How Brisbane’s Pub Choir became a global phenomenon led by choral colossus Astrid Jorgensen
Led by an introverted choirmaster who shapeshifts into a charismatic conjurer of raw human emotion, this beery singing series has thrilled everyone from Kate Bush to Paul Kelly.
In a converted garden shed in Brisbane’s inner north, a reserved woman has been taking a metaphoric scalpel to an ABBA song with a forensic attention to detail that might shock even the Swedish pop quartet.
The name of this self-described nerd is Astrid Jorgensen, and with her chihuahua-cross Penny resting near her bare feet, she has spent the past few weeks in this cosy, light-filled space in her backyard, obsessing over The Winner Takes It All, a 1980 single from ABBA’s seventh album Super Trouper.
“I’ve had a month since the last show, so I have just been thinking about this song for a month, which is not healthy,” she tells Review. “I’m basically cursed by songs; this is the room where a deep magic takes over me, and I think about the song all of the time. It’s like an infection.”
Her unique musical brain allows her to dissect the five-minute pop ballad down to its bare bones, then reassemble it with an unusual selection of constituent parts that will ultimately include acoustic guitar, synthesiser, flugelhorn and voice.
But not just any voice – about 2500 of them, singing an arrangement by Jorgensen that will exist in a single room for about two hours, then flutter away into the night, leaving only memories for those who were there, and a well-produced YouTube video for everyone else.
At 32, Jorgensen has created for herself one of the strangest and most rewarding jobs in the Australian music industry. As founding director of Pub Choir, she is tasked with teaching a willing crowd of adults to sing a popular song in three-part harmony over a few quiet beers. Anyone can sign up to sing in a Pub Choir performance; all you need is a willingness to listen and follow instructions to learn the part on the day (there’s a strict “no dickheads allowed” policy).
“In every city, the audience has a different energy, but the concept is universal, I like to think: people like making stuff together, and they just need to be told that they’re OK, if they’re really shit,” she says with a laugh. “It’s so fine if you’re not the best; it’s impossible to be the best at singing, so it’s OK.”
When Review first covered Pub Choir five years ago, it was a grassroots community event confined to Brisbane – but one that had the potential for explosive global growth thanks to the virality of its performance videos of happily beer-swilling crowds, posted online shortly after each singalong.
Thanks to the power of the internet and word of mouth, Pub Choir grew in its first 12 months from debuting in a West End dive bar – where about 70 people sang Dave Dobbyn’s Slice of Heaven – to a sold-out first birthday gig, where 800 voices sang Powderfinger’s My Happiness at The Triffid, with the band’s bassist (and venue co-owner) John Collins joining in on acoustic guitar.
Those two markers in that first year are telling: with her co-founders Meg Bartholomew and Waveney Yasso, Jorgensen built a tribe of enthusiastic singers from scratch, and took them from a group of outsiders paying tribute to a great Kiwi pop song, to performing alongside one of the musicians from Australia’s most popular rock bands.
Jorgensen has stayed the course, while proving to herself and everyone else that the three friends struck upon a sturdy, remarkable concept when they cooked up the idea on a picnic blanket in an empty apartment in 2017. “For people who come along for the first time, I think it’s almost like magic to them: how could it work?” she says.
As the sole remaining co-founder working on the project, she has steered the good ship Pub Choir through a pandemic, wherein singing with strangers could result in serious illness or death. The business setbacks caused by Covid’s spread were significant, as they were for all performing artists worldwide.
Jorgensen and her small crew were in the US in March 2020 – having done one show in Los Angeles and on their way to SXSW in Austin, Texas – when they realised their planned American debut was toast. They refunded about 20,000 tickets for the tour in 24 hours, and flew home before the Australian border slammed shut.
A smart pivot into an online “Couch Choir”, where people from around the world sent in videos of themselves singing at home – which later morphed into Australia’s Biggest Singalong, broadcast live on SBS TV in June 2021 – kept the concept afloat, in a tangential way, until crowds could safely gather again.
But getting people in a room and coaching them to sing beautifully together is the true essence of Pub Choir, and it wasn’t until July last year that Jorgensen began to see the light again, after years of darkness.
“I actually got really stressed last year; I thought maybe it was over,” she says, noting a dramatic slump in ticket sales as a hangover from Covid lockdowns. As she tells it, though, Kate Bush was the spark that helped relight the flame.
In one of the strangest stories of 2022, the British pop artist’s 1985 single Running Up That Hill became a renewed chart sensation and pop cultural phenomenon, after it was used as a crucial narrative device in the Netflix series Stranger Things.
To the surprise of everyone, Bush swiftly approved the Pub Choir team’s request to cover her song – a necessary part of the process, in order to license the song for public performance and later video upload – and Jorgensen used that momentum to advertise her song selection in advance.
