Singers from Renfrewshire are on royal jolly to London for the Coronation of King Charles III – and they’re set to sing for him as part of a 300-strong band of community choirs.
Ferguslie Park Community Choir are participating in the Coronation Concert taking place at Windsor Castle on Sunday, May 7, after an article in the Paisley Daily Express brought them to the attention of organisers.
The concert is being produced by BBC Studios whose own researchers stumbled on the Paisley Daily Express's coverage of the Tannahill Centre-based choir last year.
The choir were then invited for interviews to assess their suitability for the event and to begin filming for a documentary called Sing for the King, which will air on BBC One tonight at 8pm.
There are 14 singers participating, who have been zooming up and down to the English capital in preparation for the biggest concert of their lives.
Last week, they were joined in Windsor by choirmaster Gareth Malone and around 300 other members from community choirs across the UK who they will sing alongside at the special occasion.
They also met their celebrity mentors Amanda Holden, Motsi Mabuse and Rose Ayling-Ellis. The Ferguslie Park Community Choir volunteers travelled back down to London for the last rehearsals before the big event, with all costs covered by the BBC.
Speaking to the Paisley Daily Express from the car as they travelled down to London was Bobbie McCabe, volunteer coordinator at the Tannahill Centre.
She told us the choir group was “hugely excited” ahead of their moment in the limelight.
Bobbie said: “It was so exciting to meet all the other choirs. We’re a choir of 300 altogether gathered from across the four nations. There are only two choirs from Scotland, so it’s pretty special that we’ve been involved with this. It’s very, very exciting.
“We sang last week in St George’s Chapel in Windsor, which was very exciting – and we met Gareth Malone, who’s creating the documentary all about choirs and he’s the one who’s been leading us.”
The choir was only formed in 2018 and Bobbie says their invite “kind of came out of the blue”; citing the Paisley Daily Express's role in bringing their exploits to the attention of the BBC.
After being contacted by the BBC’s researcher, Bobbie explained that there was a “nail-biting” process to find out whether they would be selected or not.
“We had to do Zoom interviews, send video footage of us singing, then meet the researcher, and then the BBC came and filmed us two weeks ago in the Tannahill Centre, and we did a rehearsal and they interviewed members of the choir, and then we found out that we’d been selected, we were delighted,” she added.
The world’s eyes will be on the event and Ferguslie Park Community Choir will do their best to represent for the Buddies with their performance of Emeli Sandé’s ‘Brighter Days’ – part of which they will also use British Sign Language to make the performance more accessible.
“We’re performing in front of a crowd of around 20,000 and there’s a projected TV audience of about two billion people for the event,” she said.
“For a wee community choir like us, just wow. What we normally do is so small in comparison.
The Ferguslie Park Community Choir meets every Monday lunchtime at the Tannahill Centre on Blackstoun Road. Anybody is welcome to join in.
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