He wanted to be a rock star, but his girlfriend was pregnant so he took a teaching job. He funnelled his musical talent through the high school choir. Now, as he reaches retirement, a 25-year-old recording of those young voices has had David Bowie raving in The New York Times, and Hans Fenger has finally made it into Rolling Stone, writes Donald Clarke
Children's vocal music has traditionally occupied as hallowed a place in the affections of the mature aesthete as Morris dancing, body-painting or Icecapades. Which makes the recently issued CD, Innocence and Despair: The Langley Schools Music Project even more of a revelation. Recorded in 1976 and 1977, the album is a collection of contemporary pop songs sung by a group of Canadian schoolkids under the tutelage of their inspirational music teacher, Hans Fenger.
On each track, the musical reach just exceeds the children's grasp, creating an otherworldly tension amid the echoes of the school gymnasium. Their skilfully arranged version of The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations has all of composer Brian Wilson's lonely anguish, Help Me Rhonda is sung with the gusto of a football chant and Space Oddity emerges odder than ever before. Or as David Bowie himself put it: "The backing arrangement is astounding. Coupled with the earnest if lugubrious vocal performance you have a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of, even with half of Colombia's finest export products in me."
Since the CD appeared in North America towards the end of last year, it has gone on to sell nearly 30,000 copies, topping Canada's college (independent) charts for two weeks and picking up a host of celebrity admirers in the process. Musicians as diverse as Richard Carpenter of The Carpenters and avant-garde cacophonist John Zorn have queued up to sing its praises.
Speaking from New York, Irwin Chusid, the producer of the reissue, sounds quite bemused by it all.
"I had to get an agent," he laughs. "I was getting phoned by all these Hollywood types asking to make a movie out of it." He first came across the music when the radio show he hosts was mailed a recording of the Fenger version of Space Oddity. A Canadian listener had taped it from an old vinyl LP, credited to the Lochiel and South Carvolth Schools Glenwood Region Music Group, that he had picked up in a thrift store. There was little other information on the sleeve, but, blown away by the Bowie tune and similarly moved by renditions of Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon and Wings's Band on The Run, Chusid vowed to track down the source and get the music to a wider public.
After much research, Hans Fenger's story emerged. In 1971 the 24-year-old was playing in a Vancouver bar band when he discovered that his girlfriend was pregnant. Spurred into grown-up employment, he found a job teaching music in Langley, British Columbia. Right from the start Fenger encouraged the kids, aged nine to 12, to sing popular songs whilst providing their own instrumental accompaniment on bass, drums, xylophone and anything else that came to hand. Later, buoyed by his students' enthusiasm, Fenger approached the parents and raised enough money to press two LPs of their work, never suspecting that 25 years down the line the albums would resurface so publicly.
Even now, Fenger's irrepressible enthusiasm is apparent as he chuckles down the phone from Vancouver, where he still teaches. "I wasn't aware that I was doing anything different," he says. "I wasn't aware how anybody else taught music. I had never studied it at school. But then I was encouraged to take the kids out once or twice to see other school choirs in action and I rapidly realised, wow, these other guys don't sing David Bowie. And I also quickly realised that everyone, boys and girls, wanted to be in my class, whilst the other choirs were all little girls."
Fenger asked only that the children fully commit themselves; nobody was sent away because he or she lacked formal ability. He left only one string on the electric bass and removed keys from the percussion instruments, thus ensuring that nobody could hit a note that was harmonically jarring. In hindsight, he sees his uncluttered approach as akin to that of the punk movement, which was in full flow at the time of the recordings.
"I never played them the original records," he says. "The only one they had probably heard was the Bay City Rollers tune, Saturday Night. I wasn't overly nuts about that, frankly, but I thought that if we were going to do it, we may as well do it as a bit of a fascist chant, punk it up a bit. But because this learning was internalised, they learnt the tunes really well. And when they made mistakes, the mistakes were consistent. There's a drum in Space Oddity that is in the wrong place. But every time the kid played it he put it in at exactly the same point - the wrong point but the same every time. And I wasn't going to correct that."
This might suggest that the record's appeal is that of kitsch, that it is "so bad it's good". On the contrary, permitting the occasional mistake and eccentricity grants the performers a purity of expression that would be absent if they had been dragooned into strict musical conformity.
Student Sheila Behman's case is illustrative. In a recent radio interview she was reunited with Fenger. Her solo rendition of The Eagles' Desperado on the LP is impossibly moving. As Fenger puts it: "You can read anything into it because she reads nothing into it." During the broadcast Behman - only nine years old at the time of the recording - explained that like many of her classmates she had had a troubled childhood and that singing these songs had helped them "express their torments". The music had got her in touch with a part of herself that would have remained dormant. When Fenger left the school, she said, "all that went".
The teacher got a chance to meet up with the rest of his students recently when the TV station VH1 organised a reunion. To his delight, many of them had embarked on careers in music as instrumentalists, singers and even, in one case, as a music engineer.
"Meeting them again was one of the most profound experiences of my life," Fenger explains. "And I think it was for them too. It is hard for me to talk about it because it is so deep, so personal. But getting this recognition is an amazing thing for their lives. Imagine your grade five homework assignment winning the Nobel Prize."
Notwithstanding their timeless beauty, it makes sense that the recordings have come to prominence at this point in history. Audiences are attuned to subtexts and distant resonances in popular art forms in a way they weren't 25 years ago. But there is a purer, more poignant, appeal for listeners of a certain age. For those born in the 1960s these are the tunes they grew up with, but rendered in voices more poignant than the originals, voices eerily close to their own. The outpouring of emotion engendered by the CD has come close to overwhelming Fenger. "When the New York Times article came out and it transpired that Bowie liked it, the impact really hit me," he says. "It was a wondrous event, like giving birth."
But the ironies of his situation do not escape him. These strange bookends to his career - he retires next year - are weirdly entwined. "What is so strange is that I was in this rock-and-roll band, and if I'd stayed in it I would probably still be playing in a bar. But the fact that I went into teaching, which I felt wrecked my career, eventually got me into Rolling Stone magazine."
•Innocence and Despair: the Langley Schools Music Project is available from http://www.setantarecords.com/
It will be available in record shops from the end of April
