History

A Short History of the Geelong (Bay City) Conchords

The Geelong (Bay City) Conchords were founded back in October of 1996 when two gentlemen whose partners were singing in the Geelong Harmony Chorus, developed a love of barbershop harmony and decided to develop their own male chorus.

After a lot of hard work recruiting members and searching for a musical director the Bay City Conchords as it was then called began rehearsing with one of the two guys (Matt Eaglesham) as its inaugural president and the other (John Hare) as its first honorary secretary.

Our first musical director, Michelle Hope was indeed recruited from the Geelong Harmony Chorus and with a little help from the Melbournaires, Victorias only other male barbershop chorus, we were soon off the ground and singing at smaller venues such as nursing homes and wineries etc.

Many of the original founder members of the chorus are still happily singing along with us today. Matt Eaglesham is our baritone section leader and of course a stalwart of the chorus, and Michelle keeps in touch with the chorus, through her partner Rod who is our current musical director.

In those days the chorus would travel to many engagements by hiring a rickety old bus that would be driven from point to point by one of our members, Phil Welsh. Many a song has been sung to the grinding of the gearbox of the “bus with no gears”.

Less than two years after our formation we entered the open chorus section of the AAMBS 5^th National Convention in Brisbane and while we didn’t exactly set the world on fire it was a huge learning experience for all our members during that period.

Certainly the greatest experience we learned at our first convention, was the camaraderie and sense of fun that exists within the barbershop community. The whole atmosphere of a convention is a truly wonderful experience.

After the first convention the chorus became quite well know locally by singing at a variety of large engagements in and around Geelong and wining a few local trophies along the way.

Over the next few years the chorus had slow growth but eventually settled down to an average figure of about twenty eight members until the early part of the 21^st century saw a decline in membership to nearly half of this number.

Prior to this period the chorus tasted its greatest success to date culminating by winning the best small chorus award at the 6^th AAMBS National Convention in Melbourne. Although we have gained higher scores at following conventions we have been unable to emulate this success as the standard has continually risen at every convention since.

Lately, we have been very busy rebuilding the chorus by using a series of music workshops as a recruiting tool. This proved highly successful in 2006 and we plan to use this method again for 2007 so that we will have a solid base to continue our bi-annual foray at the next AAMBS Convention in Hobart, Sep. 2009.

In the meantime we are hoping to make 2007 a turning point later this year when for the first time, we will produce and star in our very own concert. Our music committee is currently hard at work putting the finishing touches to this production.

The committee of management have put together a 2 year plan to take us to the Hobart convention and this is to be soon expanded to a 5 year plan that will hopefully turn the chorus into a championship winning team that will become even more well known in Geelong and district for its quality, style and ringing close harmonies.