Labi Siffre’s Something Inside gospel choir reunite

A Birmingham gospel choir who sang with Labi Siffre on his anthemic Something Inside So Strong hit in 1987 have reunited for a concert in the city.

Now living around the UK and abroad, members of Highgate Gospel Choir, which formed in the late 70s, have got back together for an album and a finale performance on Saturday.

The group have many stories about their involvement with the song, including not being allowed to go on Top of the Pops with Siffre due to a “strict bishop” and having to wear “awful BBC Two blouses” when they did appear on BBC daytime television.

“Did we know it was going to be an amazing, international hit? No – we had no idea,” chorister Evadne Anderson said.

Beverley Hepburn-Henderson who has travelled from Florida in the US for the reunion said it was great to see everyone again.

“I have not sung with them and some of them I have not seen for over 40 years, so coming back, this is like, ‘ok, this is where I left off” she said.

Ms Anderson said the friends had been brought up “in the church” in Birmingham and it was “the norm” to be in a choir.

Their parents had come from the Caribbean but “did not get a warm welcome” and went on to contribute to the growth of Pentecostal churches in the UK, she said.

“So it all built out of that. We used to sing, that’s what brought us together, but also helped us through hard times.”

Angela Brown-Johnson, the youngest in the choir, said she was a big fan when she first joined at 15.

“The volume and the dynamics… I couldn’t hear myself sing in the first rehearsal at all. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it,” she said.

The choir became well known, also appearing on the BBC’s Pebble Mill At One show in 1983, which led to them being approached to record Something Inside So Strong.

The haunting song – touching on 90s apartheid in South Africa and oppression – reached number four in the UK charts in 1987.

“A lot of those elements of it were built in that studio session that night… someone said ‘why don’t you do this and why don’t you do that’,” Ms Anderson said.

“I was very proud to be there that night.”

Kathy Hepburn-Hinds added: “They asked us to sing different parts and… it was just a song to me personally, another song that we had to learn to do and when it came out on the radio – the other day I was at work and it came on the radio and I said ‘oh, that’s us singing’.”

But Ms Brown said despite the success of the song, they were not allowed to go on Top of the Pops.

“It was on Top of the Pops but we couldn’t go – our strict bishop said no,” she said.

But the choir did sing with Siffre on the Pamela Armstrong show on BBC Two in the late 80s.

“We had to wear these awful BBC Two blouses,” Ms Brown said. “We had our own uniform, but the colours weren’t right.”

Ms Anderson said the song resonated and was about “the black experience”.

“Because that’s the person who wrote it and that’s where he’s coming from – hope, being held down and we were going through that, [at the time] though we might not have talked about it all the time. We pushed through it and achieved things.”

Donovan Hepburn, who has five siblings in the choir and is behind the “crazy reunion plan” as director of its Legacy Project album, said it was great to see everyone together again.

“It was a nice sort of reunion. Some of them hadn’t been in a studio since they did that record so it was like, coming back to it all these years later,” he said.

The concert on Saturday at Anchor Point on Chester Street was the finale of the project, he added.

“Just because you’re ‘senior’, let’s say that, it doesn’t mean the end – you can teach an old dog new tricks.”