Lost Songs of Scilly is a new collaboration between Isles of Scilly-based composer Piers Lewin and John Patrick Elliott of The Little Unsaid. The lyric video below for Lyonesse is the first preview from the album due for release in May which is to be followed by a UK Tour in June (more below).
Lyonesse is a wild, Pogues-esque storm of a song that collides the myth of the Lost Land of Lyonesse with our imminent future of sunken lands. Islands like those in Scilly are first-hand reminders that the tide is ever-encroaching as the climate warms and sea levels rise globally. The song is rooted in foot-stomping folk that’s awash with distorting synths, thunderous drums and Elliott’s frantic tirade of spoken-word imagery: “Haul a net from the foam / You’ll find no ancient gold / Mobile phones and finger bones / And plastic love-knots.” In Lyonesse, modern-day paraphernalia (the “junk of nowhere”) swirls on the seabed along with visions of ancient lost lands as we confront the myths of our own time and our failure to tackle the threat of climate catastrophe.
Elliott is a writer supremely aware of the power of contrasts and juxtapositions.
Thomas Blake, Folk Radio
About Lost Songs of Scilly
Lost Songs of Scilly is a new collaboration between Isles of Scilly-based composer Piers Lewin and John Patrick Elliott of The Little Unsaid.
For over a decade it’s been Piers’ mission to find and share the music of his island home. Other remote British Islands – Shetland, Orkney – have their own rich traditions, laced with a Celtic wildness that speaks strongly of their isolated locations and heart-stopping landscapes. If they ever existed on Scilly, these songs and tunes of place have been lost to the past.
Now the pair have distilled this work in to one boundary-pushing new debut album as a duo, comprising an expansive collection of contemporary folk originals: Lost Songs of Scilly. This is music where foot-stomping tunes weave around ambient soundscapes and glitching field recordings, songs of shipwreck and myth collide with electronic loops and spoken word.
The more the pair focused in on the culture, nature and sounds of Scilly – a tiny granite speck in the wide Atlantic – the more they became attuned to the universality of island life and the crucial (if precarious) position of islands at the forefront of global issues in the modern world. These themes tangle and collide across the album as Lost Songs of Scilly aims to blend the specific with the mythic and connect us with a global sense of island-ness.
UK TOUR DATES 2024
5 JUNE 2024
THE RAILWAY INN, WINCHESTER
6 JUNE 2024
KITCHEN GARDEN CAFÉ, KING’S HEATH, BIRMINGHAM
7 JUNE 2024
THE TOLMEN CENTRE, FALMOUTH
10 JUNE 2024
THE LIGHTSHIP, BLYTH HARBOUR, NORTHUMBERLAND
12 JUNE 2024
VICTORIA HALL, SETTLE
13 JUNE 2024
THE PLOUGH @ HARTLAND, NR. BIDEFORD
14 JUNE 2024
THE PLOUGH @ ST ANNE’S BARNSTAPLE
15 JUNE 2024
ASHBURTON ARTS CENTRE, ASHBURTON,
18 JUNE 2024
POUND ARTS, CORSHAM
19 JUNE 2024
THE GREEN NOTE, LONDON
20 JUNE 2024
THE LIGHTHOUSE, POOLE
Tickets & more: https://www.lostsongsofscilly.com/