‘The synergy is amazing': Stewart Copeland album fuses nature and music
Chirping Arctic terns and howling wolves are among the birds and animals that will be heard in a pioneering composition that fuses sounds from nature with the playing of traditional instruments.
Birdsong and animal calls will interact with orchestral music on an album by Stewart Copeland, the former Police drummer and a seven-time Grammy-winning composer, who has drawn on field recordings made by the British naturalist Martyn Stewart.
Wild Concerto is a 'collaboration between nature and music' where a croaking frog duets with a saxophone, a black-footed albatross twitters over a string motif and an Asian barred owlet hoots to a piano nocturne.
A guillemot, a hyena and a red deer will 'perform' with Copeland on percussion alongside 30 musicians of the Kingdom Orchestra.
Copeland said none of the natural recordings had been manipulated or retuned. 'All the bird and animal sounds are exactly as they were, but I put them in positions so that they add up to a melody and rhythm,' he said.
'Instead of sopranos and tenors, I'm working with hyenas, wolves and a chorus of birds. Their voices bring an unparalleled authenticity to the music.
'They all have their own individual, often atonal melodies but when you put a flute against a red-breasted nuthatch, for example, the synergy is amazing. I picked out sounds that I felt were the soloists, like the wolves, and others that were more atmospheric, like the wild winds of Antarctica, and treated them in a similar way to a trombone or a guitar … The wolves are howling with great soul, great passion, and accompanied by a trombone following their line. It's jazz, the jazz wolf of the Arctic tundra.'
Wild Concerto is inspired by the remarkable migration of the Arctic tern from pole to pole, and some of the birds and animals possibly encountered along the way.
There is an environmental theme to the work, Stewart said. 'Many of these species are endangered and their sounds could vanish in our lifetime. Through the Wild Concerto, their voices are immortalised.'
Over six decades, he has captured the sounds of the natural world, from lush rainforests to remote Arctic tundras – sounds that have been heard in natural history series such as Our Oceans and Blue Planet as well as about 150 films, including Cold Mountain and Frozen.
With an archive of almost 100,000 recordings from more than 60 countries, he has been described as the David Attenborough of sound.
Stewart said: 'I was so sceptical about sticking natural sounds with music. So many saunas and salons play new age music with pianos and oceans and I thought that's what it was going to sound like. But I was just gobsmacked. Stewart [Copeland] is a brilliant talent. He's combined natural sounds and music seamlessly. This is another avenue for people to listen to nature. It's giving the animals another voice.'
He hopes the album will raise awareness of creatures that are extinct, endangered or so affected by noise pollution that their sounds cannot be captured cleanly. 'Two-thirds of the species in my library are now basically extinct. Twenty-five or 30 years ago, when I wanted to record one pristine hour of sound, it took about three or four hours to do that with minimal editing. Today, if I want to record an hour's pristine sound, it takes about 2,000 hours to get that because there are so many manmade sounds in the environment … There's about 10 endangered species on the album … poison dart frogs, wolves, Galápagos tortoise.'
For Copeland, the idea of using sounds from the animal kingdom was 'immediately intriguing'. He recalled his first film score for Francis Ford Coppola, Rumble Fish, and Oliver Stone's Wall Street, where his sounds included dogs barking and billiard balls clacking.
In a video filmed at Abbey Road Studio, Copeland says: 'As I'm composing these sounds, I'm very aware of Martyn out there on his hands and knees in the deepest jungles getting bitten by tsetse fly, black mamba, tarantula, because he has to go far away because of sound pollution … to get this incredible library of sound.'
Wild Concerto is released by Platoon Records on 18 April. Copeland will join fellow composer Arash Safain at Kings Place, London, on Earth Day, 22 April, to discuss the composition and the wider relationship between music and nature, before his nationwide tour.
A track from the album, White Throated Sparrow (Is Happy On the Glacier), can be heard here.
