Biography
Early in 2011, a dream featuring Betty Corrigall—an abandoned Orkney resident who took her own life in the late 1770s while pregnant outside marriage—prompted Erland Cooper to assemble a new project. He recruited Simon Tong, a former bandmate from Erland & the Carnival whose résumé already included the Verve and the Good, the Bad and the Queen, along with Irish singer-songwriter Hannah Peel, thereby founding the Magnetic North and conceiving an album devoted to the islands where Cooper had spent his childhood. The three musicians relocated to Stromness and captured the material inside Cooper’s parents’ residence, drawing on the archipelago’s legacy of folk traditions, verse, and its stark yet striking terrain. Issued by Full Time Hobby in 2012, the resulting Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North enjoyed both commercial and critical attention, leading the group to reunite in 2015 once each member had completed separate endeavors. At Peel’s suggestion they turned their attention to Skelmersdale, the Lancashire town where Tong had been raised. Constructed in 1961 amid Britain’s second wave of postwar housing expansion, the settlement later declined during the 1980s until the Transcendental Meditation movement established its headquarters there, attracting families—including Tong’s—from across the country to promote its ethos of peace and love. After discarding the bulk of their initial recordings, the trio restarted the process and ultimately completed Prospect of Skelmersdale. Once more informed by local surroundings and the Transcendental Meditation community, the record emphasized the muted tones of working-class suburban life, recalling the social realism of Ken Loach’s Kes and Mike Leigh’s domestic narratives. Full Time Hobby released Prospect of Skelmersdale in early 2016.
Albums
