Chris Gardner is dressed in a blue frock coat and matching finery, wears spectacles perched perilously half way down his nose and bears a creditable (if not necessarily intentional) resemblance to Johann Sebastian Bach.

Another chap looks like he might have escaped from Treasure Island, a third like a suitably corpulent Mr Bumble the Beadle and a fourth resembles a cross between The Fat Controller and the snooty fox which advertises Old Speckled Hen beer.

The mob-capped ladies may be from the pages of David Copperfield; the panoply is splendid, the singing better still.

They are members of the West Gallery Music Association, formed to preserve and to perform the singing and music familiarly heard from the west gallery of country churches in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

"The Victorians came along with their great big organs and threw us out," says Judy Whiting, the secretary, adding almost immediately that the sentence might be better rephrased.

"West Gallery was the music of ordinary people, the sort of thing you sang around the piano not in cathedral or collegiate churches," says Ken Baddley, the quire (as they call it) leader. "The Victorians threw it out because they couldn't control it."

The west side story continued last weekend with a workshop on Tyneside, members as far flung sung as Hertfordshire and Devon, and with a Sunday evening service in Blaydon Methodist church to help mark the tercentenary of John Wesley's birth.

The association has no religious affiliation; if they had, they'd be non-conformist.

"This isn't like singing hymns in church," says Judy Whiting. "This has more body to it, it's more alive. The same people might have played at the village dance; there are a lot of people who'd like to sing in church like this."

Ken Baddley says that the old quires would often get the ends of their lines so greatly mixed up that instead of "strong bulwark" - for example - they might repeat "Strong bul" three times.

"There are quite a few rude examples, but since we're in a Methodist church it's perhaps fortunate I can't remember any of them," he adds.

The Tyne's twinkling on a cold, clear night. Three other churches, one redundant, are within 200 yards, with the MP's office, a chip shop called Paulo's and an old pub called the Bisley - someone may be able to explain the name - in between.

"I love coming to the North-East, everyone's always so friendly," says a cheery soprano from Oxford.

The church overflows, though almost entirely with grey heads, a board on one wall listing the other churches - Ravensworth, Rowlands Gill, Fellside, Spoor, High Spen - in the South-West Tyneside circuit. The order of service promises tunes like Lyngham, Gopsal and Sagina, which wonderfully translate into O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing, Rejoice the Lord is King and that all-time Methodist number one, And Can It Be.

In the gallery, the quire is accompanied by oboe, fiddle and serpent - the multi-contoured wind instrument, not the ubiquitous Old Testament creeps - and sometimes by Chris Gardner on the organ.

Chris is also musical director of Joyful Noise, the local West Gallery group, and a lay clerk at Newcastle Cathedral. In former times, he says, his outfit would have been the Georgian equivalent of off-the-peg. Musicians, he adds, didn't have a very high social standing in those days.

The music and singing, even from those who toil below, is quite marvellous. Had the Songs Of Praise cameras been there, the programme would be repeated more than Steptoe.

Robert Mawdit, the Methodist circuit superintendent, speaks of John Wesley's visits to Tyneside, of being met by a mob - "led by the minister" - at North Shields and of a distinctly frosty reception at Whickham in 1742.

Though Wesley's Journal records that he spoke in rough tones, the locals were "exceedingly quiet" and would have fallen asleep, he admits, but for the bitter cold.

The following year he spoke at a hospital he'd founded - Wesley often built hospitals before churches - in Newcastle. "So dead and senseless a congregation had I scare met," he wrote, "except at Whickham."

The service concludes, rousingly, with And Can It Be. Had the swansong been The One I Love Is Up In the Gallery, it could hardly have been more appropriate.

Details of the West Gallery Music Association from Judy Whiting, 18 Holly Avenue, Ryton, Tyne and Wear NE40 3PP, telephone 0191-413 8796 or on www.wgma.org.uk

Facing the music

Anglican churches, at any rate, are always built facing the east. Since quire and musicians were at the opposite end, says Judy Whiting, it was the source of the phrase "Facing the music".

Others disagree, mostly suggesting that the phrase is mid-19th century American - perhaps first used of nervous young actors having to face the audience and, therefore, the world-weary orchestra in the pit.

Another theory ties facing the music to soldiers being cashiered - literally drummed out - a fourth, more macabre, claims that the original phrase, like the song, was "Face the music and dance." A band would be lined up at military executions. The dancing man, of course, was at the wrong end of the rope.

Scholarly as ever, readers of these columns may - as a musician might say - know the definitive score.