Usually this is kept a secret, as in Jorgensen’s mind, it’s less about the song than the experience – but in that case, the unbridled popularity of Running Up That Hill helped lure Covid-concerned audiences back into the room, to sing as one again.
The note Bush sent back after watching the footage of the Brisbane crowd’s performance went to No.1 with a bullet on Jorgensen’s list of all-time favourite emails: “It’s utterly, utterly wonderful!” wrote Bush. “I love it so much! Thank you everyone. You sing it really beautifully. I’m incredibly touched by your warmth and all your smiling faces. Thank you! With lots of love, Kate.”
Bush is far from the only artist to respond with kindness after bearing witness to Pub Choir in the room where it happens.
Closer to home, a raft of well-known Australian singer-songwriters have made appearances over the years, including Chris Cheney (The Living End), Meg Mac, Ben Lee and Tim Freedman (The Whitlams). Inevitably, they are deeply moved by what they see, and one of Jorgensen’s favourite things is watching the moment of recognition pass across their faces, where they realise: this is no ordinary gig.
“It’s almost like lifting the cloche on MasterChef, where they show you the meal, finally,” she says. “I like that reveal to the artists themselves. It’s so cool to think that you could gift that to someone who wrote the song; they know it better than anyone, so the idea that you can find something new in the experience for them is unbelievable.”
At Review’s request, Jorgensen pulls up and reads aloud another favourite email, which Paul Kelly sent soon after a performance of his song Leaps and Bounds in January 2020.
“I’m catching my breath today after various adventures since I saw you,” Kelly wrote to her. “I wanted to say a big thank you for a great experience on Wednesday. Watching you work was a revelation and a joy. It was such a lift, singing with all those voices. … I hope you’re happy with how the song sounds and looks.”
At this, Jorgensen looks up from her screen and says incredulously: “He hopes I’m happy with how his song sounds and looks!”
Kelly’s final words of kindness were these: “It seems ages ago already; a strange and wonderful dream. I look forward to seeing them come into the world soon.”
All told, the choirmaster has led crowds through something like 110 songs since 2017. For the upcoming performance of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All, Jorgensen has gone unusually deep with her preparations.
“I try not to look up other people’s versions of stuff,” she says while sitting at her keyboard. “I just try to listen to the original, to try and tease out the details. But I was curious about this song, because I’m like, ‘Maybe this has been overdone.’ I looked online, and there’s no good versions of this. There’s a lot of covers, but they’re exactly as the original.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever done this, but I’ve decided to change the mood of this piece a little bit,” she says. “If you weren’t listening to the lyrics, you’d think it was a really happy song: it’s got a really happy drumbeat, and there’s a little jangly acoustic guitar the whole time, so I thought I would make it sadder.”
This time, rather than a re-creation with a lot of singers, she’s doing something akin to a cover of ABBA’s song. As well as her own keyboard playing and her usual accompaniment, which features a rotating cast of Brisbane-based female guitarists, Jorgensen has also lined up some special guests to play synthesiser and flugelhorn on the night, which is why she’s gone to the trouble of writing a full score, complete with all the vocal parts.
It’s a complex piece with new textures, and she’s not entirely comfortable with it just yet – but there’s a tantalising sense that, if all the pieces fall into place, it could become one of her greatest achievements. “Plus the soundscape of synth, acoustic guitar, flugelhorn and 2000-odd voices – that’s a new soundscape!” she says with a laugh. “No one’s ever done that before!”
“I love arranging for other instruments, especially strings, and it feels like a really awesome outlet for me,” she says. “But I think if I do it too much, it kind of detracts a little bit from the audience being the main feature. If I put too much stuff on top of them, they’re like, ‘Oh, so we weren’t good enough, were we?’,” mimicking a miffed punter.
“It’s all about choosing the right instrument at the right time, and not drowning out the audience,” she says. “I really want them to walk away being like, ‘I’m amazing! I’m a musician!’”
Somewhere between the shed and the stage, a transformation takes place within Jorgensen’s very cells. The reserved former music teacher becomes a choral colossus, burning calories at will as she bolts across the stage while alternately teaching, singing, cajoling, swearing and otherwise charming anyone in earshot.
“My stage self and my own self are quite different,” she says. “In my life, I’m definitely an introvert. It’s like something just switches in my brain; I don’t choose it. It’s a true part of me on stage, this outlandish, mean (person) lovingly bullying the audience. Offstage, I’m really quiet. I’m a massive nerd. I won’t talk to anyone for a week, and I’m so fine.”
“I think people want to know that I’m taking them seriously, but I’m not taking the quality of their singing seriously,” she says. “I’m taking them as a human person seriously, but it’s not about the notes that they make – it’s about the energy they’re bringing to the show.”
