Learning from the Streets

Have you ever heard the song ‘The Funky Chicken’?

Whats that you say?

I mean – Have you heard the song the funky chicken?

Well let me hear your funky chicken..

It may still be sung now, or variants of it, but back in 1996, this was one of the ‘songs’ that was part of the collective spirit of my Oasis Frontline gap year. It wasn’t an anthem, we didn’t take it that far, but, it was one of those fun songs that we all learned in the training and developed in a number of ways.

It goes like this… best sung in a circle in a group of about 20

Let me see your funky chicken, whats that you say?

Let me see your funky chicken, whats that you say?

I said let me see your funky chicken…

And cue a mass of bodies flapping pretend wings around, making appropriate chicken noises and until someone shouts

‘Let me see your_______’

And then other verses were added as created by participants – like ‘praying nun’ ‘jumping kangaroo’ ‘slow moving snail’ ‘energetic windmills’ – and the rest…

So, that was the funky chicken, and all would have been fine… All that is except that we as a team had the ONE opportunity to do a High school assembly in the entire year, to promote our upcoming christian union, and what did we decide to do, to try and be ‘cool’ and ‘fun’?

Yes, you guessed it.

In front of a group of 150 year 8-9’s.

We decided to go full weird and ‘do’ the funky chicken.

Getting them on their feet, singing it in front of them, trying to teach them the song, and pray they might join in, then find us funny, and cool..

I think it was only us doing funky chicken moves in the first verse… not going well

Throwing sweets at them in the third verse helped ‘let me see your boiled sweets’ – but we may have injured a few people as the boiled sweets landed

We could tell it was going badly half way through the second verse, but like good seasoned performers, weren’t giving up, we were committed, and trying desperately to get some audience participation and contributions by then.

There was a few shocked looks on the faces of the teachers.

And pupils in the back rows some falling over each other trying to take part and yes, it was carnage. For others it was met with stoic non moving and pupils who didnt know whether they had permission to even move.

Thankfully my memory protects me from remembering all the different verses we used. But we thought we were amazing. We thought that by making such an impression we could get loads of the pupils to the christian union the following lunchtime. By hoping that they thought we were cool, and that by default ‘God’ was cool, they would be interested in coming to a group like this.

How many people turned up? guess…

6.

And all of then were the kids we saw at church already. We’d managed to scare off a few of them too, as word of the crazy assembly spread.

We had the opportunity to ask some good questions, to try and give the impression to the pupils that we had something of value, and that it was a place where they could find out more about faith- instead we pranced around, and yes im gentle with myself about something that happened over 25 years ago, and Ive have done a few assemblies since,

but my first high school assembly was definitely one that fits in this confessions series… I dont think I could do the funky chicken ever again…..