"But," continues Stijn, "the audience was all young choir singers and they freaked out. And we did it and we ended up last." "No," corrects Steven, smiling. "Steven really wanted to end with I Think I'm Paranoid and I said: 'Is that a good idea?'" remembers Stijn. The solution was the rock songs he loved and they unveiled their new direction in the final round of a choir competition in Canada in 2001. That was the big escape for me – to find something new." The music is brilliant but if you play a piano concerto of Beethoven, that's already been done a million times by brilliant pianists. "In classical music everything is done already. Formed in 1996, Scala performed a standard mix of classical material, musicals and pop standards for its first five years. "You have to be a fighter," agrees Stijn. "You have to be really good to get out of Aarschot," says Steven. Steven, who writes the arrangements and Scala's original material, was the pop buff.Īfter studying music elsewhere, they returned home to form a choir. "Can you imagine?" Stijn, who conducts, was a classical music devotee who didn't get into pop until his early 20s. "At a certain time, we had three grand pianos in the house," says Stijn. The Kolacny brothers (the surname is Czech) grew up in the small Flanders town of Aarschot.
It's a cliche that it's fun to sing in a choir but boring to listen. I don't like it." Stijn adds with pride: "You see how difficult it is. "Sometimes we meet a choir that uses exactly the same score. Scala's classically influenced approach is different again, spawning several imitators. At the other end of the age scale, the Chorus, a Massachusetts choir of over-70s, were the subject of an acclaimed 2007 documentary. The grassroots phenomenon is the PS22 Chorus, an amateur choir based in a Staten Island elementary school that has racked up more than 30m YouTube views, performed with Stevie Nicks and Katy Perry, and visited the White House. The commercial powerhouse, of course, is Glee, with its let's-do-the-show-right-here pizzazz. Their sudden international success is the latest symptom of a boom in enthusiasm for classic rock and pop songs reinterpreted by diverse groups of singers. They are sitting backstage at the Union Chapel in London, a few hours before their debut London appearance to mark the release of their first UK album, an eponymous collection of new and old recordings. "How motivated can you be?" marvels neat, shaven-headed Stijn, who is six years younger. "There was a Canadian girl asking to join Scala and she was willing to move to Belgium for a year just to be in the choir," says Steven, a droll, shaggy 41-year-old. By the end of the day, they had dozens of requests from concert promoters, advertising agencies, and women eager to join the choir. The brothers watched the page views mount as different time zones woke up and discovered the clip.
Within hours of the trailer going online, Scala's website had registered 60,000 new US visitors. Not only did the contrast between the communality of the performance and the prickly isolation of the lyric work as a metaphor for Facebook's creation myth the dexterity of the trailer amplified the emotional potency of the music. It was the perfect combination of film and song. When David Fincher chose their decade-old version of Radiohead's Creep for the trailer of The Social Network, everything changed.
Until that point their girls' choir, Scala, which specialised in performing songs by the likes of Nirvana and Depeche Mode, had been a strictly European concern, big in their native Belgium and neighbouring Germany but unknown in the US or UK.
O n 15 July last year, a movie trailer changed Steven and Stijn Kolacny's lives.