New town quixotics
Conceptual chamber-pop trio sing about failed town planning in the home of design. By Andrew Male.
The Magnetic North RIBA, London
On an ankle-high stage, at the far end of the grand Florence Hall dining room in 66 Portland Place, lit by late summer evening light pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows, a man is reading from a piece of paper. This is John Grindrod, author of Concretopia, a book about the failed Utopian vision of Britain’s post-war new towns, and the first support “act” on stage at The Magnetic North’s occupation of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ modernist 1930s headquarters. Under the umbrella title of “People And Place – An Evening Of Live Music, Film, Literature And Architecture”, tonight’s line-up of three authors, three short films and one band has been assembled to celebrate the release of the North’s new LP, Prospect Of Skelmersdale. Like their first release, 2012’s Orkney: Symphony Of The Magnetic North, the trio’s new album was inspired by the landscape of childhood. Yet rather than the bleak natural beauty of lead vocalist Erland Cooper’s Orcadian home, Prospect Of Skelmersdale concerns itself with guitarist Simon Tong’s formative environment, the failed postwar, manmade community in West Lancashire his family moved to in 1984, to be part of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Skem-based meditation village, The Golden Temple Of The Age Of Enlightenment. The first hour of the gig possesses a suitably Utopian feel all its own, a belief that gigs can also be given over to book readings and educational films and not suffer in the process. The applause seems especially loud when The Magnetic North finally take the stage. Beneath an overhead slideshow of Skelmersdale photos from the RIBA archives, and a 1986 film showing the opening of The Golden Temple Of The Age Of Enlightenment, Cooper, Tong, and third member Hannah Peel – accompanied by cellist Jo Silverston, violinist Antonia Pagulatos, drummer James Field and Guy Passey on oboe and clarinet – transform their darkly poetic chamberpop songs into hushed, harmonious, valedictory confessionals. It’s quieter than they’d normally play – a black box above the band’s head promises a power cut if they get too loud – but these songs benefit from the almost conspiratorial whisper Cooper and Peel sing in tonight. They intersperse the set with songs from the Orkney album, including the forlorn Efterklangian pop of Bay Of Skaill and Old Man Of Hoy, which, with its central refrain of “From the old town to the new town/Never stop moving on”, neatly links together the two albums, but it’s the Skelmersdale songs that work best tonight. Imbued with a wistful sadness and delivered in voices that sound like the forlorn ghosts of this failed northern Shangri-La, the North’s songs whisper through the corridors of this venerable gentleman’s club of British architecture and can’t help but sound like revenants, come back to seek redress for every bold architectural vision that failed the people who lived in them.