03 May 2026
When you think of primary school I bet you imagine yourself sat on a shiny wooden floor – or if it’s a Year 6 memory on The Benches – belting out “sing Hosanna, siiiiing Hosanna” or “who put the colours in the rainbow?” writes Laura Bill.
If you are of a certain age you might remember walking into the school hall early only to see the teacher writing the song words onto a clear plastic sheet ready to put onto the overhead projector. Remember those?!
The kids who didn’t like school probably recall a song from assembly even if it is sniggering at: “I was cold, I was naked were you there? Were you there?”
Son of teachers, James B Partridge, a freelance music teacher at a school in Fulham, has cleverly made school day nostalgia into more than just a successful career with his one-man Primary School Bangers touring show sweeping the nation. In a tour bus.
Ahead of his performance at the Alban Arena later this year I caught up with him for a chat about the phenomenon that is captivating the UK.
I’m collected by a guy called Alex who I was instructed to ring on arrival at the Colosseum in Watford. He leaves me in a snazzy dressing room with those light bulb lights framing the mirrors and goes to fetch James.
He is the kind of chap you’d take to see your grandma – a good-looking gentleman, well-spoken with dazzling teeth and a reassuring demeanour.
He has a slight air of authority yet warmth in that teacherish way that is very familiar to me and he’s more serious than I anticipated.
It’s the love of music. You can see he is genuinely in love with music and the stories they help to tell.
I ask about the tour bus and say I imagined him to just turn up with a Cassio keyboard in a Volvo:
“It was like that until recently. I put the keyboard in the back of the car. And then for Christmas, Alex was driving. That was the first time I had a driver, essentially.”
“And a water fetcher!” I jest as Alex hands James a bottle of water.
They both laugh. “I’m full Mariah Carey now,” James said.
Alex jumped in and said: “And then after the show, I’ll carry James – me and Fraser will carry him.”
“While the steam comes up from the stage!” I added. We all laughed.
They clearly have a great relationship and some good banter.
Alex leaves and we are left to chat. James tells me that he has been music teaching in primary school since 2012 but hasn’t trained as a teacher. He is still at an independent school in Fulham that he joined in 2014 which shows how much he loves it.
I ask if the children are excited that he is famous now and he said they really aren’t bothered by it at all but that every so often someone will say: “My mum was watching you on YouTube.”
He plays the piano, the guitar and sings but is obviously an all-round entertainer and also hosts the whole show himself. I ask what his school days were like: “We were talking earlier about school and in the context of tech billionaires and how they seemed to be the kids that were bullied at school who are now getting their own back.
“I think most people didn’t hate school and they didn’t love school. It was just there. I did have a really good primary school experience, hence why I’m doing a show like this. And a big part of it was music and singing.”
I tell James that when my twin sister and I joined Oakwood primary school in Year 6 the headteacher, Mr Blythe, got us to play The Snowman and Let It Be on the piano in assembly. I recalled fondly how it made me feel included and seen as a new pupil and he smiled and nodded.
So how does he keep it fresh? And does he get bored of the songs ever? “I don’t actually, and it’s funny because as a musician, obviously these songs are quite simple, relatively simple.
“What I do is I re-harmonise the songs, so it makes it interesting for me.
“I also change up the order of the set list between shows. I’ve thrown in a few things here and there. But also, there’s a bit I do during each evening where I take live requests, essentially.
“I’ve got a post-box in the foyer where the audience can make requests. I’ll go through them and try and mash them all up together. So that really challenges my musical training.”
My colleague told me that when he was little he thought that Hosanna was a girl’s name and the song was telling her to join in with the song.
James said someone at the show a few days ago called Joanna thought when she was little that everybody was singing to her. There must be so many other anecdotes like these out there because nobody ever explained the meaning of these songs, did they? You just went in and sang the words.
One I remember so clearly is “smell of bacon as I fasten up my laces and the song the milkman sings” which turned out to be about gratitude. The chorus being “So I mustn’t forget… no I mustn’t forget… to say a great big thank you, I mustn’t forget.”
It’s not all religious songs though. The day before I met James he had posted a song, Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry, on his social media.
It’s an old Irish folk song about not being with a man who treats you badly which was popular in the fifties.
I’ve had it as an earworm since I saw the video clip.
He seems delighted that I’ve seen it. I make my standard joke about being a stalker (but as Steve McFadden kindly told me at Christmas “It’s research. You’re doing your job.”)
He said: “I don’t think anyone really knew it. That’s actually a song I teach at school. It’s a lovely little folk song. I did get a number of people on Facebook saying they sang this in the ‘50s.”
We talk about country dancing. You have to have a degree of maturity to remember being encouraged to do-si-do your ‘partner’ to folk music.
Usually the teachers found it more awkward to teach than the kids did to take part in and there were always a few boys who took it too far and bashed into each other, perhaps even falling onto the shiny hard yellow floor. I recall actually loving it and when I went to a ceilidh at my cousin’s wedding in Scotland I felt slightly more confident than I would otherwise have done.
Should we bring that back? Sounds easier than teaching the Haka which I’ve had to do before on a supply teaching gig. The deputy head kept walking through the hall with a clipboard to check how well it was going too. Not very well at all, was my conclusion so I wasn’t surprised that school didn’t ask me back.
