The Spooky Men are a male choir founded in 2001 in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, by Stephen Taberner. They quickly gained attention through their skilful blend of Georgian songs, beautiful ballads, and international covers.

Since then, they’ve performed in over 800 concerts across Australia (WOMAD Festival, The Great Escape Festival, Woodford, Cobargo, Port Fairy, Blue Mountains, and Bellingen), the UK, and Europe (Tønder, Cambridge, Broadstairs, Wickham, Camp Bestival, Towersey, Shrewsbury, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Union Chapel in London, St David’s Hall in Cardiff, Liverpool Philharmonic, Colston Hall in Bristol, Sheldonian in Oxford, and The Sage Gateshead).

The Spooky Men have released seven albums: Tooled Up (2004), Stop Scratching It (2007), Deep (2009), Big (2011), The Spooky Man in History (2013), Warm (2015), Welcome to the Second Half (2019), and We’ll Give it a Go (2023).

In their live performances, The Spooky Men draw from a shifting and elusive mix of musical and theatrical values. Notable influences and themes include Georgian male polyphony, a running joke about man as a vast and cluelessly useless object, whispers of clowning, bouffon, and Monty Python, and forays into a deeply satisfying grunt-based tribalism. The audience is invited first to joyfully endure a wall of human sound, then to laugh foolishly, and finally to venture into moments of great tenderness. Ideally, it is not so much comedic as hilarious, not so much dazzlingly perfect as deeply, resonantly human.

National premiere.