08/08/2026
Dear everyone,
I’m afraid I have some difficult news to share with you, and this is an email I have been putting off writing because, quite simply, I haven’t really known how to find the right words.
After a great deal of thought — and more than a little soul-searching — I have made the very difficult decision to close my Tuneless Choirs.
I know this will come completely out of the blue, and I am so sorry for that.
Over recent months, my work as a Funeral Celebrant has grown enormously. It is work that I love and feel incredibly fortunate to be doing, but it is also demanding of both my time and my emotional energy. I have reached a point where I simply cannot continue trying to fit everything into the available hours without something important being squeezed out.
And, increasingly, that something has been time with my family.
So, as difficult as this decision has been — and it genuinely has been incredibly difficult — I know that I need to make a change. I need to give myself the time and space to concentrate on my celebrancy work while, most importantly, making sure there is still enough of me left at the end of the working day for the people I love at home.
One of the things that has made this decision particularly hard is knowing that our choirs have never really been just about singing.
They have been about friendship and laughter, about belonging somewhere, about walking through the door after a rotten day and hopefully walking back out feeling just a little bit lighter. They have been about singing songs we probably had no business attempting, occasionally producing noises that bore only a passing acquaintance with the original melody, laughing at ourselves, and doing it all again the following week.
And they have been about people.
You.
I have watched friendships form, confidence grow and people support one another through all sorts of things. I know that, for some, choir has become an important part of the week, and that knowledge has weighed very heavily on me while making this decision. Please believe me when I say that I haven’t taken it lightly.
But I also know that I cannot keep doing something simply because saying goodbye to it hurts. Sometimes we have to recognise when life has changed and make room for the things that now need us most.
I cannot adequately thank you for everything you have given me over the time we have spent together.
Thank you for turning up.
Thank you for throwing yourselves into whatever ridiculous song I put in front of you.
Thank you for the laughter, the conversations, the kindness and the friendship.
Thank you for looking after one another.
Thank you for trusting me to stand at the front each week, wave my arms about and somehow persuade you that whatever happened next was entirely intentional.
And thank you, above all, for making our choirs the wonderfully warm, welcoming and slightly bonkers communities they became.
I will miss that enormously.
I am genuinely sorry that our time together is ending this way, and particularly that I won’t have the opportunity to stand in front of you all together and tell you just how much I have appreciated you. That is perhaps the hardest part of writing this email.
But I hope that, alongside the sadness of something ending, you can look back at everything we have shared with the same enormous affection that I will.
There have been songs. There have been friendships. There have been some truly spectacular wrong notes. There have been moments when one half of the room has been singing something entirely different from the other half and I have decided that the wisest course of action is simply to keep smiling.
And there has been a tremendous amount of laughter.
I wouldn’t change any of it.
I am so very grateful to every single one of you for being part of this chapter of my life, and for allowing me to be part of yours.
Please keep singing — loudly, enthusiastically and, wherever possible, somewhere in the general vicinity of the correct note.
But much more importantly, please keep hold of the friendships you have made, keep looking out for one another, and keep finding reasons to laugh.
With enormous love, gratitude and appreciation,
Matt xx
