All together now

Andrew Mathieson
BEHIND Belinda McArdle’s infectious smile and twinkle in the eye is a good singing voice.
Not to mention a fair degree of optimism.
“Everybody can sing,” she argues.
Even the bad singers, she nods, who are somewhere hidden among the masses.
Belinda lives music nearly every day as she guides Geelong’s largest community choir.
The choir draws a few hundred average people from all walks of life to bellow out from the bottom of their lungs just for fun.
“The people who tend to be out of tune on their own fall into tune together with other people,” Belinda explains.
“I have never asked anyone to leave in my six years.”
A four-year-old girl stands patiently every week to sing each line without fail. Some ageing members, kicked out of stuffy-old school choirs decades ago, repress bad memories.
“Just because they might have hit a bum note when they were 13 doesn’t matter any more,” Belinda cheerfully says.
In 2001, a friend invited Belinda to sing in Melbourne’s first community choir, at St Kilda.
The idea for the choir in Geelong went from a capella – singing without instrumental accompaniment – to Acabella, a “beautiful” play on words.
Belinda started the Geelong choir in a hall across the road. She remembers Thursday, January 15, 2004, when 26 curious folk showed up for a hearty sing-a-long.
The next time just four returned.
“Bugger it, this isn’t going to work,” Belinda says she remembers thinking.
“I just kept rocking up and it cost me a bit of money to run it.
“Then one week we got kicked out of the hall and I went to the next door neighbour and asked ‘Can we sing on your front yard – I’ll give you a slab?’.”
Belinda, 33, now writes material for songs about life in Geelong and the choir has since released an album.
The choir is a regular at Geelong events such as Pako Festa and National Celtic Festival, at which the members were last time a little worse for wear with sore throats after appearing four times on stage on the day.
“I think there could have been a bit of Guinness flying around by the end of it,” Belinda laughs.
Singing since she could remember, Belinda was always the first to put her hand up for choirs, productions and concerts.
She had a few setbacks, like the time playing Bugsy Malone in a year 11 school production and falling over on some shaving cream at Geelong Performing Arts Centre.
That’s just showbiz, as Belinda learnt from an early age.
“When I was four I sang in a concert in front of 1000 people and I burst into tears halfway through,” she smiles.
Impoverished during uni days, Belinda sang for her supper at a 1990s Highton cabaret restaurant dressed up as Dusty Springfield, Mama Cass and sometimes ABBA.
Then, in her own words, she sang in “just about every Geelong pub in a band for the next two years”.
Deciding to travel across Europe in 2000, Belinda rocked up to a London backpackers when a Geelong woman approached her and said: “I saw you at Scottish Chiefs last New Years’ Eve for the Millennium. Are you interested in a job?”
The woman pushed across a newspaper that had an advertisement for a singing gig on a cruise ship and the next day Belinda was sailing around the Mediterranean for the six months to fund her trip.
“I feel like everything that has happened in my life has happened because of the thread of singing,” she says.