
The Cut.
With support from Sound and Music, Arts Council England, The Canal and Rivers Trust and the help of 27 partner organisations, Dead Rat Orchestra undertook a unique and audacious tour during July and August of 2014, across the canals and waterways of Southern England, from London to Bristol via Oxford.
DRO aimed to use the 273 mile odyssey to chart these inland waters, gathering an informal history of England's once thriving industrial arteries, exploring social, historical and musical roots. Having researched and developed musical material about and from this history they stopped daily to perform and interact with locals along the route, sharing stories and learning new ones, making connections. Often packing up and moving on in their boat 'Gemini II' shortly after performances, the sense of Journey was at the forefront of this tour, more than any other, with the music and performances developing in unexpected ways that reflected the nature of their movement.
They played in churches, under bridges, in boatmen's pubs, from pontoon gardens, at the London Canal Museum, the Arnolfini art gallery and even the oldest music performance space in Europe, The Holywell Music Rooms. They danced and hollered amongst victorian pumping engines and clattered through a museum of industrial heritage.The physicality of life on the boat was tansformative, with the Genini II's outboard motor becoming the forth voice in their ever tighter vocal renditions of songs that explored the hopes and aspirations of the countries first steps into industrialisation.
FOLK RADIO asked us to provide a diary of sorts - we obliged with a post from each of the three of us from different stages of the tour, covering different aspects of our journey each time...
1. Lucy Broadwood and forgotten songs found - Dan's blog.
2. Steering and singing to the motor - Robin's blog.
3. A compendium of waterways thought - Nathan's blog.
The Oxford Times gave the following review....
We were accompanied by film-maker Ian Nesbitt for sections of the journey, inviting him to make his own interpretation of our activities:
“The films serve as a parallel odyssey, each day's experiences relentlessly accumulating, as band members become less autonomous masters of their destiny and more as intractable elements of the history that they and their gloriously inappropriate vessel the 'Gemini II' set out to tame.”
“The band's own voices and instruments become immersed and entangled in the sonic environments they pass through to create new and unexpected music of the waterways.”