Sails and scales
Poet laureate and landlubber Simon Armitage brings the Shipping Forecast’s lyrical energy to the Proms
James Weston Lewis
- Michael Hodges
This Proms performance will be played on Radio 3 at 9pm on Friday. Add it to your collection now
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Like most landlubbers, Simon Armitage – born far from the coast in West Yorkshire – has never deliberately tuned in to the Shipping Forecast, yet it exerts a strange power over him. “I find the Shipping Forecast peaceful and I can’t quite tell you why,” says the poet laureate. “People at sea rely on it for navigation, but I don’t think of it as a functional thing; for me it’s everyday poetry.”
There is an undoubted enchantment in the forecast’s evocation of 31 names: the hypnotic lilt of Hebrides, Fisher and German Bight. Is it a little perplexing to be out-poeticised by a weather report? “No, it’s not. I’m sure the Shipping Forecast developed organically. Nobody imagined it would become this lullaby mantra.”
That mantra, beginning with Viking then looping round the Bay of Biscay and Ireland and ending with Southeast Iceland, was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925. To celebrate the centenary, Armitage, 62, and Land Yacht Regatta, the rock band he plays in with Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson, has created a piece of music for the BBC Proms. Their seven-movement work, Yonderland, will premiere in Belfast on Friday night, performed with the Ulster Orchestra as part of a Shipping Forecast Prom that includes Storm from Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and traditional Irish music.
There will also be excerpts from the BBC archive and the voice of Neil Nunes, the radio announcer with fathoms-deep tones, in a soundscape that will merge the band with the orchestra. “What we’re doing is fitting around the amazing swell of the orchestra,” says Walters. And how do the band fit music around Armitage’s spoken words? “You try to find a pace within the reading,” says Pearson. “The way that things are phrased often leads the conversation of what’s the tempo, what’s the signature, what’s the key?”
Poet laureate and playwright Simon Armitage. Getty
Should the poet laureate even be in a rock band? It’s a question that Armitage winces at. “If the job of the poet laureate is to connect art with the matter of this country, then that’s what this project’s about,” he says. “I can’t think of a poet laureate who hasn’t worked with music. Going right back to John Dryden who wrote what we would now call song lyrics. Betjeman had his Banana Blush project, and one of the last times I bumped into Ted Hughes before he died, he was with Pete Townshend talking about writing a musical opera of the Iron Man. There’s a tradition there.”
Armitage isn’t the first poet to tap into the power of the Shipping Forecast; Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy were there before him. “The names are a gift,” he says. “It would be unwise not to tap into that energy. They seem to suggest a territory, a fictional landscape. When writing, I imagine these places almost have character, are realms in their own right.
“There’s one section where I’ve written a list of fictional shipping forecast areas. Places like Narnia and Atlantis.” In Armitage’s telling, Rockall, the outcrop of rock that gives its name to an area of the east Atlantic, becomes “unmoored” and goes searching for romance. “It’s a rock of unspecified gender,” he says. “As befits the age we live in.”
This is work tinged with humour, and it avoids the stormier subjects that bedevil British waters right now. “I don’t think getting into the politics of the small boats would have dignified that subject in this context,” he says, though he does argue that the Shipping Forecast, like the sea, isn’t the UK’s alone. “I’d like to think that the language of the Shipping Forecast joins all of that up.” he says. “Lots of people listen for nostalgic reasons, or it’s something that they really enjoy. And they’re not necessarily British – they just listen to the Shipping Forecast.”
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Do things work out for Rockall? “Well, without giving away a spoiler, something happens at the end with Lundy.”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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