#men singing

John's Boys Full Semi Final | Performance Britain's Got Talent 2023 Semi...

If you could somehow incorporate male A Capella group performances into your business I can assure you that I'd spend all my extra money there. For reals. Sexy men, sexy voices, sexy choreography. Who wouldn't that please?

Consider it.

Sincerely,

Tenor trio Forte. they are awesome!! MUST LISTEN!!!!

The boy Billy, in the garden on Anerley Vale My parents were all about opera. At our house, drumbeats were verboten - and anyone so craven as to lean on a microphone for their amplification was dismissed as ‘a bloody crooner’. The nearest letterbox was a mile up the lane. So I could have walked a mile towards humanity, and maybe sent a postcard the rest of the way. My thing, then, became motorbikes, not music - because motorbikes were the thing that helped you get away. A motorbike is essential equipment for hunting down those elusive drumbeats and microphones. For getting hold of everything forbidden. It’s a would-be outlaw’s elephant gun. Time rumbles on, and now I’m a parent and an orphan, I can have whatever noisy noise might take my fancy, when and where I want it. But whatever shape the performance might take: the mop-top puppet, embalmed in YouTube like a fly in amber; or the fleshly god, dominating an audience like a dictator’s bronze; for me, it all ends up with the same thing. Inevitably, at some point within the coming hours I’ll find myself shedding at least one tear for my dear old dead dad. My dad, as a lad, elevated congregations and audiences all around London - North, South and central - buoying them until they were stranded overhead, clinging to the rafters, carried up there on his 'Wings of a Dove' and abandoned, beatific. And I remember helping my dad, the dear old nearly-dead dying dad, as he wrestled in frustration with the opacity of digital technology, gathering the troops in a last attempt to record his voice, so that it, at least, might be left behind to maintain his claim on at least some small corner of the world of the living. That memory is - even now - almost as painful as the actual losing of him. For in the end his failing kidneys beat him to the finishing line, and he lost his marbles long before he'd managed to make his final mark. But right to the end, he kept his voice. His old Grundig reel-to-reel had long gone the way of all damp aluminium; fluffing into snow, turning molecular, and floating off in fragments blown up and away by the scything stillness of ordinary everyday attic air. The braided insulation on the copper wiring had mummified under its coat of fur. The rank of ivory-smooth buttons had set solid, their hidden doings rooted, like willow twigs left too long in the ground. Every working part was overwhelmed by the mysterious glue of mating-face corrosion. Its smell, though, was largely unchanged, and forever this will be a scent that takes me back to places I'm not altogether sure I want to go, if only because I'd be tempted to stay there, slowly starving. It’s the heady, resinous musk of winding insulation, ripened by the old heat of valves. It speaks of so much more than mere technology. It holds whole universes of layered meaning. I've kept that great dead weight, heavy and bulky and useless and worthless though it is, and every so often I succumb to its glare, burying my sorry sad nose right under its lid, digging in the aluminium snow, and breathing in that special drug. I still have all his tapes, too, and I'm pretty sure that on at least some of them I'll one day find him still within reach, his light tenor tone lighter still in its youth, but always resonant, and with a firm restraint on its fruity vibrato that conjured up everything that was fine about his generation of men. They hauled the coal, split the logs, and built the kitchen dresser, and the beds, and the verandah and the patio and the greenhouse; and they could kick the living shit out of you if they had to, but they chose not to because it was more to the point to be growing or mowing or making something. And when they sang, all that power and solidity and immoveability was put towards the song. All their gentleness was reserved for it, too. That sort of thing speaks to a two-hundred year old girl like me. But I won't try to hear those recordings yet, even now. I couldn't stand it. Real men. Real singing. That's what I mean. Calloused, useful hands lying idle near half-empty pints as their owners strike up an impromptu chorus of something scandalous. Then you'll see their eyes shine. Because it's only when a man sings from the heart that he lets his beauty out. A surly suit of armour can stay firmly in place even while you're singing, if you do it in the right way. But if a man is beautiful inside, armour or no, he can't keep his eyes from showing it while he sings. The lips part, the sound emerges, and something happens to the eyes. Like the morning sun emerging from behind a hill, great shafts of beauty radiating out and making everyone feel that everything - everything - is so much more than alright. It can be a siren call in the wrong hands. And so it can be corrupted. Put to the service of mammon. Modern commercial pop has reduced the market’s idea of men singing to little more than an insidious alarum to the partial portion of the population, telling them it's time to queue up and ready themselves for mating. Which they are, of course, very keen to do. For all their waxed monobrows and shiny pitch-pine tans, so many of the men doing this streetwalker singing are very far from beautiful. The lamps that shine from their sockets are semaphoring crazily "Make me rich. Love me more. Fill me up with your