The Magnetic North

The Magnetic North are a British band, formed between multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong (formerly of The Verve, Blur and The Good, the Bad & the Queen), Orcadian artist and producer Gawain Erland Cooper and singer, composer and orchestral arranger Hannah Peel. Their songs are part autobiography and part psychogeography.

Contents

• The magnetic north signs
• The magnetic north bay of skaill
• Personnel
• Discography
• Songs
• References

Having come together to make an album that imagined the landscape, legends and people of Gawain Erland Cooper's birthplace, Orkney (2012’s highly acclaimed Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North), and originally intending to be a one-off, their popularity led them to reconvene to release follow-up Prospect of Skelmersdale in 2016 - evoking childhood memory, people and place, and an examination of how a failing Northern new town became home to the transcendental meditation movement. If Orkney was the musical equivalent of great nature writing then Prospect of Skelmersdale is somewhere between finely-tuned kitchen-sink drama and urban psychogeography. Inspired as much by the greys and greens of Kes, as the soothing, cyclical patterns of meditative ragas, Prospect of Skelmersdale is a collection of musical snapshots of a uniquely British town.

It is a concept album about Tong's Transcendentalist hometown, Skelmersdale. In an interview with Transverso Media he described it as, "a series of little snapshots that I had drawn from my memory of people and places," stating it's, "kind of about where I grew up. I’m kind of wondering what the people of that town will think about it – whether they’ll like it or they won’t like it. I don’t know."

The inspiration for Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North was the appearance in a dream of Betty Corrigall to Cooper, insisting that he should write an album about his island home.