My 20 odes to the people of Yorkshire, via Elvis - Ian McMillan

The bit of the song that really intrigued me, though, and spoke to me on a truly emotional level that I couldn’t quite articulate, was the spoken section in the middle.

Elvis stops singing and the music carries on in the background, and then he intones, as though he’s performing a soliloquy on a vast stage.

‘I wonder if you’re lonesome tonight? You know someone said the world’s a stage and each must play a part; fate had me playing in love, with you as my sweetheart…’ and ever since I first heard those words I’ve been in love with the idea of words spoken over music and the special power that that combination has.

I’ve experimented a bit with poetry and jazz in the past, memorably (for me anyway) with a bass player called Steve Berry.

He’d play and improvise and I’d improvise a poem, speaking over the bass and responding to what he said and somehow the thing that we ended up with was greater than the sum of the parts.

With my short-lived Ian McMillan Orchestra I did the same with a range of instruments and then me and my mate Luke Carver Goss would have fun with spoken word and accordion and every time I mixed speech and music in pieces that weren’t really songs I felt like, as the kids say, I was living my best life.

I hadn’t dipped my toes in the spoken word/music world until recently though; until, that is, I was approached by the brilliant conductor and composer Ben Crick who conducts the marvellous Skipton Camerata.

We’ve worked together before; you might recall last year’s Yorkshire Dialect version of The Barber Of Seville with one of Ben’s other bands The Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, and he wanted me to write something that celebrated famous Yorkshire figures past and present and because there are so many of these to choose from we eventually decided that I would write twenty short pieces that I could speak, maybe sounding not too much like Elvis, over the music of the Camerata.

It’s a dream come true, I have to say.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been working on these pieces, about Caedmon and Winifred Holtby and Charlie Willams and Malachi Whitaker and sixteen other White Rose Luminaries and the whole thing will get its world premiere at Skipton Town Hall on November 22nd and I really can’t wait to hear the music Ben writes and I can’t wait to put my voice alongside it.

The Skipton Camerata is always looking for new funding, of course, which is never a problem that Elvis had, and my dream is that our new piece which I’m going to call ‘A Yorkshire Score’ (See what I did there?) will become an unlikely worldwide hit with people whistling it on the street and doing impressions of me as they wash up in their tartan pinnies and the royalty payments will flood in.

Ah huh huh to that, as The King would have said.