San Francisco crowd joins touring Australian Pub Choir at Regency Ballroom

Inside the Regency Ballroom, about 1,300 people became a temporary chorus, learning a Pat Benatar song together in one night and turning a San Francisco concert hall into something closer to a community rehearsal than a show.

Pub Choir opened its Eyes Up! U.S. tour in San Francisco on Monday night, with Astrid Jorgensen guiding the crowd through a format that is equal parts performance, comedy lesson and social experiment. The audience was split into three vocal parts, prompted by color-coded lyrics on a giant screen and coached into harmony with a loose, playful style designed to keep the room relaxed. The result was a 90-minute collective performance in which strangers who had never sung together before were asked to listen, respond and make one sound.

That no-pressure structure is the point. Pub Choir’s official description says the concept is an entirely improvised comedy music lesson built to help ordinary people reclaim music in their lives free of pressure or judgment. The group, based in Brisbane, Australia, says it teaches one song in three-part harmony in about 90 minutes and asks participants to put away their phones, be kind to one another and stay present.

The choice of We Belong gave the night an easy emotional center. In a city where so much live entertainment can feel segmented by cost, status or the kind of social polish that makes a room feel closed, Pub Choir offered something simpler: a low-stakes invitation to show up, follow along and be part of the same beat. The appeal was not virtuosity. It was access.

That helps explain why the San Francisco crowd mattered beyond one lively night at a classic venue. The Regency Ballroom, long one of the city’s dependable rooms for touring acts, became a place where the audience itself was the spectacle. In a moment when many public spaces are more often associated with isolation, caution or passive consumption, the event showed how strongly people still respond to being asked to participate in real time.

Pub Choir began in Brisbane in March 2017 with about 80 attendees, later gaining a global following through viral videos. Its 2023 Africa project brought together 18,812 people across 15 cities and 37 musical guests, underscoring how quickly the format has scaled while keeping the same basic promise: ordinary people can make music together without auditions, training or judgment.

The U.S. tour continued after San Francisco with stops in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis and Honolulu through May 24. But the opening night made the clearest case for why the format travels: in a city that often measures connection through institutions, Pub Choir showed that belonging can also begin with a lyric on a screen, a roomful of strangers and the willingness to sing anyway.