At 7pm on a Wednesday in late March – the week after Review met her in the garden shed, with Penny the chihuahua patiently listening to her owner singing yet another timeless Swedish melody – the heightened, magnified version of Astrid Jorgensen walks out on stage before about 2500 people at The Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane.
By now, her introductory patter is a well-oiled machine, as she skilfully separates the room into three sections according to their vocal range: high ladies, low ladies and men, although she points out that the gender names are a guide only. To address the men, she speaks into a pitch-shifted microphone that makes her voice sound deeper, in the guise of a masculine character she dubs “Titus”.
In front of stage left, a small but enthusiastic group of deaf or hearing-impaired singers gathers at the feet of Auslan interpreter Madison Rossetto, to perform in their own way, using sign language.
Having not seen Pub Choir in the flesh since that night at The Triffid five years ago, when Powderfinger’s My Happiness was sung to the rafters, it is a pure joy to witness again. Business is booming, too, judging by a bulging calendar here and abroad: a 15-date national tour runs from June to August, followed by a US and Britain jaunt in August and September.
Wearing purple boots and a white dress with an ace of spades design on the front – a direct reference to one of the ABBA song lyrics – Jorgensen is nothing less than an adept conjurer and conduit for human connectivity.
At the start, she sounds a note of caution that this might be the most challenging arrangement she’s done. “I’ve saved the hard song for Brisbane, because I believe in you,” she says. “Don’t talk about it – let’s do it!”
The first half-hour sees her working hard to reinforce the foundations, with the men and low ladies learning interlocking harmonies, as the high ladies – positioned at the balcony – take the soaring chorus. “It feels exciting, like we’re on the cusp of glory here,” says Jorgensen before an intermission for bar and bathroom visits.
Through sheer force of will, skill and personality, she creates a living, breathing force that fills a room with joy for two hours. Once the high ladies give their first full rendition of their part, the crowd erupts with impressed cheers. Sensing the momentum, Jorgensen pushes them on, riding every note and melodic line like a jockey on a winner.
What she does on stage is something akin to giving birth to a brand new organism; a social creature, rooted in sound, that only exists for two hours, then disappears.
As I watch her whip this crowd of strangers into creating something of extraordinary beauty, something she said last week in her garden shed rings in my ears.
Reflecting on the idea’s six-year journey so far, Jorgensen said, “My understanding of myself has changed a lot. I think it’s taken me a while to feel comfortable saying I think Pub Choir is where it is, in a large part, because I’m really good at my job.”
“I think for a while there, it was, ‘It’s all of us together!’ But actually, I have something exciting and special to share, in this one lane. I was worried it was selfish, for a while, because it had succeeded. I felt nervous to be like, ‘I did that’ – but I did.”
During the first half of the show, as the three audience segments learn their parts one-by-one, an older man with grey hair has been looking down on proceedings from a backstage vantage point. In the halftime break, Review learns his name is John Hoffman, a highly esteemed flugelhorn player born in the US who has called Byron Bay home since 1990.
It is Hoffman for whom Jorgensen was sweating enough to write out the entire score, and for good reason: this unassuming musician has played trumpet and flugelhorn with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Glenn Miller. This is a man who has shared air with jazz greats from another era – yet it is he who is effusive in his praise tonight.
“Watching Astrid conduct and rehearse, there’s nobody like her in the world,” Hoffman tells Review. “You know, I’m nearly dead; I’ve been around a bit. But what a special, special woman. I’m just so impressed. ‘Impressed’ is a bullshit word; I am so honoured to be here, and be part of her beautiful creativity.
“I have to drive back to Byron Bay when this is over, and I’m going to be awake for hours and hours when I get home, just thinking about it,” he says. “There’s just so much beautiful creative energy out there, and people are just loving it. I’ve never seen anything like it, honestly. I’m going to be smiling for days.”
Just before the crowd’s final performance of The Winner Take It All – the one that will later be uploaded online – Hoffman takes the stage to a hero’s welcome, having had his tyres suitably pumped by Jorgensen. As well, guitarist Dana Gehrman and synthesiser player Seja Vogel add their textures to this one-off version of ABBA’s song.
When it all locks into place and the harmonies and melody combine, the sense of euphoria that grips the room is all but tangible. Jorgensen basks in the glory of applause and cheers for a while, and her final words into the microphone are these: “My name’s Astrid. Have the best night!”
It’s a curious sign-off from the choirmaster, one that is no doubt improvised, like all of the motormouthed banter that’s emerged in the preceding two hours.
Judging by the smiles, laughter and perhaps the hint of a post-choral glow discernible in the crowd on the way out the door, everyone here has already had the best night. They are amazing. They are musicians.
Pub Choir’s 15-date national tour begins in Brisbane (June 28) and ends in Perth (August 9). For tickets, visit pubchoir.com.au
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