LYR: ‘I kept thinking how would I feel if my village had been labelled as a failure’

Then the Poet Laureate, singer-songwriter and producer were about to release their debut album, Call in the Crash Team, a record assembled in separate corners of the country that somehow captured the ominous mood in the early months of the pandemic.

At that point the trio had hardly spent much time together, only playing their first couple of shows days before Covid curtailed gigging, and the impression was very much of a group still finding its feet.

Today, as we gather by Zoom, with Armitage in Marsden, West Yorkshire, Walters in Hampshire and Pearson in Devon, things look decidedly more optimistic. After completing their first tour, more concerts are scheduled, starting this weekend in Wakefield; the trio also have a new EP, Firm As A Rock We Stand, out now.

Armitage explains the five-track release was composed for Durham Brass Festival, which is finally due to go ahead in July after a couple of cancellations. The “song suite” was inspired by County Durham’s Category D villages which local authorities in the 1950s deemed were unsustainable as the mining industry declined.

“It was Sue (Collier, the festival’s artistic director) who actually suggested the subject matter,” Armitage says. “She said straight away that one of the things we might like to write about was the Category D villages and it just struck me as something topical and rich in terms of imagery and language and subject matter.

“The sort of provocation came from their end but as soon as we heard about it we were really keen to try to respond.”

The policy seems a particularly shameful chapter in the county’s history. “I think well over 100 of these communities were deemed to have no future,” says Walters. “To be categorised like that for the morale of people in the communities must have been so bleak. The categorisation grew over a number of years, so they just kept on adding to it. It’s pretty shocking, but there were so many different emotions for us to drawn on that are tied into that.

“Obviously there was anger, and you can feel it when you went up there and talked to people, but there’s nostalgia as well and we wanted to celebrate those communities as well as dig into that political angle of it. It’s fascinating source material.”

“There are two elements to this,” says Armitage. “There are communities that were completely bulldozed and don’t exist at all any more. I think the emotional draw of that was in speaking to people who grew up somewhere that...they couldn’t go back to. And then there were the other villages, the vast majority of them, who were just left to struggle on. They were very bloody-minded, they dug their heels in and said they weren’t moving. Most of them were offered council houses elsewhere but they had an attachment to the place where they lived.

“They had been left to struggle on over decades and a lot of those communities are very proud and operate without a great deal of help in terms of services and amenities.”

During his research, the poet visited the likes of Addison, Grange Villa and Marsden in County Durham. “I spent quite a lot of time at the Pitman’s Parliament talking to people there, particularly Ross Forbes who works there, who is a great depository of knowledge about the Durham coalfield in general and about this issue.

“There’s a lot about it on the internet as well. I think it’s one of those issues that’s become more prominent over time. We’ve moved slowly but surely into an era where people have felt emboldened to speak up about these things and people who have been marginalised are slowly but surely finding their voices. I think in some ways we wanted to lend strength to those voices, whether it was a harmonic strength or a lyrical one, to unionise with them a little.

“When the band went up there we spent a lot of time in villages that weren’t there at all, sort of interviewing ghosts, really. On some of the other days I went to those places and there’s just a sense of deprivation and lack of connection. You do get a sense in terms of infrastructure these are places that have been left behind. Grange Villa is somewhere that has just muddled on. Some of the people there were saying it was better back in the day and it would have been better if they’d shut down and gone elsewhere but we also met people who were proud of their survival.

“It is noticeable when you go through County Durham on the train and you look out of the window and see in a field three terraces with nothing else there. I should have realised because they had grown up around pits.”

Having “a village mentality” from growing up in rural West Yorkshire, Armitage found it easy to identify with the people he met in County Durham. “I kept thinking how would I feel if my village had been labelled as a failure,” he says. “One of the tracks, Category D, uses the metaphor of being given D in class or wearing the dunce hat and what to do with that. That was amplified by the fact that one of the villages is called Marsden. I grew up in a village called Marsden so it was a strange twin town thing where one of the twins no longer existed.”

