Co-directed by Charlie Morrisey

Sound design Sebastian Frost and John del Nero

Sound artists: Samh, Chris Ruffoni, Monty Adkins, Jaydev Mistry, Yorkshire Sound Women’s Network, Hoot, many teenagers

Performers: Ruby Wood, Amber Leigh, Thabo Mkwananzi, Rob Bradley, Martin Chung, Jack Button, Noah Burton, Supriya Nagarajan, Bryony Griffith, Alice Jones, Testament, Mohammadreza Beladi, Boliyaan Group led by Swarnjit Kaur and Hardeep Sahota, Huddersfield Choral Society led by Ellie Slorach, Huddersfield Choral Society Voices led by Laura Bailie, Huddersfield Community Gospel Choir led by Edwin Baker, Shepley Singers led by Bryony Griffiths, Skelmanthorpe Brass Band and Hade Edge Brass Band directed by Martin Heartfield, Marsden Music Ensemble led by Simon Wood, many many children

Produced by Artichoke

Project manager Tilda Verrals

Photos Matthew Andrews

 

Watch Colm Hogan’s film of Herd here

 

Listen to the music here:

HERD | The Songs of HERD

HERD | Part 1: Pastures

HERD | Part 2: Factories

HERD | Part 3: Streets

 

1

 

Once upon a time, there were sheep living in the wild, and there were humans.

 

Then we, we humans, we saw an opportunity.  These sheep could be useful to us.

 

We ate the sheep, we drank their milk, we made cheese from their milk, we took their fleeces and learned to spin, and knit, and weave, and we clothed ourselves. We lived with the sheep, we talked to them, we sang to them. We gave them names. We brought them closer to us. We cleared forests to make space for their pastures. They became not just useful but vital to us. We looked after them, we loved them, we moved at their speed, we took them to market, we traded them, we turned them into commodities, they made us rich – some of us.

 

And the sheep thought….. What did the sheep think?

 

 

2

 

The sheep lived in the pastures, and we ate them, and we turned their fleeces into garments, sometimes by hand, sometimes using beautiful machines.

 

Then we – some of us – we saw an opportunity. We made the machines larger, more efficient, more powerful.  We put the machines in large factories.

We made worsted, and broadcloth, and tweed, and gaberdine, and serge, and felt. We made herringbone and houndstooth and dogtooth and tartan. We made mungo and shoddy. We were busy. We moved faster than sheep.

 

We came – some of us – from other places to work in the factories. We sorted and we washed and we spun and we warped and we weaved and we dyed, we dyed in the wool.

 

And the sheep had a new responsibility – to provide more fleeces – more and more and more. More sheep, more fleeces, more profit.

 

They made us very rich – some of us.

 

And the sheep thought….. What did the sheep think?

 

 

3

 

And now, here we are. The sheep are still with us, living in the pastures. We live – most of us – in the cities.  We still – most of us - eat the sheep. Some of us think that’s a terrible idea. We still make them into garments. Some of us think that’s a terrible idea.  Some of us think we should plant forests on the sheep pastures.

 

We move faster, faster, much faster than sheep, on bicycles, in cars, in aeroplanes.

 

We, some of us, we have seen an opportunity. We weave wool and we cover the wool with resin and we make a material stronger than steel, lighter than air (almost). Out of this material we can make cars and aeroplanes. Sheep and ingenuity can still make us happy, can still make us rich, some of us.

 

And the sheep think….. What do the sheep think?

 

 

4

 

What next? What next for us? What next for sheep?

 

There will hope and despair.

There will be sadness and delight.

 

We will replace ourselves with machines. Maybe.

We will live in other galaxies. Maybe.

 

The climate will continue to change. Probably.

Huddersfield will be a desert. Huddersfield will be under water.

Huddersfield will be farmland. Maybe.

 

We will treat sheep with respect. Maybe.

A sheep will be President of the United States. Possibly.

We will understand how sheep think. Maybe.

We will understand how we think. Possibly.

 

What do we want?

 

*

 

I am obsessed with the fact that we spend a lot of energy and time planning our visual environment but almost none in planning our aural environment. Our attitude to our aural environment is to try, feebly, to mitigate its nasty excesses.

Let’s do something positive!

 

In a hotel in Derry, I propose to Helen Marriage the (sane) ambitious director of the arts production company Artichoke an insanely ambitious project, Mass Notification. We would install sound systems in three locations, each covering a square mile (yes, I know), one in the centre of a city, one on its outskirts, one in the surrounding countryside. We’d exchange sounds between the locations, and make a playful piece in which sounds could rush down a city street, or hover in the air at a motorway junction, or tease the ear in a forest. We’d make music from the sounds and we’d let it loose. We’d organise events to punctuate the soundscape: speeches, dance classes, performances.

 

To her great credit Helen has never given up on this idea. It will probably never be realised, but it has had consequences.

