102,974 Singers Who Never Shared a Stage
A video of “Bohemian Rhapsody” published on YouTube on April 25, 2025, contains more than 102,974 individual voices. No arena held that crowd. No single night produced it. Most of the people in it would not call themselves singers. The recording began years earlier, one line at a time, at shows in pubs.
For scale: Pub Choir’s largest single live event drew 7,000 people at a Christmas fundraiser in Brisbane. The “Bohemian Rhapsody” project accumulated participants equivalent to nearly 15 evenings at that capacity, spread across cities and years, with no two groups ever in the same room.
How Do You Record a Choir One Pub at a Time?
Pub Choir is a Brisbane-based project founded in March 2017 by Astrid Jorgensen, a vocalist and choral conductor. The format asks almost nothing of you: buy a ticket, show up at a licensed venue, and learn a popular song in three-part harmony over one evening. No audition, no experience required. Jorgensen’s team describes each event as an “ENTIRELY improvised, comedy music lesson”, removing the word “performance” from the equation changes what people allow themselves to try.
The first event drew 80 people to The Bearded Lady in West End, Brisbane, where the crowd learned “Slice of Heaven” by Dave Dobbyn. Since then, Pub Choir has toured Australia, the UK, Ireland, the US, and New Zealand, capturing at least one line of “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the audience at every show during a world tour starting in 2022. Across roughly 2.5 years, those fragments accumulated until the contributor count exceeded 102,974, then were compiled into one video.
The Song Choice
Written by Freddie Mercury and released by Queen on October 31, 1975, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a nearly six-minute suite, 5 minutes and 55 seconds, with no repeating chorus: intro, ballad, operatic passage, hard rock section, reflective coda. When Queen recorded it at Rockfield Studio No. 1 in Monmouth, Wales, beginning August 24, 1975, the grand chorale section alone used 160 tracks of vocal overdubs on 24-track analogue tape, Mercury sang middle register, Brian May sang low, Roger Taylor sang high. Jorgensen reconstructed that layered principle at a scale the Rockfield sessions never approached. The recording has since been added to the US Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2022 for its cultural and historical significance.
Why a Crowd Makes You Brave Enough to Sing
When 300 other voices are attempting the same unfamiliar harmony around you, the social cost of getting it wrong drops close to zero. Nobody is listening for you specifically. Jorgensen’s format is built around that reality: the humor, the step-by-step teaching, and the sheer noise of a room full of people working through the same thing together lower the barrier until people stop thinking and just sing. Pub Choir’s founding philosophy is “to help regular people reclaim music in their lives, free of pressure or judgement.” That is not a marketing line. It is what makes 102,974 usable recordings possible.
A Pattern Worth Noticing
Pub Choir arrived at this model independently of Choir! Choir! Choir! founded in Toronto in 2011 by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman, which operates on nearly identical terms: drop in, no audition, learn a song, sing with strangers. Two separate projects, built thousands of miles apart, converging on the same structure. That the same format emerged independently on two continents suggests the demand is widespread and genuine. For most adults, what stops them from singing in public is almost entirely social, and both projects independently found that putting enough people in the room leaves fear nowhere to land.