emptiness. Make me more fabulous than I already dream I am". When they strike up, it's the tightening of a carefully calibrated ratchet. They serve only to parade their own capacity to pimp themselves. They’ll sing insincerely, and they’ll sing only so long as there's a shekel on the table and a job of seduction required to win it. There's no beauty of any kind in those sorts of men. Their hands are soft. All the callouses are inside them. Born in 1927, my dad grew up during the depression. His father sang, and his father before him. Living three generations in the same house, they worked whenever they could get a week from the gaffer, and they'd sing to an upturned hat in the pubs of an evening when work was thin on the ground. When the bailiffs got really close, like the week when they tried to sell their mouldering piano on the pavement at the front of their terrace, dad's granddad would spend his last pennies on a ticket so he could travel round town all day, busking, cap in hand, on the open top of a double-decker bus. ‘Knees up Mother Brown’, ‘My Old Man’, ‘Danny Boy’, and all the rest: my old man knew all the words to the music hall standards, tragic and comic, start to finish - because when he was a little lad they'd paid a fair whack of the household bills. But my father would, with his breath control and soul, take it further. For my old dad, slum boy of Penge, loved the opera. Starting work as a warehouse boy at the age of thirteen, his voice broke from angelic choral soprano to a very respectable lyric tenor. He studied music in the evenings after work, cycling up to the Guildhall School in the City, and feeling his way back across the river, and through the miles home under the sparse, feeble South-of-the-river street lamps, bumping over the setts. It all paid off: he'd go on to join the Sadler's Wells Company, working alongside the baritone son of his "tenore di grazia" idol, Heddle Nash - and he'd also meet my mum in the chorus. Result. Topping it all, he managed to go halves on an Austin A35 with his mate Johnny Tripp. The glamour of all this was almost unbearable, especially seen from that rowdy terrace on Anerley Vale. Heddle Nash was a man with honourably calloused hands, and a man who could sing. Son of a builder, Deptford born, he grew up in a Victorian fog-drenched dockside borough that's hard as nails even today. But Nash, another South London boy chorister like my dad, grew up to be one of the most celebrated lyric tenors of the last century. His conservatoire scholarship was postponed so he could fight in the First World War, and once trained, with the flinty pragmatism of a chap of his background, he started his professional life on a weekly wage, as a hidden voice wafting up from the pits of an Italian puppet theatre. And he still finished up travelling the opera houses of Europe as a star in his pomp. So on the 1950s night my dad found himself giving that very same international superstar a lift home from rehearsals, making wantonly free with Johnny Tripp’s half of the A35, you might understand how his life was in some sense complete - even though it still had considerable decades left to run. Dad had collected so many records that most of them ended up stored under the workshop bench. Like a termite city, the piles of 78s grew and slowly twisted to the vibration of his saw, the sawdust always sprinkling down, coating the strays, and eating into them every time the pile was tidied straight. Then one day he took the whole lot to the tip, and that was the end of any Heddle Nash we might have found in our house. And my dad never would become a star, as the quality of his voice and his dedication might have demanded. So: his nerve failed, and his dedication to music joined those black shards in the skip. But this wasn't cowardice. Maybe it was a childhood spent with the toes cut out of his shoes. Sitting on the front step of a corner pub while his grandmother spent the day swilling gin inside. Maybe it was the wartime bomb that left the adolescent trapped under an upturned office desk for two days, not knowing if the world had ended above his head. Or it could have been Indian partition, and the nineteen-year old National Serviceman’s horror as he watched Muslim and Hindu take machetes to their brothers’ heads.

But maybe it was just the simple, honourable urge to provide a secure home and a life for the family he loved. And maybe this last, at the end of it, is why I find a man's song so incredibly moving. Because when a certain sort of man opens his mouth to sing with any kind of commitment, he's taking his dignity and his family’s wellbeing in his hands. He actually means it. Whatever my father's reasons, though, he was simply too afraid to let go of a regular wage. He clung to that security throughout his life, and as his career got bigger and more consuming, he ultimately abandoned music altogether - until retirement finally led him back to the misericord, and a rediscovery of all he had once loved as a boy. And then one day not long after that, it was all just too late. To hear something like a ghost of my father, you'll find a handful of fine Heddle Nash recordings on the web. Born in 1894, he died in 1961, but it seems that the fresh timbre and agility of this Deptford brickie's voice, somehow rendered spectral in those uploads, have been granted some kind of electric immortality - or a reprieve, at least, until the power runs out and we start to take our turnips raw. In any of these videos, you'll notice the tight control Nash held over his expansive voice. That's a man singing: a powerful instrument kept on a choke-chain, and rarely - cataclysmically - snapped off the leash.