 

First we make a modest piece Ready To Drop on the basketball court on the seaside promenade in Brighton. We record the sounds of the basketball games and play them back at night when the court is empty, make music from the collision of the sounds of the basketball and the sounds of the sea and the birds – shouts, calls, foghorns, sea shanties, fragments of radio broadcasts – a disorientating dreamscape.

 

(We? Artichoke, me and the sound experts John del Nero and Sebastian Frost.)

 

William Galinsky, producer, who is programming the Kirklees Year of Music festival 2023, comes to Ready To Drop, likes it, and commissions us to make a piece to launch the festival. He wants a sound installation in Huddersfield, or perhaps (for political reasons) three sound installations, one in Huddersfield, one in Dewsbury, one in Batley. To launch a festival with a sound installation seems odd (where are the people?), so we decide to include performance. To make an outdoor event in January seems daft, so we agree to make the event in July. So it doesn’t launch the festival. But I can’t get rid of the idea of performance. In this area of Yorkshire with its wonderful history of amateur musicianship – choirs, handbell bands, brass bands – and its immigrant music – reggae, bhangra, qawaali, kirtan, as well as its rock bands, its northern soul bands, its jazz bands, I want to work with everyone - every brass band every choir every orchestra every boliyaan singer every qawwali singer every reggae band every ska band every jazz band every heavy metal band every child.

 

Mandeep Samra, who makes a wonderful podcast Townsounds investigating the music of the area, introduces us to the world of Jamaican sound systems, beautiful constructions to play at massive volume the music that the people want to listen to (rather than the music on the radio), and party to. My first idea is to construct a massive sound system in St George’s Square in Huddersfield that is a replica of the architecture of the square made from speakers.

 

At the same time we are thinking about sheep, realising that sheep have been crucially important here, partly because of farming but mostly because of the woolen textile industry which has shaped the area, not just economically but by encouraging (needing!) immigration. So I look at St George’s Square and there on top of one of the buildings is a lion for some reason, and I think let’s put a giant sheep on top of the sound system to echo the lion, oh and let’s put a speaker in the sheep, this sheep must have a voice. No no no let’s do sheep and nothing but sheep, says John, the sheep are the sound system, and the sheep can move, yes, the sheep can move around the whole area, and they can be alone or in pairs or groups…..

 

Flock?

No, Herd, says Kate of Artichoke. We like the implied pun.

The council doesn’t like the title. Are you suggesting the people of Kirklees can be herded? Er, no, it’s the sheep that will be herded.

 

Supriya Nagarajan, Carnatic singer, shows us round Dewsbury. We are struck by the confident beauty of the 19th century architecture and the scuzziness of the town centre. What’s happening here? It would be lovely to do something outside the Minster, but there’s a racket going on all day from the ring road.

 

Kate and Helen and I are looking for a place to eat in Dewsbury. I remember having a wonderful fish tawa (minutely chopped fish and vegetables, fried with spices) at a restaurant in Manchester (Akbar’s?), so I suggest going to The Tawa Place. Turns out to be a rather different matter. Have you been here before? says the waitress, clearly discombobulated by our arrival. No. Have you booked? No. Well, er, ok. We sit down. We are the only people in the restaurant. Is there a menu? Apparently not. She brings an uninspiring plate of chopped vegetables and a couple of dates. We eat dutifully. Still no menus. Then it happens, and it’s serious. An enormous skillet, in the centre two curries and round the edge a forest of tandooried meats. A stack of chapatis. Amazing, mildly alarming (particularly to Helen, who has recently decided to go vegetarian), a very long way from what we were expecting. And delicious, if you’re an omnivore. Twenty minutes later the restaurant is full. Ah, of course, it’s Ramadan. People are eating, hurriedly, exactly the same meal as ours. They disappear, and we are left marveling. It’s been an education.

 

William organises an event at Huddersfield Town Hall for everyone interested in the festival. I’m sitting at a table with someone carrying what looks like the insides of a goat, and which turns out to be an Iranian bagpipe, a neyanbam, someone who’s just written a 500-page book about handbell ringing, someone who works with women to make sound installations, someone who’s working on a new kind of carnival, and a spectacularly well-dressed person who is an expert on bhangra and is obsessed with the music of Prince. An inspiring tableful.

 

We are looking for someone to design the sheep and Helen finds Dave Young who is surely perfect. He has worked with, amongst others, Welfare State and what he doesn’t know about making stuff for outdoor events isn’t worth knowing. And he just happens to live and work in Huddersfield. We visit the studio where he works with his wife Jane in a knackered industrial complex (we are, nominally, indoors, but the weather is very present), and are charmed by a Jabberwocky that is under construction from recycled materials.  Dave says that he has a low boredom threshold and wants the sheep to be very different from one another, constructed from many different materials, with different personalities. Good. They will be different sizes too, some life-size, some large, some larger, one massive. After some financial arm-wrestling, there will be twenty-three of them.