“The idea not just that the houses have moved but the fact that you couldn’t ever walk down the street where you grew up, I just couldn’t compute, it made no sense to me at all,” says Walters. “So I found the project as soon as I heard about, and then Simon being our correspondent up in County Durham reporting back when he was going round these places, I really get a hold on the emotions tied into this.

“It felt strange for it to be distant history for Pat and I, we grew up so far away from where this was happening, but those feelings of resentment and longing and missing, they’re so relatable and it really made me stand back and look at my own childhood and think about how I’d feel if everything was taken away like that. It’s something that I found had lots of room to work around lyrically and melodically.”

The band talk of feeling a sense of responsibility to properly represent the people that they met in the Category D villages. “I think there were a couple of emotions,” says Armitage. “One was melancholy associated with that situation, and I think the other was to do with trying to restore a little pride and show some solidarity. Across those five tracks I think those two emotions probably are the prevailing ones.

“It was interesting when we all got together in the studio, the three of us. I’d done a fair bit of the writing in advance but really the emotional energy of the pieces doesn’t really arrive until the musical accompaniment, the composition, is laid down. It was amazing to watch Pat and Richard tune in to some of those things that I’d felt, those sentiments, and to make the musical version of that.

“I’ve said before when we’ve worked together I can write something that I feel is very high octane or ecstatic in some way but occasionally that ends up in being quite a sad or sorrowful piece of music. Sometimes the fact they’re pulling in different directions is the power. We were also very mindful that at some point there was going to be a big brass band involved in these tracks. A brass band is capable of making you both march and weep and I think we were trying to open up some spaces for either of those things.”

Pearson sought advice from his friend Simon Dobson, a renowned brass band composer and conductor, before they recorded with Marsden Silver Band. “I felt that if we were going to move forwards with working with brass I would need somebody like Simon to come on board with me to help arrange, to help guide, to help us know what is expected or what can be done with a brass band because it’s not just playing standards,” he says. “It’s all of the interesting textural stuff that you can get with a band, it’s tuned percussion. You’ve got 28 people in a room, they could use their voice as well, so in one track we scored in a vocal line for them to perform.

“I think knowing what the potential was for this helped us to understand how to get these tracks together, but I guess you don’t really know until you get into that room. Simon had come back with the Midi arrangements of the tracks and they all sounded very software instruments and it was like OK, it sounds great but we’ll wait to see what it sounds like in the room. We had a day to do it and it was bizarre and incredible to hear that come through in the actual recording of it. I think in terms of that, it was magical. I’d work with brass again, I think.”

The band will perform the song suite at Durham Cathedral with the Easington Colliery Band. “They are local to the Durham area and were our first choice to work with for that,” says Pearson. “When it came to recording we felt that using Marsden Silver Band related to the track of the same name and the place of the same name that we felt inspired to work with and of course it’s Simon’s home village as well, so using two different bands didn’t seem such a problem. The charts will stay the same.”

Pearson believes the pieces will take on a new force performed in the cathedral. “You can’t not let that room take that music and send it into all corners of that building,” he says. “I’ve been in performances in cathedrals and it is jaw-dropping, so to be on the other end of that is going to be an incredibly special moment.”

Armitage expects that some of the people he spoke to during his research will attend the concert. “I got the impression that they were very much behind what we were doing, and very interested in it. I think that’s part of the responsibility that we feel. We’re not from that area, we don’t want to feel like we just parachuted ourselves in to pick up on a particular subject. It was an invitation to go and work there and we want to do the people and that subject proud...It’s giving the subject a huge platform in that venue, we’re talking to God about it.”

LYR perform a regular band set at Long Division festival in Wakefield on Saturday June 11. Their concert with Easington Colliery Band takes place at Durham Brass Festival on July 15. brassfestival.co.uk