British poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has teamed up with musician Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson to form the band, LYR. They will be performing their new EP ‘Firm As A Rock We Stand’ at Durham Brass Festival with the Easington Colliery Band this July. Emma Chesworth caught up with Richard Walters to find out more.
LYR is certainly not a conventional band. How did it come about?
I have always admired Simon Armitage and we were put in touch around ten years ago and got on really well. We wrote a couple of traditional songs and then the idea for a spoken word project came about. Patrick and I have been making music together for years and he was the missing piece to our puzzle. He is an amazing musician and can play literally any instrument. LYR stands for Land Yacht Regatta – three random words that sound good together. We all agreed that picking a band name is one of the hardest and most tedious things to do. It was Simon’s suggestion and you don’t really argue with a poet.
LYR is not just poetry set to music. How would you describe your music?
Simon’s way of writing for this is very different to the way he writes poetry or prose. He’s not presenting poems to us to put to music, it is more musical and there is a natural rhythm. It is lyrical and very musical from the beginning. Even when we get a recording of Simon speaking, you can hear where it is going, and there are traditional song structures with choruses and refrains.
Tell me about ‘Firm As A Rock We Stand’. It tells the story of the Category D villages in County Durham that many people will not know about…
Learning about the Category D villages was a revelation to all of us – that history and just how many villages were put into that category. (During the 1950s and 1960s, more than 100 villages were listed as category D in the Durham County Development Plan where no future development would be permitted, property acquired and demolished and the population relocated). It was amazing to learn about those villages and dig deeper beyond the headline of villages that vanished. Writing the music and words certainly created a deep feeling of emotions and we also felt a great deal of responsibility, not being from the area, to tell the stories of these people who had lost their communities. People are still deeply affected by what happened more than 50 years later.
How did you find working with a brass band? And what does it mean to perform at Durham Cathedral?
Working with the brass band has been a complete joy; it’s quite different to writing string arrangements as it’s expansive. There are 27 people in the brass band and what we found amazing is that they’re all amateurs – that felt really authentic. The sound of a brass band is so tied up with nostalgia for so many of us. It has its own beauty and feels kind of ancient – and you don’t get much more ancient than Durham Cathedral. It is quite an intimidating space to fill but we are lucky that we have the brass band behind us. Durham Brass Festival is inspired and a great way to bring brass back into people’s minds.
LYR and Easington Colliery Band perform as part of Durham Brass Festival at Durham Cathedral on Friday 15th July. Tickets, priced from £15.00 in advance, are available from brassfestival.co.uk.