 

They will operate all over Kirklees, an administrative region which includes beautiful parts of the Pennines (Marsden, Holmfirth), 19th century industrial areas which are not so industrial now, a network of towns that almost connect (Cleckheaton, Liversedge, Dewsbury, Batley), suburbs of Leeds. Since the textile industry has shrunk, there’s an economic problem, but there’s also an energy and a determination, and there’s a vibrant culture.

 

The event will last a week. The sheep will start, singly, on the boundaries of Kirklees (beating the bounds!), the joke being that no one knows or cares where these boundaries are, in fields, by reservoirs, by streams, on moorland. Some will be hard to get to – but that’s part of the point, to encourage people to go to places they’re unfamiliar with. The giant sheep – the Mother Sheep – will be on top of Castle Hill overlooking Huddersfield, calling her flock. We’ll light her at night; she’ll be seen from miles away. During the week the sheep will be herded through the area, gathering together in larger and larger groups, into 19th century industrial locations, into the towns (moving from the distant past into the present) and eventually into Huddersfield where there will be a grand finale. At each stage they will play soundscapes inspired by place and history.

 

As they move the sheep will encounter performers – singers, bands, choirs, beatboxers – who will be in conversation with them, the soundscapes punctuated by performances.

 

On the penultimate day the sheep will be mounted on the backs of cars and trucks and drive round towns – Cleckheaton, Liversedge, Dewsbury, Batley – occasionally collecting to process round and round a roundabout or a supermarket car park.

 

At the beginning of the week the public comes to the event; at the end of the week the event comes to the public.

 

On the final day the sheep will assemble in St George’s Square, all twenty-three of them. Now the sound can become beautifully complex, moving round the sheep, coursing through them, running from one side of the square to the other. As near to Mass Notification as this project will get. The finale will be a procession from the square up the hill, the sheep (on wheels) pulled by teams of people with ropes (rugby teams! body builders! sumo wrestlers!), to Greenhead Park for an event that considers the future – the future of the area, the future of sheep and by implication the future of the planet.

 

Heck. Not the simplest project ever devised.

 

*

 

Helen has the idea of launching the project early in the year by bringing a large flock of (real) sheep into Huddersfield. Excellent. (Not such a fanciful idea, the annual Sheep Drive of the Freemen of the City of London brings a flock of sheep across London Bridge into the City.) The timing turns out to be tricky - many of the sheep will be pregnant.

 

William has a bust-up with the council, and disappears. The council takes over the running of the festival, and there is a period where our project seems doomed, our ally gone, the council (understandably) worrying whether to put money into a massive arts event or funding, say, part of a hospital. But somehow, by the skin of its teeth, the project survives.

 

Qaisar, who runs Radio Sangam the Asian radio station and is on the board of the festival, takes us out for a slap-up meal, tawa+++, in a restaurant belonging to a friend of his (everyone in Huddersfield is a friend of his). That is extremely generous, but it’s not all. Afterwards we go to Heavenly Delights, and it’s another education for me, a restaurant serving mocktails and wildly elaborate desserts that are works of art.

 

To make the performance aspect of the project happen we are working with the choreographer and director Charlie Morrissey. Charlie and I go round and round and round Kirklees looking for inspiring sites. Some suggest themselves immediately – Deffer Wood, Holme Moss, Marsden Moor, Butterley Reservoir, Oakwell Hall, the river at Mirfield, Slaithwaite Lock – but they’re not guaranteed; there will be endless negotiations with the owners.

 

Looking down from Holme Moss, we see below us Yateholme Reservoir and decide to take a closer look. We mindlessly follow the instructions on the satnav and find ourselves driving down a bumpy downhill track with increasingly deep steps, eventually realising that we’ll never get back up. The reservoir is spectacular but we realise that it’s asking a bit much of the public to wreck the axles of their cars and have to be rescued by helicopter.

 

I am wildly excited (no one else is) by a small circular copse overlooking a quarry near Lane Head. It’s a strange magical place. I imagine a circle of sheep round the edge and a group of knitters amongst the trees, knitting a Neolithic burial mound. But we have climbed over a gate with a sign saying Danger Keep Out, so I’m going to have to give up on that idea.

 

We make several visits to Longwood, a strange kingdom hidden away on the outskirts of Huddersfield, a wild lumpy landscape suitable for extreme golf and misbehaviour. On one mound is a strange approximate stumpy tower, built in the mid-19th century for the Longwood Thump, a musical celebration, ‘The Mother of All Sings’, that has been happening yearly in some form ever since. At the top of the tower someone has painted ‘Fuck The Pigeons’. It’s an intriguing neglected location, but bringing sheep on to it would be more or less impossible, our sheep anyway - bringing real sheep would ironically be no problem.

 

We are interested in Emley Tower, a radio mast. A Kirklees beacon. But the owners are wary. After some big national event (an England football match? The death of David Attenborough?) people have broken in and tried to climb the tower (which is admittedly very tempting). So we’ll place the sheep in a field nearby with a clear view of the tower. Better.

