Reporter MEG SOBEY meets choir member Vic Magri as part of the Express Telegraph's profile on the characters who make up Melton and surrounds.
'You get addicted to music before anything else. It takes me back to my childhood.'
AS a child, Vic Magri had a spiritual music experience as he woke to the sound of the classical piece Elizabethan Serenade drifting over the airwaves.
"Once I was sleeping and I could hear the music. I am sure I was dreaming; I was seeing angels," he says.
Growing up in Malta, the radio was a constant soundtrack to life, with every home on the island having speakers connected to a wire network. While families listened to the Maltese radio news and plays in the time before television, many people also tuned into a British station.
"I couldn't speak English, but I listened to the English station for the music," Mr Magri says. "I think Elvis Presley is the patron saint of Malta."
He immigrated to Australia aged 18 in 1964 for more opportunity, getting a job as a wharfie and raising a family in the western suburbs.
He says he was always singing to himself around work and the house. Then he retired and his wife encouraged him to find a larger audience.
And so the Rockbank resident joined a choir in Bacchus Marsh, before transferring to the Brimbank Multicultural Choir. Several years ago he also initiated a singing group in Melton. Members, usually numbering between 12 and 18 and aged from children to elderly, now meet weekly to raise the roof at Melton South Community Centre.
Mr Magri, who found he was a natural bass, chose singing in a group rather than solo as "in a choir you can hide". "It is a confidence booster. I was shy when I was younger because of the language barrier, but being in a choir puts you up there on stage."
He says there's a feeling of connectedness in projecting as one voice. "There is a good feeling of being together. We are like a big family."
He says choirs are not just about standing in rows and opening their mouths - members have to be entertainers. "You have to be in character. If you sing something sad you don't want to be smiling. We also have to do body percussion and dance steps. I am very bad at that; I have three left feet."
Mr Magri says his favourite audiences are nursing home residents.
Songs from Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil to Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys are part of the repertoire. Two years ago, Mr Magri joined the Sons of Sunbury, the male equivalent of the Sunbury Divas women's choir.
He says there are not enough men raising their voices.
"Men find it hard to sing in public; they might feel vulnerable and shy."
In July, he travelled with the other 35 members of the two choirs to China, where they combined to win silver in the World Choir Games.
Mr Magri is doing his vocal exercises ahead of September 11 when he and 149 others will form a choir organised by Jonathon Welch, of Choir of Hard Knocks fame, for a concert at Melbourne Town Hall.
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