An article about Australia’s Biggest Singalong, featuring Mark Seymour.

Author:  Bridget McManus, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Date: 22 May 2021.

Original URL: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/julia-zemiro-wants-you-to-sing-with-her-20210514-p57rwv.html

Article Text

Need a hit of euphoria? Julia Zemiro has just the ticket

Australia’s Biggest Singalong!
Live broadcast, Saturday, June 5, 8.30pm, SBS

Think you can’t sing? Julia Zemiro has news for you – you absolutely can. It doesn’t matter if the sound you emit resembles Mumble the Penguin’s heart song from Happy Feet. When you’re belting out Hunters & Collectors’ iconic ballad Throw Your Arms Around Me, along with frontman Mark Seymour and the rest of the nation, she promises you’ll experience the euphoria that comes from singing with others.

Julia Zemiro hosts Australia’s Biggest Singalong! alongside Miranda Tapsell.

“If someone told you somewhere along the way that you can’t sing, that is one of the cruellest things you can say to someone. Because when you sing together, something happens. It’s an extraordinary experience,” says Zemiro, who is hosting, along with Miranda Tapsell, the inaugural Australia’s Biggest Singalong!, broadcast live on SBS from the Sydney Town Hall next Saturday.

The brainchild of conductor Astrid Jorgensen, who founded Pub Choir in Brisbane in 2017, an event at which non-trained singers learn a three-part harmony to a popular song, Australia’s Biggest Singalong! is an open invitation to join in the chorus from the comfort of your couch. (You can also submit videos of your own ensemble singing Throw Your Arms Around Me to sbs.com.au/singalong.)

Zemiro has been a fan of Jorgensen’s since she booked Pub Choir for the 2019 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, as its then artistic director.

“The beauty of what Astrid does is, she divides up the room, and she’ll say: ‘Pick your parts’. She does it very cleverly. I won’t tell you how she does it, but the way she sorts people into the altos and sopranos, the men, the women, the bigger voices, is fantastic.”

Having trained as an actor before she fell into television presenting, on RocKwiz, Eurovision and Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery — through which she got to know Tapsell in the latter’s home town of Darwin — Zemiro knows how to use her voice. She was once a member of the Solidarity Choir in Sydney, singing foreign language protest songs. And she relished a storyline in Kitty Flanagan’s ABC sitcom, Fisk, in which her character, tightly laced lawyer Roz, joined a “secret singing group”.

“Fisk has opened up a whole can of worms for me with singing,” she laughs. “I love choir singing. I love singing with people. I miss the live music of Eurovision. I like being in touch with music in that way at a big event. And knowing that so many people who love singing in choirs were shut down for a year and couldn’t get together, they are big parts of our community.”

The broadcast will include interviews with people from groups such as the children’s Gondwana Choir; the Burundi Peace Choir founded in WA by African refugees; the Song to Soul women’s choir in Perth lead by Yothu Yindi touring vocalist, Natalie Gillespie; and the University of Melbourne’s Dementia Centre Singalong.

Myf Warhurst will once again present the Eurovision song competition with Joel Creasey, this year from Sydney.

After all these years Eurovision still has its magic, says Myf Warhurst.

“We know that singing is such a great part of the connection to country, or tackling mental health or dementia, or just for the sheer joy of it. There’s nothing negative about singing, and it’s emotional, too. People find themselves crying because they’ve maybe not opened up a part of themselves to making sound, and we all need to make sound together again in a room,” Zemiro says.

To those who would insist they are completely tone deaf, Zemiro has this advice: “The harmony is no different to the melody. It’s just a different set of notes. So you do the sets of notes that you can understand. By the end of the session, you’ll find you actually kept up better than you thought you would. It’s not as hard as you think it is. It really is about reminding yourself that you’re in this together, and you are included in that final, beautiful sound.”

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