 

Yorkshire Water says no to everything, so we have to give up on several of our ideas. (They seem to own half the countryside, the half that isn’t golf courses.) Holme Moss and Castle Hill are problematic because of the possibility of high winds. We decide to place the Mother Sheep in St George’s Square throughout the week. She will call, intermittently, tantalising fragments of sound.

 

Oh oh oh, who cares about horrible Yorkshire Water, we meet up with We in Front. By a beautiful quirk of immigration there is in Huddersfield a wildly disproportionate number of immigrants from Cariacou, a tiny island off Grenada in the Caribbean. Coral reefs, clear waters. Why come here? Oh shut up. They are here, and they have formed a walking group. We walk on Marsden Moor, and they show us videos of a kind of music I’ve never come across before, parang, originally from Venezuela, which seems to happen mainly at Christmas. You go round late at night waking people up and playing parang and partying. Paranging. The lyrics are usually improvised – and daft. Apparently there are sub-genres of parang such as soca parang and chutney parang. What an education. And at the same time we are wandering through a wild beautiful part of England I’ve never seen before. Is this work?

 

Charlie and I talk about how to make sense of the performances during the week. Performers will come to the sites, perform a short piece once, twice, three times. Sometimes this music will coexist with the soundscape, sometimes it will be an interruption. We’ll think of each performance as a scene in a film (and we’ll film it), a conversation between performers and sheep.

 

We visit Bates Mill in Huddersfield, a partly operating textile mill. One of its owners Richard Bates shows us round proudly and we watch a carding machine at work, an awe-inspiring sight, big wheels and small wheels and big belts and small belts and shuttles and shuttles and monitors. It’s like a life-support machine. The yarn goes in to the machine in a chaotic state and comes out looking like something you might want to make into a garment. I record the sound to use in a soundscape somewhere.

 

We meet Greg and Ellie who run the Huddersfield Choral Society, the oldest choral society in Britain. I have some form with the choir, having written a piece for them for the Proms in 2006, We Turned On The Light. I’m pleased to find members of the choir who haven’t forgotten it. Though the fact that those people sung that song twenty years ago is evidence of their age. Like many choirs singing mostly classical music, they’re finding it difficult to recruit younger singers. Greg and Ellie want to extend the reach of the choir, collaborate with other choirs.  

 

We meet Edwin who runs the Huddersfield Community Gospel Choir. The choir has emerged from a church background but has expanded to include people who are not necessarily Christians but love singing gospel music. Some members of the choir are disturbed by the idea of performing in a secular event, some are keen to be involved in a big project, to make connections with other parts of the community.

 

The person carrying around the insides of a goat is Mohammadreza Beladi who has come to live in Kirklees from Bushehr in South-West Iran. He is part of a band whose members live in several different countries, who work together by sending each other recordings; the band never performs live. I am fascinated by bagpipes, an instrument which crops up in different forms in almost every country in the world, and I am fascinated by Mohammadreza’s unruly version. It’s like a wild beast. He patiently shows me its possibilities.

 

The spectacularly well-dressed person who is an expert on bhangra and is obsessed with the music of Prince turns out to be Hardeep Sahota. He will help us by forming a boliyaan group with his friend Swarjit Kaur, which will sing (and dance) gorgeous Punjabi folk songs about working in textile mills.

 

We meet Sunil Kalyan, tabla and dohl player, producer, and Shabnam Khan, singer. I am in awe of Sunil because he was in Alaap, one of the first bhangra bands in Britain, the band that made me excited about bhangra. And I am in awe of Shabnam because she’s exploding with ideas. Would you write a song about the future? Yes, it will be in nine languages. Aaah! But it emerges that she has a vicious kind of cancer. Sunil arranges for her to go to Cairo for treatment, but she never comes back. I am acutely disturbed by her death, but my feelings are as nothing compared with Sunil’s.

 

We meet Bryony Griffiths, folk singer. I am keen to incorporate local folk songs about weaving, and she is the person. We have watched a video of her and Alice Jones singing one of their songs, accompanying themselves on harmonium and violin, on the bank of a canal, ah, perfect. Bryony and Alice know several weaving songs already, and Bryony finds a book of songs by a local songwriter Fred Brown, including the wonderful Old Servants, about a knackered loom: ‘What ails mi loom? / It’s all awry / Summat snaps / And t’shuttles fly.’ The tuner comes, and fails to mend it. ‘Me and t’owd looms / Hed wer day / Let’s get downed / And lay away.’ Bryony runs a folk choir the Shepley Singers, and they become a key part of the project.

 

A phrase comes into my head: Yan tan tethera. What’s that? Oh yes, a way of counting sheep that was used in many parts of Britain. Yan tan tethera methera pip sethera lethera hovera dovera dik yanadik chanadik tetheradik metheradik bumfit yanabum chanabum tetherabum metherabum jiggit. (There were many different variants.) You could count to twenty. And beyond? I write a children’s song using these words. Surely as an eight-year-old you’ll enjoy singing the word ‘bumfit’?

