Alongside a host of talent from the literary world, this year’s Off the Shelf Festival welcomes one very well-known author in a slightly different guise. Formed from the combined creative heft of current poet laureate Simon Armitage (yes, that fella from your GCSEs), singer-songwriter Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist/producer Patrick J Pearson, the L Y R trio will bring their utterly unique sound to Sheffield’s Octagon on 15 October.
Ahead of that, Exposed caught up with Simon and Richard to talk about the band’s unlikely origins, the joys of musical collaboration and why this could so easily have all been “really shit”.
I had the pleasure of being on a call with a bona fide national treasure last month. No, not Richard Walters’ cat, who bobbed in and out of frame throughout, but none other than current poet laureate Simon Armitage.
Simon makes up one third of LYR’s musical tripod, alongside Richard and today’s missing third member, producer Patrick J Pearson. Still, as Simon points out, by happy accident I bear a passing resemblance to the multi-instrumentalist, albeit a worse-looking, and definitely less talented version, so it sort of feels like he was there in spirit.
With my role as emergency understudy now firmly in place, we move on to the band’s name – L Y R – and its muddled origin story.
“We originally wanted full stops between the letters,” says Simon, “but our first record label thought that would harm search results, so they took them out.”
“It didn’t seem to harm R.E.M, though.”
The name was never supposed to be pronounced ‘liar’ (which is what I’ve been doing!), the acronym actually stands for Land Yacht Regatta, a phrase chosen more for how it felt than what it meant. “We all live in different parts of the UK, and we’re all coming at this from slightly different angles,” Simon explains. “We wanted something that was like a three-way contradiction but actually ran nicely as a phrase – you know, like Sheffield Ski Village.”
With that cleared up, we discuss why Simon, no stranger to Off the Shelf, has chosen to perform with the band rather than in a more traditional author slot. “It’s always been a festival that’s willing to experiment a little bit and work with hybrid art forms,” he says. “But they invited us – that’s the short answer – and it felt like a good fit.”
“Some festivals come and go but Off the Shelf feeds into the energy of Sheffield. There’s a kind of family feel to the arts in the city.”
Richard also notes a distinct difference in the crowd compared to a ‘regular’ gig. “There’s no better listening audience than readers. They’re calm, they listen. People walk away surprised because it’s not what they expected. They think it’ll be Simon reading over ambient soundscapes – but it’s not that. It pushes people a bit.”
The centuries-old position of poet laureate has always offered its incumbent the chance to share and flex their creativity – but few previous title-holders have attempted to drag it into the present day with quite as much bold enthusiasm as Simon. While it’s true that predecessors have set their pieces to music before, L Y R is a very different proposition. This isn’t poetry with a backing track. It’s a proper, intentional band.
But it is still spoken word set to music and could quite easily be – for want of a better word – shit. “One way that this could be really shit is that it would be very experimental,” Simon says. “I hate experimental work. I don’t want to see people’s workings out – I want to see the finished product. All three of us agreed early on that we’re interested in moving people with what we do, not alienating people through challenging and difficult noises.”
Richard is equally protective. “This project is like an untouchable joy for me,” he says. “I do a lot of writing for other projects, but this is something I do because I love it. We’re all close friends now, and there’s a real joy in being in a gang.”
The band began over a decade ago when Richard – a fan of Simon’s poetry since his school days – reached out to ask if he could set some of it to music. “We had this idea of a spoken word project that straddled two worlds,” he recalls. A dictaphone was posted back and forth across the country, recordings swapped and layered, eventually culminating in something rich, strange and utterly compelling.
Although L Y R’s working methods often involve sending files back and forth online, they recently spent a few days together in a studio and knocked out the bones of 12 or 13 new tracks. “We’d been storing a lot up that needed expression,” says Simon. “There’s no substitute for being together in a room.”
Their roles aren’t fixed. Sometimes Simon starts with the words. Sometimes a song begins with Richard and builds outwards. Occasionally there’s even a touch of harmonising – of sorts. “There’s one song we wrote for a project in Barnsley called A Natural History, and it finishes with a three-part harmony for about 25 seconds,” Simon says. “I lent my voice to that. First time I did it, I don’t think the others were expecting it.”
He was also handed a guitar once at a festival. “I suspect I wasn’t plugged in,” he adds, deadpan.
Though Simon doesn’t sing, the contrast between his delivery and Richard’s vocals forms a key part of L Y R’s power. “There’s a sort of conversation going on,” he explains. “Richard often articulates something from a different point of view – or the opposite one. There’s a dialogue between speech and song. You can’t quite anticipate who’s going to take the load-bearing parts of a track.”
Thematically, that contrast is mirrored in the music. “There are often desperate, sad or annoyed lyrics,” Richard says, “but they’re matched with this euphoric sound underneath. It just works.”
Simon agrees. “That contradiction – sad words with beautiful music – has always been attractive.”
Alongside their album work, the band has found a niche creating commissioned pieces. They’ve recently performed at the Proms with a 17-minute piece about the Shipping Forecast. Another previous work focused on the Category D mining villages in Durham. “There’s something creatively affirming about telling someone else’s story,” Richard says. “It feels like we’re part of something bigger.”
So, what’s next?
A new album is pencilled for March, and the Sheffield show will likely get a sneak preview of some of the material. “They’ll either be guinea pigs,” says Simon, “or it’ll be a world premiere. One and the same thing, often.”
An evening with Simon Armitage and L Y R takes place on 15 October at the Octagon. Tickets £20/25 are available from offtheshelf.org.uk.
