background to the song
Love Shine a Light won the Eurovision Song Contest 1997, sung by Katrina and the Waves representing the UK. Here they are singing it.
More recently, it was sung by Kingsgate Primary School choir at the Camden Music Summer Cluster Festival in 2022. Thank you to Kingsgate for suggesting it as a song for us all to sing.
how we will perform the song
Pop songs are difficult to sing as a massed choir in unison; there are tricky rhythms and vocal tags that can be interpreted in lots of different ways. We’ve tried to notate it as closely as possible to the original, making decisions about which tags to put in and which to leave out.
This is our finisher. It will be sung by all the choirs and accompanied by all the bands. There will be audience participation, waving of phone lights and not a dry eye in the house.
The arrangement is designed to be easy to learn and sing. A lot of it is in unison, which in itself presents challenges – see above. There are harmonies in the chorus.
We will tell schools who will be singing which part once we’ve worked out where everyone will be sitting.
The structure is straightforward (see below) but it might take a while to navigate round the various repeats in the sheet music – spend a little while looking through it.
We will start with solo voices. There will be auditions for soloists in the spring term.
Structure of the song
verse 1 solos
interlude
verse 2 everyone in unison
chorus in harmony
repeat back to bar 11
interlude
verse 3 everyone in unison
chorus in harmony
repeat of chorus – unaccompanied
at bar 42 “DS al Coda” = go back to the sign at bar 24
at bar 31 jump to the “Coda” at bar 42
repeated bits, slowing down at the end.