A pub full of people blasting out a rendition of Toto’s Africa is bliss to Astrid Jorgensen but chew popcorn near her, or cough, or sniff, and rage boils inside her.
She knows it is odd to admit she hates sounds. After all, Astrid has made a living out of organised noise, creating the worldwide phenomenon that is Pub Choir.
But hearing is her dominant sense, and if someone is tapping a pen or clearing their throat, it is all Astrid can hear.
Astrid believes that anyone can be a singer. (Australian Story: Marc Smith)
“Probably the most contradictory part of my life is that I despise sounds,” Astrid tells Australian Story. “I am infuriated by the sound of other people being alive, which is crazy, because at my show, that is the only thing you can hear, and I love that sound.”
She has even been to a psychologist about the condition, known as misophonia. That did not work out, Astrid says, deadpan — he cleared his throat all the time.
So she carries earplugs with her for those moments of looming anger and gets on with doing what makes her happy: helping a crowd of amateurs find their voice, their joy, by singing as one.
“[Pub Choir] is an entirely improvised comedy music lesson where I try to convince groups of untrained strangers to learn a song in three-part harmony,” Astrid explains.
The crowd gets into the Pub Choir spirit at The Triffid in Brisbane. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
Astrid has a gift that allows her to perceive music in a way that others can’t. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
Pub Choir crowds quickly started growing. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
At the start of the 90-minute show, Astrid is the performer, the bubbly tutor, but by the end, the audience is the all-singing star.
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Musician Ben Lee compares Pub Choir to that moment on a night out with friends when a favourite song comes on and everyone sings at the top of their lungs — except under Astrid’s tutelage, it sounds good.
Astrid is “one of a kind”, Lee says. “The way she is fostering a love of music in her audiences … takes this from being just entertainment to actually being like a public service.”
What began as a conducted sing-along with 80 people in a Brisbane pub in 2017 is now a global sensation.
Astrid’s keen ear and upbeat vibe have won the praise of the reclusive Kate Bush, taken her to the stage of America’s Got Talent, and, recently, led her to conduct 2,400 people to sing Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now onboard Sir Richard Branson’s newest cruise ship.
Her successful audition on America’s Got Talent has been watched 288 million times, with many people suggesting her ability to unite a crowd through song “was a miraculous thing that happened”.
The truth, says Astrid, is that it is the result of a lot of searching, self-doubt and hard work, and a series of milestones that culminated in her finding a unique way to let her love of music shine.
Thousands of people attend Pub Choir events each year. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
‘Music was blowing my mind, not Jesus’
The first time Astrid felt the buzz of applause for a musical performance, she was a lonely little girl hoping to be seen.
Starting high school was tough for Astrid, who had immigrated to Australia from New Zealand a few years earlier with her parents, Elvira and Steve, and four older brothers.
Astrid has always loved music. (Supplied: Astrid Jorgensen)
“There were these clusters of friendship groups and I was just kind of walking the halls as the smallest, youngest person at school, wondering how to get in there,” Astrid recalls.
But when the crowd gasped with delight at her piano and vocal recital of Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles at a school talent quest, an understanding of the power of music took root.
“I was like, this was such an easy win,” Astrid says. “Music is such an easy way to connect with people.”
She felt that power again when she went to visit her aunt in Zambia as a 16-year-old, still filled with teenage angst, still searching for her place in the world.
Her aunt was a Franciscan nun. Astrid thought that could be her calling.
Then she heard the African congregation sing. “Every single person was singing in complex harmony,” she says. “I was overawed. It was the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever heard.
“I was worshipping the music,” Astrid says. “I didn’t know that instantaneously, but I see now I was having huge spiritual revelations in Zambia, but it was the music that was blowing my mind, not Jesus.”
Astrid went to Zambia looking for Jesus. Instead, she found music. (Supplied: Astrid Jorgensen)
Back home, as this revelation took time to filter through, Astrid applied to become a nun. A letter came back, gently advising her to get a little more life experience. Perhaps try university.
“I just thought I would tick that box so that I can get a degree and then come back and be a nun,” Astrid says.
“And then I got very sidetracked.”
Astrid describes her audiation abilities as “hearing music in your brain when it’s not playing out loud”. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
It was at her first lecture in aural musicianship that Astrid finally realised she heard things differently, with more nuance, more depth, more texture, than most.
It was the only music subject she had selected, having told herself music was her pastime, not a vocation. Sure, she could play piano and sing, but Astrid’s niggling inner voice and the brutal memories of a bullying violin teacher had convinced her she was not good enough.
A bad experience learning violin almost destroyed Astrid’s love of music. (Supplied: Astrid Jorgensen)
But when the lecturer clapped a rhythm, asked the class to remember it, and then later told them to clap it back, Astrid found it easy while many others struggled.
