The real secret of its success is Jorgensen herself. She’s funny enough to be a comedian, quick enough on her feet to be an improv artist and musical enough to be a pop star. As we order our meals – a calamari entree and venison sausage pasta for me, and a delicate stracciatella, peach and basil entree and green gnocchi for her – my challenge is not to embarrass her with my fanboyism.

“I mean, I’ve never attended myself, but it looks fun,” she jokes.

“I suspect a large part of that is because you’re up the front,” I enthuse.

“Yeah, it’s taking me a while to say that comfortably, but I think you’re right.”

When the entrees arrive, we are delighted to find the stracciatella delicately flavoured and the calamari tender and beautifully seasoned. We tuck in.

Jorgensen is jet-lagged after her return from a rollicking US tour, where she played to houses of up to 1000 people, and slightly hungover after the post-Festival Hall celebration the night before. But she’s gamely ordered a glass of an excellent Longboard Pinot Noir from the Bellarine Peninsula, and I feel it would be churlish not to join her.

Jorgensen started Pub Choir seven years ago in her hometown of Brisbane and since then, in her words, she’s been “working it out”. Along the way, it’s just kept getting bigger. In the United States, she delivered the fruits of that labour.

“I noticed a difference in their feedback after the shows,” she says. “Whereas in Australia, people will say, ‘Great job developing this idea. Looks like you’re working really hard. We’re all really proud of you.’ Over there, people come up to me and they’re like, ‘You’re a star’,” she says, rolling both the “r” and her eyes.

The secret, she says, is that it’s not all about the song. It’s about the feeling you get by helping the perfect strangers around you find the note, hold the harmony, pursue a common endeavour.

Before the show begins, Jorgensen takes her audience through its etiquette, summed up in huge letters on the screen: “Don’t be a dickhead”.

The hardest part, she says, is finding and arranging a song.

“I’m trying to filter it down to its essence. Because obviously, most songs are with a band and a recording studio and all sorts of complications. And I’m doing it acoustically with a human voice and usually an acoustic guitar. So how can I distil it so it still sounds like the song even though we’re missing all of the parts?”

She doesn’t always get it right, she says, but usually it works out.

“I want people to walk away feeling successful, and that they’ve actually achieved something – they’re not just singing along. I want them to feel like they made something. With their bodies.”

“It’s OK for a male voice to be super sassy ... When it’s in my lady voice, it sounds like I’m just a bit of a bitch.”

Astrid Jorgensen

From start to finish of every show, Jorgensen is improvising. She says she finds out her mistakes “in real time”, on the stage.

“I get quite nervous before the show, and then I walk out on stage and I genuinely just black out … I would describe it as a flow state. Everything kind of disappears when I’m up there.”

Pub Choir began when Jorgensen, a high school music teacher, decided the job was not for her. Apart from anything else, she was “too performative,” she says. “The gig goes from eight to three every day and your audience is bored and they don’t like your set list.”

She took refuge in leading choirs. At one stage, while still teaching, she was driving all over Brisbane and surrounds and leading a choir every night – seven a week. In 2017, one of them was called Pub Choir, and “everybody started going to that one”.

After initially teaching the songs by ear, she developed the PowerPoint technique – at first, with the lyrics only, then the words shaped up and down, then colour coded for the different parts. Then she discovered gifs.

“Every single show, I step back after I’ve calmed down and say, can I do anything clearer?”

A revelation was the introduction of Titus Andronicus. Titus is a microphone tuned low. It allows Jorgensen to demonstrate the male part at its actual pitch. With Jorgensen’s sibilant consonants and a booming basso voice, Titus sounds like another being entirely, with his own bespoke sexuality.

On his debut, Jorgensen says Titus got the biggest laugh she’s ever had. People were crying with laughter.

“And I thought, “Oh! I think we’ve discovered a new thing. I think this is going to work’.”

Is it like having another personality on stage?

“Yeah,” she replies. “Meaner. For some reason, it’s OK for a male voice to be super sassy. I do feel a bit free to tell people: ‘Well, no. You’ve missed.’ When it’s in my lady voice, it sounds like I’m just a bit of a bitch.”

We agree not to look too closely into the sexual politics of this.

Another innovation has been Bohemian Rhapsody. It was, says Jorgensen, the song most people request to sing, and at the same time, simply impossible – and she’s not one for noble failure.

So she adapted. Now Pub Choirs do it one line at a time. More than 80,000 people have already sung a portion of the Pub Choir version of the hardest song in modern history. When it’s finished some time later this year, the 300-person outdoor crowd in rural Queensland will be represented with a line, as will the 2500 at the Sydney show next week.

“It sticks to the principles,” she says. “This is organic. This is real time. This actually happened. It’s almost like a tour diary.”

When it’s done, she plans on emailing the guitarist from Queen, Brian May, and asking him to play the solo. She hopes she’s told enough people about this already that he feels obliged to agree.

As we scrape the last of the piquant pasta sauce off the bowls with the last scraps of home-made bread, I ask Jorgensen if she’s always been funny.

“That feels like a question you’re not allowed to answer yourself,” she says, then proceeds to do so.

“I’ve got four older brothers. It’s a noisy house … And I don’t mean to get weirdly political or anything but my family did move here from New Zealand because we experienced racism in this small town, and my mum, who’s Singaporean, said: ‘I will not live here any more.’ So we moved to Queensland at the highest point of Pauline Hanson. So, good choice.”

Humour was the way she found to fit in.

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The espresso has arrived, so, as we start winding up, we get a little contemplative. I ask how big this thing could get. Could Pub Choir appear in a stadium?

It’s a live conversation within the small team that runs it, Jorgensen says. At Festival Hall – a heritage-listed venue built to host professional wrestling and renowned for its dreadful acoustics, Jorgensen noticed a worrying sound delay, “so I felt like we weren’t exactly in time with each other on the stage and in the back corner”.

In theory, she thinks, there is a size where her show stops being as fun. But she’s not sure we’re there yet. Meanwhile, with no marketing except word of mouth and a bit of social media, her shows are still selling out within hours.

For now, it appears, the only natural limit is Jorgensen’s capacity for work – it’s difficult to franchise because the show is so uniquely based on her.

“I feel like all of my strange failures and attempts at other jobs have come up with this perfect recipe – Pub Choir soup. I don’t know how to teach anyone those things … it’s almost like, if you had the ability to do this, you would have worked it out already,” she says.

“I’m just delighted to have found this expression of something that feels really unique to me … And so I’m gonna hang on to this, grip on, my nails on the cliff edge and be like, ‘I’m gonna stay here as long as I can’.”

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