 

We go to a rehearsal of the Dewsbury Soul Choir, and it’s a delight. We sing along to Dusty’s Son of a Preacher Man, one of my favourite songs, and I’m a happy man. And then I can’t quite think how to include the choir in the event – it has nothing to say about the area (there are Soul Choirs all over Britain), and Dusty never sung about sheep or the textile industry.

 

We meet sound artists – Samh, Chris Ruffoni, Monty Adkins, Jaydev Mistry – who will be central to the project.  Each will create a series of soundscapes: rural, industrial, street. We will work with Yorkshire Sound Women’s Network and Hoot, excellent community projects.

 

I try to ride a line between bossiness and wishy-washiness. The event must have a robust structure, must keep its focus, but I don’t want to be too prescriptive. I want to be surprised by people’s contributions, I want them to delight me with stuff I could never have thought of. But there’s no algorithm. Some musicians like being told what to do (most amateur musicians!), some thrive on latitude. So I need to get to know people, tell them what I’m thinking, find out what they’re thinking, and then judge how to best work with them. Would you sing this song from your repertoire? Would you play this piece I have written? Would you find a folk song about weaving and arrange it and sing it? Would you create a soundscape that will be played back at this lock?

 

We meet Thabo singer and Thabo is a joy and Thabo talks about his friend Ruby singer and we meet Ruby and Ruby is a joy and Ruby talks about her friend Martin guitarist and we meet Martin and Martin is a joy and Noah drummer and Rob rapper and Jack bass player it slowly emerges that once upon a time they were all in a band together, Extra Curricular (future soul!), and we decide that we’ll work with them all and it will be a reunion (which would be tricky with, say, Pink Floyd, but with Extra Curricular is a breeze). They will write several songs for the event. One of these Machines and Blood is for me the hit song of the project. It’s about the Luddites, dissenters in this area in the early 19th century, fearful of the arrival of the machines, and about our current Luddite reactions to AI – brilliant.

 

We meet Testament, beatboxer rapper playwright, the only beatboxer I know whose favourite composer is Arvo Pärt. He and I start work on a piece for St George’s Square. There is a statue in the square of Harold Wilson. We chop up a Wilson speech (oddly enough, in a piece about sheep, it’s a speech about beef, British Beef!) and Testament goes into conversation with Harold on the subject of beef.

 

We go to Marsden, beautiful Pennine village, home of an excellent jazz festival, where Alastair and Jenny Hanson run an extraordinary business and community service making musical instruments and giving lessons to hundreds of aspiring musicians. They will create an ad hoc all-ages big band, lovely. We walk past the Marsden Football Club pitch which is covered with grazing sheep. Apparently they wander down off the moors, probably because of the superior quality of the grass.

 

I become fascinated with Bank Bottom Mill a massive derelict textile mill in Marsden which was abandoned many years ago. (Like many middle-class people I’m a sucker for a derelict building.) We walk down the track between the buildings, and under the walkway connecting them we notice a small hole in the wall. We look in, and there is a huge knackered room with two huge knackered looms. You can almost hear them. Oh that we could take over this building and make an event. Not this time – Artichoke don’t like working indoors. What will become of this behemoth? Of course it would make a wonderful arts centre – almost everyone in Marsden seems to be an artist – but how? More likely expensive flats.

 

The sounds of the loom will be crucial to the event. The coming of the machine transformed the area. Someone suggests that techno music in the north of England has emerged directly from the rhythms of the industrial machines.

 

*

 

This project is insanely complicated! We’re going to have to simplify. Ok, no performances during the week. I’m regretful about this but something has to give. Instead we’ll ask performers to record pieces of music that we’ll incorporate into the soundscapes. The people must have a presence, even if it’s not a visual one. Some of these pieces will be from the performers’ repertoire, for example the Huddersfield Community Gospel Choir singing the heart-wrenching slave spiritual Hold On, some will be written specially. I start writing a piece for the Huddersfield Choral Society, The Great Mistake, a setting of part of a letter written by Richard Oastler, enlightened mid-nineteenth-century mill owner: ‘The great mistake in the minds of those raised above the working class is that they think the people want plunder and anarchy. I know they want no such thing. They want peace and rest, and their rights. They want to be able to go out in a morning, get a good day’s work done, and come home with a fair remuneration.’ Not every mill owner was a tyrant.

 

And the finale! Out of control. Let’s get rid of the procession (ah it turns out that the carnival/mela will include a procession to Greenhead Park a few weeks later, so let’s definitely get rid of the procession). The finale will be an hour-long event in St George’s Square, with performances by everyone who has contributed to the soundscapes during the week. We’ll commission songs about the future, and we’ll end with a song for everyone The Future Is In Our Hands, classic community-project ending. And Amber, Ruby’s eight-year-old daughter, excellent singer (and keen dancer), will sing the last words. Sentimentality perhaps, sentiment surely.