“I was like, ‘It’s so simple, what are you guys doing?'” she says. “Then I realised, this is not a thing that everyone has going on in their head.”
It is called audiation, something Astrid describes as “hearing music in your brain when it’s not playing out loud”.
“That became very exciting to me to realise that I’ve actually got a skill,” she says. “That was a cool turning point in my life.”
Evyn and Astrid met at university. (Supplied: Astrid Jorgensen)
Also at that lecture was Evyn Arnfield. In fact, he was at many of the same lectures as Astrid, having also chosen a grab bag of subjects ranging from religious studies to psychology to biology.
They kept bumping into each other in classes; then they started chatting. They exchanged messages over the summer holidays. Then they went out.
“I think she was starting to realise that it might not be the right life decision for her to go and become a nun,” Evyn says. They have been together for 18 years.
Astrid Jorgensen’s Australian Story ‘Striking a Chord’ airs tonight at 8:00 (AEST) on ABCTV and ABC iview.
Astrid finds her ‘flow state’
Astrid and Evyn have been together for almost two decades. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
Evyn was the first person Astrid told she had an eating disorder. At school, she felt ugly and insignificant, and an unhealthy relationship with food began.
After returning from Zambia slimmer, people told her she was “beautiful now”.
“That really needled into my brain,” Astrid says. She began purging food, telling herself that “if there’s less of you in the world, people will like you more”.
It took years, but with Evyn’s support and ongoing professional help, Astrid has been able to manage the illness. “It is a part of me, but I have worked really hard to step through that,” Astrid says.
Eating disorder resources:
After finishing her degree, Astrid had no real plan. She decided to become a music teacher.
“It was the most awful job for me,” Astrid says. “I didn’t enjoy making music competitive for children. I didn’t like listening to a child sing with their whole heart and giving them a C. It doesn’t feel right for me.”
A circuit breaker came when Evyn, who had gone on to study medicine, had a placement in Townsville. Astrid joined him, taking a year off teaching to consider her future but continuing to conduct community choirs, something she had been doing since university.
Evyn suggested she would make a good air-traffic controller. “It seemed to tick a lot of boxes for me,” Astrid says. “It’s thinking quickly and doing maths equations and … also multi-tasking.”
She passed the aptitude test, and over months, sat a range of exams. Finally, she was booked for a face-to-face interview in Brisbane.
Then an email landed in her inbox. A Townsville school wanted a choir conductor for “this crazy project” of creating a regular, but non-competitive, whole-school choir.
“It was the best idea I’d ever heard,” Astrid says.
She cancelled her air-traffic controller interview.
“I’d been building up all my skills — my teaching skills, my arranging skills, conducting, performing — but this was the last piece of the puzzle,” she says.
She recalls entering a “kind of flow state” the first time she stood on stage and got the school singing.
“I knew what to do with my arms, I knew how to pace the lesson. I’d never done it before, but I just knew how to get 500 kids singing.”
This, Astrid realised, was the version of music she had been seeking — non-competitive, welcoming, communal, experiential.
“And that was the direct precursor to Pub Choir.”
Astrid learnt that music is an “easy way” to connect with others. (Supplied: Jacob Morrison)
Astrid finds her slice of heaven
After the first Pub Choir, when a bunch of tipsy Brisbanites sang Dave Dobbyn’s Slice of Heaven, Astrid wrote in her diary, “something has changed”.
The extent of that change was unimaginable for Astrid. She has sold out shows in the US, performed Teenage Dirtbag with Wheatus’s Brendan B. Brown in New York City, and got a record 7,000 people at Brisbane’s Riverstage to harmonise John Paul Young’s Love is in the Air.
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In the early days, Astrid was Pub Choir. She spent hours listening to and deconstructing the songs, arranging them into bite-sized pieces that she could teach the crowd to bring to life. She organised the venues and song licensing, did the social media — with videos by Paris Owen — and built the website.
She now has a full-time manager, John Patterson, and musician Sahara Beck, but the most vital part of Pub Choir remains the audience and the joy it gets from sounding so damn good.
Astrid visualises her three-part harmony method for audiences. (Supplied: Kristina Wild)
Everyone has been told at some point that their voice is out of tune, that they should just shush, says Astrid.
Pub Choir allows people to sing their heart out free of judgement, safe in the knowledge that, as Ben Lee would say, we’re all in this together.
“We are all allowed to sing and to feel happy, and to clap our hands and to wave our hands in the air,” Astrid says. “We should be more comfortable with having beautiful experiences as a community, just because that feels nice for each other.”
Astrid never imagined the choir she started in a small Brisbane bar would become a worldwide hit. (Supplied: Jacob Morrison)
Watch Astrid Jorgensen’s Australian Story ‘Striking a Chord’ at 8pm (AEST) on ABCTV and ABC iview.
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