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Wales Online
an hour ago
- Wales Online
I spent a night at the luxury hotel where Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds stay on Wrexham visits
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info The minute you drive through the entrance to Carden Park Hotel and Spa you know you're arriving somewhere special. Set in acres of lush grounds, as you wind along the tree-lined driveway with a beautfully manicured golfing green beside you, as well as water features and wildlife (we spotted a swan and her babies), any cares will be relinquished long before you reach the building itself. In fact it's so special that it's a favourite destination for Hollywood A-listers Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively when they visit the football team he co-owns, Wrexham FC - and they can often be seen entertaining their famous friends there too. And why wouldn't they? Carden Park is about nine miles from Wrexham and has 197 stunning bedrooms (currently undergoing a major makeover) including four luxury suites, a newly-refurbished leisure club, two championship golf courses and award-winning restaurants including The Vines which offers a fine-dining tasting menu. There's also a vineyard and a new £10m spa with one of the largest spa gardens in the UK, which wouldn't look out of place in the Maldives or on a Caribbean island. (Image: James Devaney, GC Imagesvia Getty Images) READ MORE:I tried a tiny restaurant overlooking a Welsh beach and discovered the best Asian fusion food for miles After a quick and seemless check-in we took the lift to our room. During our stay the ongoing refurbishment was evident in the upper corridor as one half was light and airy with plush new carpet and contemporary pale wooden doors while the other half was a little dated. Our refurbished room overlooking the sculpture garden at the front was elegant but homely in shades of blue with floor to ceiling curtains and an ensuite featuring a huge walk-in shower. (Image: Carden Park) It's always the little touches that count and as well as the complimentary teas and coffees and luxury toiletries, a little plate had been left on the side with a selection of homemade chocolates and a welcome message. (Image: Karen Price) We decided to explore and our first port of call was Morgan's Bar where you can enjoy a drink and watch sport on the large TVs. There's also a terrance overlooking the front lawn so we took our drinks outside to people watch before having a walk through the grounds, taking in the sculpture garden featuring a diverse collection of artwork from leading sculptors and the vineyard which produces up to 10,000 bottles of Carden Park Estate Reserve sparkling wine each year from the two grape varieties grown. (Image: Karen Price) Back inside we had a quick change before heading to The Vines where we had a reservation. Before their meal, guests can relax in Goldie's cocktail bar opposite the restaurant with a drink and some snacks as they look through the menu. The surroundings are glamorous but not stuffy with comfy chairs and sofas, a beautiful golden ornate ceiling, low lighting, potted plants and large windows opening up onto a terrace. A pianist was playing background music in the corner adding to the chilled vibe. 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But my favourite was the Dark Chocolate Mousse which had a beetroot sponge, mascarpone, cocoa nib crumb and beetroot sorbet. Yes you read that right - who would have thought the humble earthy vegetable could be the basis of one of the best puddings I've tasted. The combination with the rich dark chocolate was simply delightful. There is also the option of a cheese board for a £5 supplement or as an additional course for £17 featuring a selection of cheeses, grapes and celery with jam. To finish off, you can enjoy a coffee with a selection of petit fours just like the ones that were left in our room, which we just about managed after all those lovely courses. While we dined like kings - or Hollywood royalty - the next morning we were up early ready to sample the hotel's breakfast, which features full English and continental choices, and after a little breather we headed to the spa. (Image: Carden Park) Housed in a new building a stone's throw from the main hotel, the spa (strictly for over 18s) is quite literally out of this world. From elaborate interiors to a breathtaking garden that features hot tubs, a pool, relaxation pods and a sauna with floor to ceiling windows looking across the Cheshire countryside, this is chilling at its best. There's also a variety of treatments on offer, from facials to foot and scalp rituals and manicures. I chose the Rejuvenating Ritual (£109 for 50 minutes) which combined a back, neck and shoulder massage with a facial. Bliss. Before heading home we enjoyed lunch in the spa restaurant overlooking the gardens which offers a selction of healthy options including all day brunches, sandwiches and wraps, salads and lighter bites. All of the facilities at Carden Park - from the bedrooms to the restaurants and spa - are exceptional and the staff are super friendly and helpful. Leaving the resort after our 24-hour stay we felt relaxed, pampered - and definitely like Hollywood royalty.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
Glasgow Times
2 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Pub Quiz June 7: How smart are you? Take this pub quiz
Perfect if you're taking a trip to the pub this weekend, this quiz will let you brush up on some of that unusual but essential knowledge for the occasion. With 10 fun questions, the pub quiz will get your brain cogs working and put your general knowledge skills to the test. Take last week's quiz now: Pub Quiz May 31: How smart are you? Take this pub quiz From what is the rarest blood type to what is Scotland's national animal, see how many questions you can guess correctly. So, if you think you have what it takes to be the pub quiz master, find out now and take our quiz. If you liked that quiz, you can see how British you are with the UK's citizenship test. You can even test your Barbie knowledge with our Barbie quiz and find out if you're a Barbie or just Ken. Now that you've put your brain to the test, you'll want to start revising hard in preparation for the next pub quiz. Did you get 10/10, or was it a tough round for you? Keep an eye on the news and get ready for next week's pub quiz. How well did you do? Let us know in the comments below. What is the history of the pub quiz? The pub quiz is believed to have originated from a company called Burns and Porter, which would share their quizzes in the 1970s in order to encourage more regular visitors. The regular pub quizzes saw pub numbers rise from 30 teams a week to a peak of 10,000 teams. Burns and Porter went on to publish their own line of pub quiz books and would continue to host weekly quizzes.