 

Phew. Still wildly complicated but not as complicated as it was. At some cowardly moments I even consider cutting all the performance. No no no! Again no! We must see the people who have made the music (and they must see each other).

 

*

 

We go to record the Huddersfield Community Gospel Choir singing Hold On in their rehearsal room, a Methodist chapel in the centre of town. An apparently simple song (three chords, a series of verses with similar lyrics), but like many simple songs not easy to sing well. The choir is blessed with some brilliant singers including Shaun and Tara who will sing solos, partly improvised versions of the choir part. Edwin has taught the music by rote, no question of scores, anyone can be in this choir, and he leads them through the song with a benign casualness which disguises (I think) a desire for perfection. Hold on just a little while longer, everything will be alright. Sing on just a little while longer, everything will be alright. Fight on just a little while longer, everything will be alright. What we haven’t bargained for is the bell-ringing from the nearby Anglican church. It’s their weekly practice. Aah, two kinds of Christianity in conflict. Normally I’m entranced by bell-ringing but this evening I’m wringing my hands. We make a chaotic recording. I try to convince myself it’s ok, but it’s not.

 

We record The Great Mistake with the Huddersfield Choral Society. The choir is extremely capable, sings in tune and with great commitment. Their relationship with Ellie, who is conducting, is mutually respectful. They clearly like her, trust her, and she treats them gently but forensically deals with mistakes and weaknesses. It’s work (though they’re not paid of course), but not labour like many classical choral rehearsals I’ve attended. I have written a part for organ – stonking mid-nineteenth century instrument (actually this organ is a Baroque organ but never mind) – which irritatingly breaks down. The keys stick, and the sound is unbearable. Daniel the brilliant repetiteur deals with it, uses different notes on the different keyboards, fills in with the foot pedals, and we get through, just.

 

Material starts coming in, exciting times (and slightly anxious times – do I like this? what to say to improve it?). Soundscapes, songs, brass band pieces, neyanbam improvisations, weaving songs from Bryony and Alice and the Shepley Singers, future songs from Supriya and Extra Curricular and a large group of children.

 

We have an obvious, and obviously flawed idea: one of the sheep will be a black sheep. This sheep will be the rebel, will rove around the area randomly, playing an anarchic soundtrack, hanging out in odd locations, barging in occasionally on the other sheep. (My wife Jo has pioneered this reading of the words ‘black sheep’. The jumper she designed with rows of white sheep and one black sheep, worn by Princess Di, has been taken up by Jack Carlson an American entrepreneur and she’s scared there’s going to be backlash; but Jack sells it to the world - the black sheep is Princess Di, brave, rebellious, principled. This is not the meaning of ‘black sheep’ as in the old phrase ‘black sheep of the family’ but it’s a plausible modern alternative – and the ploy works. No backlash. Not a murmur.) We talk to Dee Bo General, poet and reggae artist, about working with teenage musicians to make a soundtrack for the black sheep, and he runs rings around us. Oh that cliché, the black person as outsider, as rebel. What exactly does the word ‘black’ mean in this context? But it’s a sheep. Yeah yeah yeah. The idea of the rebel sheep survives, but the sheep is not black – in fact it looks as though it was designed by Vivienne Westwood. And it carries around a subversive rap/grime/metal/ambient soundtrack with contributions from many teenagers.

 

We visit Parik who runs the university music department while being an expert on fashion, wow. I say patronisingly, what a pity about the decline of the textile industry, and he talks enthusiastically about collaborations with fashion houses, the invention of new weaves, about a new material produced by making a thick intricate 3D weave which is covered with a kind of resin; the weave is destroyed from within, making a material which is feather-light and strong as steel, useful for aeroplane wings and car chassis. Amazing. But it is true, people who used to work in the mills, including many who have migrated here particularly to work in the mills, have had to look for new jobs, and new jobs have not been easy to find.

 

After forty years of being fascinated by South Asian music, I am belatedly beginning to realise a (to me) interesting difference between South Asian music and Western music (ok, next question, what are the similarities?): Western music has had a long tradition of choral music, and it’s had a long tradition of collective amateur music-making – bell-ringing, handbell-ringing, brass bands (and in this area Tommy Talker or Waffen Fuffen bands – bands with homemade instruments playing daft versions of popular songs). South Asian music is profoundly different, partly I suspect because it is generally monophonic (one-note-at-a-time) with drones and percussion (sorry, wild simplification); there is no polyphonic tradition (several-notes-at-a-time), no sopranos altos tenors basses. South Asian singers tend to be professional and they tend to be soloists. There are wedding bands, raucous (small) brass bands parading through the streets, but they tend to be professional too. Trying to gather together a hundred amateur South Asian singers together, or thirty amateur South Asian brass players, doesn’t make sense. Make sense? What’s that mean? Maybe we should try. Could be really interesting. But we’ve only recently arrived up here. Isn’t that a case of we-know-your-culture-better-than-you-do? Certainly, we are clear we want to produce an event which reflects the area’s demographic. Well, at least 20% of the population here is from South Asian backgrounds, 5% from Caribbean backgrounds. So we better not make something 90% white. Ho hum.

