Our Song of the Day comes from LYR, the project of singer Richard Walters, producer Patrick J Pearson and poet Simon Armitage. The track, A Brief Chronicle of Birds in the Autumn and Winter Months of 1886 PT II, is taken from their new album, An Unnatural History, released in September last year.
The album was created as part of the Eldon Street High Street Heritage Action Zone, supported by Barnsley Museums and Archives with funding from Barnsley Council and Historic England. I strongly recommend you check the album out, which is currently available on Bandcamp as a ‘Name Your Price’ (and vinyl).
“An Unnatural History was a poetic and musical happening celebrating Barnsley’s Eldon Street through the lens of its former Natural History Museum. The museum, once housed in The Civic, was an emporium of fowl and fauna, some of it local, some of it more exotic. When the museum disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances, it lived on in memory and anecdote, with only the odd blurred photograph and dusty paperwork as evidence of its existence. Digging into archives and the psycho-geography of the locality, LYR metaphorically recreated the Museum as a kind of imaginarium of all things zoological, using it to investigate the dream life of Eldon Street past, present and future. In the spirit of the great circuses and fairs that have tripped through Barnsley, and the beasts that have passed through its streets (including elephants and whales), by way of the town’s legendary Bunny Run and the animals that still make Eldon Street their natural habitat (from urban foxes to rare moths), a unique live performance of An Unnatural History on the stage of Barnsley’s Parkway Cinema put Eldon Street back on the map, but a map where pigeons nest alongside phoenixes, two-headed cattle and other fabulous creatures….”
