School of Hard Knocks

What is School of Hard Knocks? Have you ever heard of them? Well, it seems, a lot of people had. On October 7 2016, the School of Hard Knocks was advertised as participating in a “Hope and Inspiration Tour” at QPAC. I missed it - I'd read about it about two days too late. It had been the 10^th anniversary celebration for SOHK from Melbourne, but I found out that the Brisbane SOHK choir existed – and had been around for 3 years. This choir grabbed my interest, and I contacted them through email – and was asked to join... so I did!

From October last year I've been as busy as anyone else in the choir, and I love it! We meet at Common Ground on Hope St in South Bank for practice every Friday during normal school terms. We had a lot of practice for external trips where we would perform.

My first trip with the choir was to the State Library for a performance with the SLQ “10 years - Library of the future”, which celebrated on 12 November 2016. Our next performance was on 14 November at Moreton Bay College, which was all-girl. We had two shows: first up, Absolutely Everybody choir followed by the Rhythm of Life, which was a “Music Theatre [which] include movement, acting and singing” - also from SOHK. On 9 December we performed for the Qld Mental Health Commission, and our final 2016 performance was on 16 December at the SLQ theatre The Edge for our christmas concert.

That was when I found out about Streetbeat, a percussion group which uses “buckets, bowls, cups and anything else we can find, we’ll have plenty of instruments for all attending”. I was drawn in by the cup song “When I'm Gone” from the movie Pitch Perfect. I joined that too – practice at South Bank every Wednesday morning. This year we started with a Streetbeat performance in Redcliffe on 17 March at the Encircle community place in Lamington Drive. Our team played for supporters, and we even gave them some lessons. Very recently we played a percussion drum beat on our buckets for one of my favourites, the Queen song “We Will Rock You”!

The SOHK choir's first performance this year was one I missed because the floods hit Beenleigh and took out the Beenleigh train station! That was a private concert for families and supporters at Common Ground at the end of term 1. Our next was at Stamford Plaza Hotel in CBD, a riverside stage from where we performed for the Baptist evening.

On the recent Thursday evening we went down to the Gold Coast to the  CEO night-over at the Cbus Super Stadium at Robina. We had a rugby player's room to wait in... it was damned cold outside of there! We went into the open hall area and had some sound streaming before we could go and get some soup and bread for dinner and wait in our area. We did three numbers that evening, including audience involvement with the John Farnham song “You're the voice”. 

Yesterday we had an end-of-term get together. It was a special event for all choir people and some from the Rhythm of Life and we ended up doing a flashmob at the SLQ for a lot of their clients! We were told that the words were written by Melissa Gill, our director – I've printed them here (and my apologies if I got that wrong... but I don't think I did)! There's a post from the State Library on their Facebook page along with a video of the mob – they loved it! We finished there with “You're the Voice” - yes, John Farnham's wonderful song.

This year we're practicing for the “You’re The Voice” choral event which will be held at Piazza in South Bank on 29 July 2017, with 2,500 other choir people also joining in. Have a look at the Queensland Music Festival page, read about why it's being done, and come along and watch us all on 29 July! I've also included links to our own QMF advertisement - where I speak in it! - and the QMF pdf page which was a media publication telling about the whole events between 7-30 July. Printed it out and pass it on to your family, friends, business, community!

This choir is a busy, lovely, great group to belong to, and I feel so much at home. If we advertise anything we are publicly performing, I invite you all – and your family and friends – to come and see us. If you have just a little bit of money available, visit the SOHK website and donate.

Support us – and we'll love you!!