Spooky Men’s Chorale | 25 Years of Pointless Grandeur
3 May 2026, Melbourne Recital Centre, VIC
Origins
Somewhere in the misty folds of the Blue Mountains around 2001, a tribe of blokes assembled under the benevolent mischief of Stephen Taberner. What began as a low-stakes experiment in male vocal bonding (read: controlled chaos) became a roaming choral phenomenon. Sixteen men, black-clad and hatted like a council of slightly eccentric wizards, set out not to conquer the world—but to hum at it, oddly. The origin myth? Equal parts folk choir, philosophy club, and beautifully tuned nonsense.
Style and Content
Imagine Gregorian monks discovering cabaret after one too many herbal teas. The Spooky Men specialise in tight, luminous harmony wrapped around gleeful absurdity. Georgian polyphony rubs shoulders with songs about tools, longing, and existential bewilderment. Their tone? Deadpan. Their timing? Surgical. Their repertoire swings from the deeply tender to the gloriously ridiculous—sometimes within the same breath. One moment you’re in a sonic cathedral, the next you’re giggling at a musical shrug. It’s high art wearing a very silly hat.
Critical Reaction
Critics have struggled, delightfully, to pin them down. Reviews regularly describe a “magnificent, many-headed beast” — equal parts precision machine and comic organism. Outlets like The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald note the paradox: immaculate pitch paired with disarming stupidity. Audiences, meanwhile, surrender quickly—laughter, then hush, then something suspiciously like awe. They’ve earned a kind of cult sainthood on the festival circuit, where their peculiar blend of whimsy and warmth lands like a tonic for modern seriousness.
Highlights of the Last Decade
The past ten years have seen the Spooky Men roam far and wide, charming crowds from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to beloved halls like the Melbourne Recital Centre — a venue they revere for its pin-drop acoustics and cathedral clarity. Their repertoire has gleefully expanded: “Dancing Queen” reimagined, “Bohemian Rhapsody” cheerfully dismantled, and original works polished to a strange, glowing sheen. Through it all, they remain what they always were: part choir, part philosophy, part group therapy for male weirdness — utterly pointless, and utterly essential.
“AH MORTICIA”, The Performance
Not sure what it was that I expected, but not this. A cauldron oozing eccentric vocal weirdness. At the Melbourne Recital Centre, The Spooky Men’s Chorale delivered a gloriously unhinged anniversary outing: part choir, part comedy cult, part sonic experiment. Robed figures shuffled, chanted, and erupted into exquisitely tuned harmonies, pivoting from monk-like solemnity to outright silliness in a heartbeat. The jokes landed with a wink; the music landed with surprising emotional weight. The post-grad, ‘lounge’ audience, where plenty of facial hair was in evidence, were laughing one minute and quietly stunned the next. It’s a peculiar alchemy — precision disguised as chaos — that keeps this delightfully odd ensemble feeling both ridiculous and, somehow, quietly profound. As the Sound of Music is to the Von Trapp Family, Spooky Men are to the Addams Family.
