Last month, we shared the first of four videos filmed and recorded in the beautiful Welsh Chapel (on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross in London) as part of a new project from the James Patrick Gavin Trio. The trio features Adrian Lever (Alma, Horses Brawl), Tim Fairhall (Yasmin Levy, Piano Interrupted) and James Patrick Gavin (TEYR, Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra, Rad Orchestra). We have the second video below which is a live recording of Stanley Hills which was written by Adrian Lever who shared the following:
“The song is a kind of multiple timeline of lives and people who lived in my village Aldeby in Norfolk, and about a place there that’s special to me.
“Stanley Hills is a humble piece of common land that looks out across the Waveney Valley towards the Suffolk town of Beccles. Also thought to be one of the earliest settlements around, it was a place I went camping with friends, singing and playing around fires, gathering wood and berries and visiting the river with its ghost bridge of the old train line crossing.
“The song imagines the Viking peoples sailing across the North Sea to settle locally, the era of people that rode the old trains that crossed near the hill, and all of those whose way of life may have changed completely through enclosure and the changing face of agriculture.
“Standing on the highest point of the hill is where I come closest to sensing those lines of generations and their connection with the land. The chorus questions what’s potentially been lost in striving for gain or ‘improvement’ – what’s been forgotten and disconnected, and what price we’re having to pay now on a larger scale for the way we’ve used the Earth and it’s resources.”
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