Kat R on love and flair

“Maybe Kylie will get us through this.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard more than once among the members of Polyphony over the past few months. It began with a single sheet of music: a trial arrangement of Kylie Minogue’s ‘On a Night Like This’. There’s no precise formula for how a piece of music lands in our choir. Sometimes it’s a struggle; sometimes it sticks. This one stuck.

From that modest start came the Kylie medley—a 64-page, nearly ten-minute epic, arranged with love and flair by our conductor, Oli Cameron. It only scratches the surface of Kylie’s vast discography, yet it manages to capture her evolution: from glittering pop ingenue to creative force, queer icon, and dance floor oracle. As Oli quipped in a recent rehearsal, “This is my Fauré’s Requiem.”

And like all great music, the arrangement holds multitudes. Oli has asked us to lean into its camp and complexity, to embrace the shifts in tone, from “Balkan folk” to “rugby match.” There’s joy in watching my fellow choristers bop, sway, and shimmy in place to the beat of ‘Padam Padam’—Kylie’s latest banger and a Grammy-winning reminder of pop’s power to move both body and spirit.

But it hasn’t been easy. There’s been laughter and frustration, wild harmonies and weepy notes. For many of us, this program holds an ache. It’s impossible not to feel the absence of Jack, our late, brilliant, beloved musical director and conductor. Wild Combination bears his fingerprints. It’s his vision, his irreverence, his love of high-gloss pop layered with meaning and heart-wrecking ballads sung in earnest (with the Prince song, of course, being the prime culprit).

And so as we sing—as Kylie sings—‘Confide in Me’, perhaps we are also confiding in each other. We are remembering Jack’s genius, his humour, and the dizzy joy of rehearsing with him. We are gathering ourselves in harmony and heartbreak, camp and catharsis.

Maybe Kylie will get us through this. But only because Jack showed us the way.