“I think it would be quite good because a lot of people now don’t really have any connection to the traditions of the country they live in, or the area they live in. It could be an interesting thing to say ‘In this area a hundred years ago, everyone did this kind of dance. This is what we’re going to do now’.”
James looks thoughtful and says that he might go down the storytelling side of songs. “It would be good to maybe get into a bit more history after I’m not touring this show anymore.”
What is the weirdest request for a song he’s had? He said at his previous show two days ago, someone asked for It’s Your Birthday by American rapper 50 Cent which he mashed up with English Country Garden and a Bon Jovi number.
I did a bit of ‘research’ and asked some St Albans folk what their favourite school
assembly bangers were. The most popular one was When a Knight Won His Spurs with Carpenter, Carpenter also well loved. The lyrics are: “Somebody greater than you or me… put the apple in the apple tree… the flower in the earth and the fish in the sea… that’s the work of somebody greater than you or me.”
I start to think of what I might request at the St Albans show at the Alban Arena on September 12. It sounds like fun. I’ve got plenty of time to come up with something abstract.
Has he ever had a time when people don’t get involved and they just sit there or is it always a singalong type show? “No, I’ve been pretty lucky to be honest.
“The very, very first time I did anything like this was in March 2022. It was part of a series of musical theatre nights and I was hosting it. The first half of the show was him singing 20 primary school songs and after the interval it was musical theatre songs.
“Because it was a musical theatre night, the first half was a bit like, this is quite random, so not as many people sang along but I went away and rewrote it as this show I’m touring at the moment.”
James said that after that very first show people were singing along, so he didn’t have to encourage them which was really nice as a music teacher: “From the first chord of the first show, people just went for it.”
Does he actually sleep on the bus? I want to know. He is very honest and I like that about him: “Well, I’ve slept on the bus a few times but I’ve gone home a few times as well. All the other guys have slept on the bus but after tonight I’ll be on the bus the whole time.”
Does he do any specific things before the performance? James used to sing in a popular wedding band – and anybody who has done that knows that you get fed right before you go on: “But with this, I very quickly realised that if I eat directly before then it’s not great, because I’m presenting it as well. If I was just singing it would probably be okay but as I’m hosting the show, it’s literally two hours of relentless talking and singing.”
It must be quite intense for James. He is literally the only person on the stage and it must bring with it a pressure but he seems calm and relaxed and his shows are going down a storm.
If you think about it, very few theatre shows are one-man or woman shows and most actors and singers have the support of their fellow cast or band members.
As we wander into the auditorium and onto the stage, I am distracted by how cool the set is. It really does take me back.
He said: “You have to have a slightly more exaggerated version of yourself on stage in order to keep people’s attention. So it is quite similar to teaching in that way, I guess.”
I randomly tell him that my favourite vocal warm-up is Papa’s Got a Head Like a Ping Pong Ball, because…well, why not? (It’s to the tune of the William Tell Overture). “That’s such a good warm-up,” he says.
“The thing is my pupils all do this,” and he bobs his head up and down as he sings a bit of the warm-up where it goes ‘ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong ball’. “Don’t do that,” I tell them. (Singers should keep their chin down and their head relatively still when they sing. Singing is a science as well as an art.)
I ask if he thinks the popularity of adults buying tickets to sing childhood hymns in a theatre with their friends of an evening is proof of a quiet revival. He says he thinks that’s “probably intellectualising it a little bit” but that he does think people do miss just the general community aspect of getting together in a room and singing.
Though James was confirmed as a Christian aged 10 and has sung in churches, he isn’t what he calls ‘an active Christian’.
He says: “I’m Christian in the sense that I went to church when I was a child. The places I’ve performed have ranged from cocktail bars and nightclubs to a Christian festival last summer but also a drum and bass festival.”
He performed his assembly bangers at Glastonbury in 2024 and 2025 which he said was a pinch me moment. Last year was the year it really kicked off, when it was on the main BBC One footage which he said was very surprising to him.
I really am blown away by how something like this can get so big in such a relatively short period of time and wonder how it must feel. His gigs are all over the UK this year and new locations are popping up all the time. He has a Christmas show too. Is he amazed by how it’s developed?
“Even though in terms of years, it’s not been that long, I think the transition has been gradual. It isn’t as if one day I had two followers online and the next day I had 200,000 or whatever. It hasn’t been an overnight thing, it’s been slowly building for the last five years and it does feel kind of natural in a way.”
The eloquence, clarity and groundedness are qualities held by most great teachers and he is likeable too – and I’m sure this adds to the overall vibe. It’s not just the songs that people are buying into but James himself, like any successful business model.
Even his rider is a humble one – coconut water – because it is hydrating for the vocal cords.
Has he ever had to send any of the audience out of ‘assembly’ ?
“I have sort of told people off and said you need to put your fingers on your lips or it’s your own time you’re wasting and stuff like that – the teacher persona does help a bit but then there have been some shows where people have been so drunk they’ve just had to be ejected.
I informed him that the St Albans audience will be impeccably behaved. Probably.
James added that he is particularly looking forward to coming to St Albans as he has only been once before when he sang at a wedding.
The show is on September 12 at Alban Arena and tickets can be booked at https://everyonetheatres.com/book/?instanceId=514401&eventId=18251
