Meet Take A Chance On Three

Take A Chance On Three started with a compromise, on holiday. Barry and Tina had already been circling the idea — they had watched a duo in a restaurant and thought, we could do that — and on the second night of the holiday the place put on an ABBA night. They went away and decided they could definitely do that.

They had form. Barry and Tina met at work, and had been together long enough to have celebrated their thirty-second wedding anniversary a couple of weeks before this conversation. Tina started singing in school choirs from a young age. Barry played in bands as a teenager. At some point the two facts met over a conversation at the office and they put a band together there: a colleague on drums, a guitarist, a bass player, and another colleague on backing vocals.

The company ran a convention every year. The work band played the Christmas one, got asked back for the summer, and did three in the end. Everyone up dancing, as they remember it, and really good fun.

The chorus years

Then came the usual interruption. A bit of amateur dramatics — Barry musical-directed a couple of shows, Tina directed one — and then a family, and careers, and everything stopped. It restarted in the mid-2000s, when Barry and his twin brother talked about doing some music together and ended up joining a male barbershop chorus. He stayed about ten years. "It wasn't really my thing," he says: mostly the great American songbook, 1900 to 1950. "But some of it I quite enjoyed."

The consequential part was what he said to Tina while he was in it — you're really good at harmony singing, you should join something. She joined the women's chorus, named after the motorway junction nearest to home, eighteen or nearly nineteen years ago. The chorus's Music Director at the time was Hannah and Tina has since sung in three different quartets with her.

A cappella did something to Tina's technique that decades of singing had not. "You have to sing properly, because there is no accompaniment," she says. "It's literally just four parts, four-part voices. There's nowhere to hide." In a quartet there is less hiding still, because there is only one person on each part. She now warms up for anything between half an hour and an hour before a show, and warms down afterwards with gentle humming rather than simply stopping.

Getting Hannah

Back to the holiday. Barry was set on ABBA; Tina wanted a mixture. They compromised — start with ABBA — and the next day they discussed it and decided that Hannah might be interested.

Tina's price was tickets. She is a serious Ed Sheeran fan, and he had just announced a run of gigs. Get me the tickets, she said, and I'll email Hannah and ask her. He got the tickets, so the email got sent. Hannah considered the offer and discussed it with her family and then came back and said yes.

The band started in May 2025.

The rooms are not the ones a new originals band would think of. Take A Chance On Three work retirement villages, social clubs and village halls across seven counties, and they got there on purpose.

"Going into a lot of bands, especially if you're doing original music, you wouldn't be thinking about going into retirement villages," Barry says. "Whereas that's an option for us." The social club circuit books tribute acts too, and between the two they have found most of their work so far. Social clubs are harder going — another band, another week, and you are up against acts you have never heard of — so at the moment the focus is on the retirement villages, where they get more out of the room.

The wish day at Bedworth

The clearest example is a retirement village at Bedworth, near Coventry. The staff run a rotation that lets residents choose something they would like to happen, and one resident — a serious ABBA fan — chose an ABBA tribute. The band knew before they arrived, because the person booking them explained it. She was sitting right at the front, in costume, when they came on. Some of the staff were in costume too. Other residents came, and family, and friends. She sang along the whole way through, and they had a photo with her afterwards.

That is the part they keep returning to. "Obviously we like to perform, otherwise we wouldn't do it. But it's also about bringing the entertainment and the joy to people who can't necessarily go to it. It's bringing it to them, so that they can still enjoy something that they love."

What a night actually looks like

They do not turn up in costume. Tina has already wrecked a T-shirt unloading gear, so the outfits go on at the venue, and the band ask for fifteen minutes and preferably a bit more — mostly for the wigs and make-up. There is a change at half time; two costumes each.

Twice now, audience members have asked the band if they could sing with them, and been allowed to. People come over between sets to talk about a song that means something to them, or to ask for one. There is a singalong built into the set, judged on the night against how receptive the room is: a bit of pantomime, the audience split in two with Tina and Hannah taking a half each to compete, then everyone back together on 'Fernando'.

The travel radius is around a hundred miles, and it flexes on the fee, the distance, the date, the time of day and how long they are wanted for. So far that has meant Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire. The diary is built around Hannah, who has the full-time job and the young family. "Everyone gets a veto on every gig that we get offered," Barry says, "so we only do the ones that we can definitely make."