 

And where are all the bhangra bands, where are the qawaali bands? I assumed that they would be everywhere, but no. Invisible. Non-existent. In Birmingham and London, people say. That’s no good, this is a Yorkshire event (except, come to think of it, for our contribution). What’s going on? People tell me that young South Asians are mainly interested in hip-hop. They might be interested in bhangra but only to the extent that it can be an element of a new kind of specifically South Asian hip-hop.

 

And Caribbean music. Well, there’s parang, we know that. Oh yes, and calypso and soca and merengue and zouk and salsa and reggae and ragga and reggaeton. Yes, good. Steel bands? Hmm, weirdly not. Someone’s apparently trying to get one off the ground, but that’s it. A thing of the past? Well, perhaps too early to say, but the days of the North Stars Steel Orchestra are gone. Pity.

 

Time to take stock of our presence here in this complex part of the North of England. We have come from down South (in my case from the South Downs), and we’re mostly middle-class and we’re mostly white. We are I think very respectful, and we’re often very enthusiastic. We’re outsiders, which is a possible advantage, because sometimes as an outsider it is possible see stuff that insiders take for granted. (Sheep!) And there’s the possibility that we can make connections between people that those people would like to make but find it difficult to make because of the way society works. People up here say that the cultural world here exists in silos, groups making work for their people and ignoring others, and perhaps we have the power (?) the imagination (?) the freedom (?) to put people together. Actually the silo accusation seems unfair to me; there have recently been projects uniting for example boliyaan groups and brass bands (Hardeep is constructing a gorgeous pull-them-all-together Prince project).

 

And yes, in our project Thabo and Supriya and Skelmanthorpe and Alice and Sunil and the gospel choir will all be making music together (future brassboliskasoul!). But but but. How well do we really understand how this place works? We know about the textile mills (or rather, we know something about the textile mills), we know something about Jo Cox, we can see for ourselves that Dewsbury is struggling, we’ve heard of Holmfirth because of Last of the Summer Wine (has that programme been a bit of a curse on the town?), we can see that Marsden is the most cultured village on the planet but is hard to get to because the Trans-Pennine railway is a shambles, but is that enough? We come, we look around, we try to make something happen that doesn’t normally happen. Are we Liz Truss?

 

*

 

We launch the project with an event in the spectacular Byram Arcade, built to house many shops and cafés, but now struggling (it’s hidden away!). Helen makes an inspiring speech. At the end, Amber is doing her moves so I challenge her to a dance-off, and lose comprehensively.

 

Charlie is working on the finale. How to stage it? The difficulty is raising the performers above the audience. There are few places in the square that help. I make the task more difficult by insisting on minimal infrastructure – I hate outdoor events in beautiful places with a mass of ugly staging and fencing and technology. Charlie comes up with an excellent idea of building an undulating walkway that snakes round the square (beautiful staging!), and I’m enthusiastic, but there’s no money left. We decide to leave the big groups of performers – choirs, bands – at ground level, but raise the soloists up on A-frame step-ladders which will suddenly appear in different parts of the square. The performers will move through the audience with the help of a group of dancers with ropes. Elegant solution.

 

Dave and Jane and their crew are constructing the sheep, coexisting with pigeons  in an extraordinarily handsome warehouse next to Huddersfield Station (let’s make a piece right here!) that has been abandoned and then fought over and is now part of a natural ecosystem with a forest of buddleia trees. At the top is one of the most extraordinary rooms I’ve ever been into, a gigantic empty space with a glorious vaulted ceiling and huge rooflights, completely covered in pigeon shit (Fuck the Pigeons!). Down on the ground floor the sheep are colourful, characterful, varied - some beautiful, some severe, some comic. They look good from afar, and they look good close up, full of detail, full of surprises: toys, family photographs, strange machine parts. They will look arresting in rural areas because they’re not sheep and they will look arresting in urban areas because they are sheep.

 

They have acquired names:

Aina

Bumfit

Covero

Dix

Edero

Fethera

Giggit

Hant

Ix

Jiggit

Kindra

Ludd

Methera

Nant

Odra

Pethera

Qethera

Ranadik

Sesan

Tethera

Umfit

Vedero

Wix

 

The region is sheep and the region is water – rivers and canals and plenty of rain. Someone tells me that the real reason for the success of the textile industry was not so much the sheep (most of the wool apparently came from Australia) as the quality of the water which was ideal for cleansing and softening the yarn. Two of our sheep will travel on narrow boats up the canals, one on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal between Marsden and Milnsbridge, one on the Calder and Hebble between Mirfield and Huddersfield. The Narrow Canal is tricky – it’s very narrow, the bridges are very low, and there are locks and locks and locks, so progress is very slow. But that doesn’t matter, the slowness has its own beauty, the sheep gliding through the countryside like a queen on a barge.

