“OK, as you know, we’ll be singing just one song in the concert, so we need to make sure it has real impact. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it should be and I hope you’re going to approve of my choice. It’s Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.’ Caitlin’s handing around song sheets now, but I expect most of you know it anyway. If you read through the lyrics, I hope you’ll agree they’re pretty fitting for this concert.”

Audrey smiled as she remembered the first time she’d heard the song, sitting on the mustard-yellow rug in Sandra Bailey’s front room nearly fifty years before, Sandra’s eyes luminous with anticipation: Just you wait, Auds. Just you wait till you hear this album. You’ve never heard anything like it. Sandra pulling the vinyl from its paper sleeve and lowering it onto the record player as carefully as a mother placing her baby in a crib. Lifting the stylus, balancing it delicately on her forefinger, gliding it through the air, and lowering the needle into one of the shiny grooves. The familiar crackle of static, the expectant whirring of near-silence before it began: that mournfully optimistic piano introduction, just the lightest accompaniment of brushes from the drums before the decisive finger-clicking. And then the voice, Nina’s voice, inviting you into a musical world of hope and regret, longing and ambition. The lyrics touching Audrey in a way no song ever had before, with its impassioned advocacy of freedom, opportunity, choice. There being a feeling of certainty in that moment, a feeling that anything was possible. And when Nina’s voice had faded away, Audrey and Sandra had turned to one another and, without either of them speaking, Sandra had lifted the record player’s arm and moved it back half an inch, setting it down at the beginning of the song. And the two of them had listened again. They had listened in silence, five, six, seven times, until Sandra’s mum had burst through the living-room door and told them to turn the record off before they wore it out.

Audrey had only been fifteen, but she had known songs like that were rare: songs that made you understand something you couldn’t otherwise articulate, something you could only feel and were a better person for having felt it.

Now, almost five decades later, Audrey heard that piano introduction again, and as her diaphragm expanded and she joined in with the opening line, she felt the physical pleasure of singing with nearly a hundred other voices. As they sang through the whole song Audrey wondered why on earth she had left it so long to do something that gave her such joy.

They reached the end and Ben grabbed at the air with his fist, ninety-three voices coming to a standstill, only the echo of the final note hovering in the air as though it wasn’t quite ready to leave. “Wow, guys, that was really good. A genuinely impressive start. Keep that up and you’re going to be great.”