems a place symbolic of one kind of England: diverse, tolerant, enriching the lives of one another by the sharing of culture and skills.

It’s easy to point to recent riots between Hindu and Muslim populations in the north of the city as proof of the opposite. Nevertheless, having worked in a diverse city centre church and visited schools and hospitals where many cultures and faiths study and work together, there are large pockets of the city that do generously manage to embody this vision. Faith leaders are overwhelmingly committed to mutual tolerance and respect.

I know many people in the county also wish for this version of England, but it has been striking to see how many villages surrounding the city have joined in with Operation Raise the Colours. Its anti-immigration message provides a clear-cut visual contrast. In the city there are no St George’s Crosses but innumerable signs of inter-culturalism brought by immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. It is the first city in the UK where being white British does not put you in the majority. In the county, these flags seem to state that these signs are not welcome. That to ‘Unite the Nation’ is to expel those different to us. That the only culture available is the one they want to equivocate with the St George: white, British, suspicious of outsiders.

Both of these contexts seem to be fully fleshed out alternatives for the future of England. Who do we want to be? Tolerant, inter-cultural, diverse? Or exclusive, suspicious, nativist? The guy in the pub was staking his hope for the future on one of these alternatives, and I’m sure he’s not unique. There will be others who are fully devoted to the opposite: a diverse and welcoming state of which Leicester appears an imperfect harbinger.

It’s important to note that a fair reading of the Bible cannot help to highlight the theme of welcoming foreigners, perhaps particularly those who are not able to contribute financially. The Israelite faith of the Old Testament specifically commands farmers to leave a border of crop unharvested for such struggling migrants.

One of the most beloved stories of the Jewish scriptures is that of Ruth, an Edomite woman who comes destitute to Israel and finds provision in the righteous life of Boaz, who has left such a border of crop for her to glean. Eventually they marry, and their offspring is blessed by God: including King David and Jesus Christ. I do believe that welcoming foreigners, and particularly those who have been affected by poverty or war is just. Any form of Christianity which puts nation before those different to us or those who suffer is a false one.

But, just as I believe that man in the pub is wrong for putting his hope in the tightening of borders, anybody who puts their hope in any philosophy or system a flag can represent is mistaken. Liberal policies towards immigration and open hearts towards those who must seek asylum or refuge will always fail and fade. Neither England represented by the city and county of Leicester can or will last a millennia, let alone an eternity. Neither can guarantee a better future for our descendants.

Jesus spoke of a Kingdom without flags, without an army, and without borders. One in which all tribes and tongues will be welcomed as the foreigners we are to the Holy God. One which is already recreating the Earth to be a place without death, enmity, and suffering and one day will bring this work to fulfilment. This Kingdom of God is the only political entity in which hope can be securely placed because it keeps its promises and never passes away. Our political parties, national identities, and nation states may be more or less like the Kingdom of God but they are never secure foundations for our future.

If I were braver, I might have broached this reality with the man at the bar. I might have suggested he makes an error in placing hope for the future generations of his family in a particular understanding of the national flag. I could have invited him to see the truer potential for hope in a Kingdom which is not directly seen but nevertheless is more real and secure, and discussed with him about what that means for our temporal reality. And challenged him to see past the flag to a Kingdom which will provide for his granddaughter without measure.

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