Poet Laureate Simon Armitage heads to Shoreham Wordfest

LYR will be at the Ropetackle Arts Centre on October 11 at 7.30pm, supported by Rebecca Askew.

The gig comes two years after their debut album Call in The Crash Team, which they describe as “a 21st-century soundscape that echoes the exquisite ache of day-to-day life, all the lovely heartbreaks and the painful joys.”

The band sets Simon’s spoken vocals to music with a visual backdrop, and the good news is that they have just finished their second album, with a release date to be confirmed.

“We started the project around 2016 but due to various work projects it took a while to get going,” says Richard. “I've always been a fan of Simon's work and he had written lyrics for me to sing on a couple of occasions. Patrick and I had worked together for many years. We wanted to be a touring band. We wanted to offer something that people can take and listen to rather a spoken word project. I always knew that Simon's poetry and lyrics had a very natural rhythm to them, and Simon has gone on record about his love of music and the bands he grew up listening to. We decided to put that all together with all those influences.

“Our first album came out in June 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The whole project was done without really being in a room together that often. It didn't look like there was any end in sight to the pandemic and we wanted to release it even if we couldn't do things we would want to do to promote it. It was ready to be released right on the cusp of the pandemic and so we did. It is called Call in The Crash Team which is one of the lines in one of the songs. I think we liked this idea of the record being somehow emotionally resuscitative. It's about coming to the aid of people. There's the theme of people in emotional turmoil and finding their feet after difficult situations and the idea was of being a crash team that arrived on the scene to bring people back together... and that was before the pandemic!

"We actually did our first run of gigs literally a week before the lockdown started and we started again in May 2021.

“We have just finished the new album which is called The Ultraviolet Age, with a release date TBC at the moment. We're just sorting out the very boring logistics of all that and there is a bit of a strange delay in the music industry because of vinyl pressings. Everybody was wanting vinyl. That was one of the pluses for the music industry from the lockdowns. I think people were rediscovering their record collections and wanting something physical rather than just pushing a button on a computer.

“There is that self-fulfilling prophecy about the difficulty of the second album but actually I don't think that ever even crossed our minds. We just wanted to get together and do something.”