Welcome to the home of The Voice Festival UK

10.05.09 - Report from Out of the Blue following their trip to ICCA's

It was less than two weeks after the voice festival final that Scott, our business manager and tour organiser, got a call from Amanda Grish, the executive director of the ICCAs (International Championships of Collegiate A cappella). Despite the fact that the voice festival had decided to go its own way this year and split off from the US-based competition, Amanda, having spoken to Simon and Alex, still wanted us to fly over to New York and compete in the world finals as the UK representatives. It didn’t take much discussion. Everyone was dead set on the idea.

Fortunately, the date of the final happened to be when we were touring the East Coast of the USA anyway, so Scott worked some administrative magic and within four weeks we were flying over to America with another gig on our itinerary, one that made all of the others look as small as the island we’d just left.

Pretty soon it occurred to us that we needed to do some serious practice for the finals. Some of us had been the year before and the standard of the groups competing there was quite frankly staggering. America has such an outstanding a cappella tradition. Every university has an a cappella group, and there are over 15, 000 registered with Varsity Vocals, the organisation behind the ICCAs. Of those 15, 000 we were going to be up against the top five. And to make us even more nervous, as well as having to make a huge jump in quality, we were also going to be missing a member: unfortunately, Nick Pritchard, one of our Tenor 1s, was unable to make the whole of tour and missed out on the final. This involved re-choreographing songs, and a bit of part switching in our slow number, Cold Water; just enough change, in short, to make us a little uncomfortable. Needless to say, competing wasn’t really our aim. We saw it as a great opportunity to perform to a crowd of thousands in a world-class venue, and above all a chance to hear some truly great a cappella.

As if this wasn’t enough excitement, Scott received a call whilst we were on the road  which came, if you’ll excuse the pun, completely Out of the Blue…

It was MTV, saying that they were filming the finals as part of a pilot for a planned series on a cappella due to run in November, and they wanted to film us when we got to New York. A bit more schedule-shuffling was done and we ended up in a very arty sky-scraper complete with surfer bar and queues of black-clad thesps waiting to audition for a musical.

The interview itself was… interesting. We rehearsed for the cameras, introduced ourselves in a variety of ways, and then performed parts of our set for them to film. It afforded us some valuable practice time, but it was evident that they weren’t too interested in portraying us as we were. Even in one to one interviews, every question asked was angled to make us TV-worthy: “Is Ed a good MD?”, “I imagine there’s a lot of conflict in the group…”, “Who do you think disagrees with the song choices?”. Nevertheless, it was a great opportunity, and a very exciting process: if nothing else, it made us even more eager to get to the Alice Tully Hall and see the other groups perform.

The day of the performance was hectic. We’d been in Washington, and had a gig at a school booked in the morning. We literally ran off stage, into the cars, and drove straight back to New York, arriving and hour and a half late for our sound check, pumped with nerves, stress, and rather too much water (to keep our voices in good shape).

Compared to the previous year, our sound-check was a joy. The technician knew what he was doing, we’d prepared in advance who’d be holding personal mics, and sorting out basic levels didn’t count towards our 10 minutes of time. Once that was over with we got some food and waited for the show to start.

First up was the ICHSA, the high-schools competition. There were four groups and each one of them could have given some of the collegiate groups we’d encountered a run for their money. I know that I would have given an arm and a leg to have the chance to sing in such fine groups as a sixteen year-old in England.

As we were performing first in the second half, we came back stage early to prepare ourselves. Everyone was amazingly relaxed, and happy. We decided on wearing no shoes, a kind of tradition in Out of the Blue (originally to stop stamping noise on stage, but latterly because we like socks), which, as always, revealed mismatched and multicoloured socks from all of the usual culprits. Somehow, and this time we’ve REALLY no idea, the organising machine that is Scott Riseborough managed to produce two pairs of clean black socks in time for us to quietly wander downstairs and await our appearance on stage. It was tense, and very exciting.

And before we knew it we were off stage with an MTV camera in our face asking how it went. It was all vague impressions: a massive crowd, huge cheers, and 12 grinning students. One of the best days of our lives. It didn’t matter what the results were; we’d had a great time and done ourselves proud.

We sat back and watched the rest of the show, particular highlights of which were the Duke’s Men, who delivered highly polished performances of incredibly difficult and intricate arrangements, and Fermata Nowhere, who dominated the stage physically and entertained the audience like no other group of performers we had ever seen. If you don’t know how to ‘thunderclap’, I suggest you learn. It looks amazing.

The results were handed over to an MTV host. First came the ‘extra prize’ awards. To be honest, we weren’t expecting to get anything all night, so it came as a real shock when we heard “and for best arrangement… Out of the Blue for Cold Water!!”. Cue much leaping about a ruffling of hair. As far as we were concerned, we’d just got first
place… but those announcements were still to come.

The host’s manner of announcing them was, in the eyes of some of us, peculiar. She called 4 groups forward: “The Beartones… The Duke’s Men… Fermata Nowhere… Out of the Blue”. We shuffled forward, unsure of what it meant. In a very strange five seconds the remaining groups were told to leave the stage and we were informed that we were in the top four. Again, it was like we’d won; to get so far in such a tough competition was achievement enough.

“In fourth place… The Duke’s men of Yale”. This was getting ridiculous. I’m afraid to say that we weren’t very good at helping the MTV host keep up the suspense. We were having a whale of a time on stage, applauding everyone and grinning inanely.

“In third place… The Beartones”. So we’re 2nd?? Good God. We could never have hoped for that. We were ecstatic. Unsurprisingly, the winner was… “Fermata Nowhere”. We hugged them all for their well earned victory and skipped off stage to consider what had just happened.  We’d seen and heard some amazing performances, and come back from it all with more than we ever expected.

The best feeling was knowing that we could come back to Oxford with our heads held high, knowing that we’d done the UK justice. We’d tangibly shown that British a cappella is on a par with the states. What is it they say? Quality over Quantity? Our voice festival could show them a thing or two.

By: Ed Thomson Jones

© The Voice Festival UK 2010