‘Lost Songs of Scilly’ album is out now

Lost Songs of Scilly is an original and diverse new album that seeks to re-imagine the music of the many whose voices have been lost to time and tide - and the Culture on Scilly team has been delighted to provide some funding for this project, as part of our remit to commission new work in any artform which has a connection to Scilly.

Piers Lewin is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, carpenter, writer, chef and guesthouse owner who lives on the tiny island of St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, a beautiful archipelago of granite and sand scattered 28 miles off the coast of Cornwall.

For many years Piers and close friend John Patrick Elliott (of The Little Unsaid) have been building a catalogue of original songs and instrumentals in the attempt to set this archipelago to music, drawing on the place’s rich Atlantic maritime tradition whilst exploring the challenges faced by modern island communities across a rapidly changing world.

Lost Songs of Scilly, launched on 31 May, distils this journey into a captivating album.

The album’s eleven original songs and instrumentals – plus one traditional reworking and a poem by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage – seek to re-imagine a music that may never have existed. If the Isles of Scilly ever had a distinct indigenous music, it has been lost to the forces of time. This is in contrast to neighbouring Cornwall and to other remote British Islands - Shetland, Orkney - which all have their own rich traditions, laced with a Celtic wildness that speaks strongly of their isolated locations and heart-stopping landscapes.

With no tradition of Scillonian music to draw from, Lewin and Elliott have embraced an adventurous approach to instrumentation and arrangement, finding a kind of celebratory chaos in allowing the ancient to tangle with the modern.

The work has taken them deep into Scillonian culture, landscape and community and has inspired original material of huge stylistic diversity: the product of their struggles to bring to the surface a version of authentic musical island truth that also reflects these times we’re living in.

Foot-stomping tunes and emotionally-charged songs of the sea emerge here like shiny new beach pebbles in the hand from a richly-layered texture of ambient soundscapes and glitching field recordings. Organic electronic loops and pulsing synths grapple with guitars, mandolins, woodwind and bagpipes; ballads of island romance and storm-tossed doom swirl amidst spoken word and static-drenched voice recordings.

In an unexpected twist, they found over the years that the more they focused in on the precise culture, nature and sounds of Scilly, the more they became attuned to the universality of island life everywhere, and the central (if precarious) position of islands at the frontline of urgent issues in the modern world. 

Songs such as Evie, delivered as a traditional acoustic ballad but drenched in a sea-spray of submerging voices and harmonicas, explore an age-old story of lovers lost at sea. This segues into the darkly cinematic Small Boats, an accelerating electronic reel that aligns Scilly’s many stories of those lost at sea with our contemporary newsfeeds full of the tragedies of migrants and refugees on perilous journeys across the water.

The traditional raucous shanty Spanish Ladies here becomes a kind of tape-looped lament of a fragmenting sense of British identity at a time when our place in the world seems increasingly fraught and inward-looking. Chopped-up voices scatter, disoriented, and layered saxophone drones stutter as Elliott whispers wearily, “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors.”

Themes such as these intertwine across the whole album in a fresh, re-energised folk soundworld, as Lost Songs of Scilly seeks to blend the specific with the mythic, connecting the fragments of Scilly with a resonant global sense of ‘island-ness’ and its imminent losses.

Piers and John first met while John was visiting the island one summer during his studies, working in the pub on St Agnes and living in a tent on Troytown Campsite. Piers was performing some covers and folk originals in the pub one night and needed a guitarist to back him up. John finished his shift in the pub kitchen, hung up his apron, and met Piers in the pub’s store cupboard to rehearse.

Piers Lewin and John Patrick Elliott

There, surrounded by industrial sized cans of beans and cleaning equipment, they quickly jammed through the set, went out and performed to a rowdy pub full of islanders and visitors, and from then on the two have collaborated consistently every year. John would return to the islands often, usually to produce Piers’ music on St Agnes and the other islands, recording in small cottages, island halls, and often out in the open air, the recordings saturated with the ambience of sea and birdsong.

This extensive collection of gathered field recordings make up the other worldly soundscapes and textures that weave through Lost Songs of Scilly, with seascapes rising out of white noise as if from an old radio, rhythmic rowing forming a percussive pulse, and birdsong skittering around improvised woodwind melodies. 

Lost Songs of Scilly will be released alongside a limited edition book that serves as a companion to the album, detailing song backgrounds, lyrics, notebook cuttings and writings by Elliott and Lewin on the process of creating this body of work. It will also feature additional poems by Piers Lewin to accompany the instrumental tracks on the album. 

“Entrancing…deeply atmospheric…songwriting of a real rich quality” CLASH 

“Foot-stomping tunes weave around ambient soundscapes and glitching field recordings, songs of shipwreck and myth collide with electronic loops and spoken word” Folk Radio UK

“John Elliott’s music is nothing short of extraordinary” Broadway World

“Bold and different…stretches boundaries” The Guardian on The Little Unsaid

Discover more about the artists

Background – Piers Lewin

Piers studied woodwind at the Royal Academy of Music before becoming disillusioned with the stuffy and over-pressurised environment of the standard orchestral scene, putting his oboe back in the cupboard for the final time and running away to a tiny island - St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly - a mile across, with a population of 80. There he became creatively immersed in the place: cooking with the extraordinary local ingredients - pristine shellfish, foraged sea greens and rich dairy cream; making innovative furniture and artisanal wooden homeware from storm -felled trees or driftwood collected on the beach; and responding to the extraordinary landscape and culture with a growing body of poetry. It wasn’t until he started to explore the powerful traditional Celtic music of neighbouring Cornwall that Piers became struck by the lack of an indigenous Scillonian music. He became somewhat obsessed with the quest to create an authentic island music from scratch.

Having previously shed his musical background, he was free to draw on whatever stylistic influences seemed to best capture the islands. Looking back over a dozen or so albums of island music - with the Rough Island Band (2009-present) and Full of Noises (2014-present) - these musical strands include Celtic-tinged instrumental dance tunes, heartfelt songs of the sea, wide ambient electronic soundscapes, field recordings from a pristine island and innovative spoken word collage.

His music has received airtime on BBC radio (Late Junction/Tom Robinson/Petroc Trelawney/etc.) and various composing commissions have led to collaborations with writers such as Michael Morpurgo, Wyl Menmuir and Alice Albinia.

www.anislandlife.co.uk

Background – John Patrick Elliott

John is an award-winning composer, music producer and songwriter from West Yorkshire. He has composed for feature film, television and theatre, and over years of extensive touring and recording with his alt-folk act The Little Unsaid has amassed a cult following. He has performed at major festivals including Glastonbury, collaborated with world-class producers such as Graeme Stewart (Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood) and Sonny Johns (Shakira, Ali Farka Touré), and received radio play from the likes of Iggy Pop and Guy Garvey.

John won the Stage Debut Award for Best Composer, Lyricist or Book Writer for his score for the Olivier-nominated play Cruise, which he performed live on London’s West End in 2021 and 2022.

He was the recipient of the Steve Reid InNOVAtion Award for boundary-pushing music creators, judged by a panel of music industry professionals including Gilles Peterson, Four Tet and Floating Points.

His recent screen credits include composing the original music for upcoming documentary series Into the Congo with Ben Fogle, as well as feature films Wild Isles and Three Moons of Biyangdo. He also recently composed the original music for the National Youth Theatre’s new touring show ADA, about legendary mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace, and is currently working on a new play with Cruise collaborator Jack Holden.