We started in 1997 in the vault of a disused bakery in the south of Cologne, where the lesbian and gay community (as it then was) held weekend parties. So, what could be better than a choir where the people who partied on Saturdays could come and sing every Tuesday? That’s how Cologne’s first lesbian and gay choir came about.

We know meet in an art gallery in the south of Cologne. The choir is by no means a museum piece, however, and choir leader Ilka Tenne-Mathow still manages to bring out the best in the 34 singers’ voices, assisted by vocal coach Javier Alonso.

Always a cappella, always with polished dynamics, and always passionate about producing a unified sound, singing brings joy and anyone who sees and hears the choir perform on stage immediately shares in that joy of beautiful harmonies. And even when they’re not on stage, we have been known to sing anywhere we can: in the high street, on station concourses, in a Bavarian beerhall, at Cologne’s carnival, in a tattoo parlour, and in front of a traditional rice barn from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in an ethnological museum.