 

Charlie and I drive around Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike trying to devise an algorithm for the Saturday drive-through. We want to make it easy for the drivers, to create a kind of random walk that can accommodate meeting places. We decide to give people a series of destinations with associated times. The rule is (concentrate!): set up your satnav with your next destination and drive towards it, but allow yourself to take random detours until your satnav eta is the same as the associated time for the destination, then go straight there. Got it? We want to encourage the drivers to take the sheep into all parts of the towns – the back streets, the housing estates, the industrial estates, the supermarket car parks. The process turns out to be very relaxing and enjoyable. We drive through surprising places – look at that weird house, look, look, that shop sells nothing but gorilla masks….

 

Tilda of Artichoke manages a thousand lists, a thousand schedules, a thousand documents that change almost continuously. It’s like juggling with mercury. Crucially, she stays in constant touch with everyone involved in the project: the sound artists, the performers, the council, the teachers, the sheep-making crew, the dancers, the sound experts, the volunteers, the production manager, the site-owners…..

 

There is talk of what to do with the sheep afterwards. A brilliant idea: Aina the Mother Sheep will be an airbnb.

 

We decide to make a film of the event. It will not be a record (a six-day-long film seems mildly excessive). And it will not be a documentary, it will not be a making-of. It will be a short film, maybe twenty-five minutes long, made from footage of the event, an elegiac piece about the area and its people. We ask the director Colm Hogan who has made beautiful art films and whose speciality is his expert drone footage (The Banshees of Inishirin!). Perfect. Colm and I discuss how the shoot the event, how six days can become twenty-five minutes, how to construct the soundtrack. (And I become mildly anxious about offending all the people whose music won’t make it into the film.)

 

We take the sheep to the vast car park of Huddersfield Town football stadium. It’s a wonderfully weird sight, these strange beasts in places normally occupied by Skoda Fabias. We start trying out the sound systems, mocking up the group positions the sheep will take at various locations, placing the sounds so they bounce around interestingly. This is to me magic. The speakers are hidden inside the sheep, they run on batteries and they’re synchronized by Bluetooth. There’s no visible infrastructure. It’s glorious. I get overexcited and start bouncing round the car park.

 

Charlie and I go to Hade Edge, a village on the boundary of Kirklees, to rehearse for the finale with the Skelmanthorpe and Hade Edge Brass Bands. On a beautiful summer’s evening we take the players out into the field outside the band room, and try out a processional piece and a calling piece. This landscape, these skillful committed amateur musicians, this amazing tradition which holds a candle for all the mill workers and coal miners. Deep England. I’m in heaven.

 

*

 

The event begins, quietly. Aina appears in St George’s Square, occasionally calling to her flock who are at this moment on a brownfield site on the outskirts of town (but no one knows that).

 

Next day, Edero in Deffer Wood, Giggit at Eastergate Bridge on Marston Moor, Hant on a raft on the River Calder, Bumfit (a large sheep, but wind-resistant) on Castle Hill. Soundscapes summoning up the distant past. These are curious interventions in rural life. A sculpture of a sheep, yes, maybe, but a sculpture of a sheep that plays music. Why? For many people the presence of sheep in their area is simply a fact, not an excuse for a music installation. And, come to think of it, Edwin said to me at one moment: ‘Most of the people in this area have never seen a sheep.’ But these fabricated sheep, thanks to Dave and Jane, have a charismatic presence and a profound dignity. And they are Instagram heaven. At Eastergate I enjoy the relationship between Samh’s soundscape and the sounds of nature. The stream in the soundscape and the stream that runs under the bridge. The birdsong in the soundscape and the birdsong in the air. The sheep sounds in the soundscape and the lack of sheep in the landscape. And over that, Sam’s voice singing a dreamy out-of-focus lament-cum-lullaby, conjuring up an England that now scarcely exists. How much has this part of Marsden Moor altered in the last thousand years?

 

I watch Colm and his team filming in Deffer Wood. The cameraman Roman steers the drone through the trees (amazing skill); on his Ipad we can see the image the camera sees. The drone is not a beautiful object but watching it move through the wood, a pair of tiny green lights on top and a pair of tiny red lights underneath, is mesmerising. It’s a primeval insect.

 

Next day the sheep are beginning to gather. A flock at Oakwell Hall round a tree in a formal Elizabethan garden. A strange group in the high street in Marsden. (I’d hoped some real sheep would turn up and join in, but frustratingly they decide not to.) A flock in Thornhill Park on the edge of Dewsbury, on a small island carrying the remains of a medieval house. Supriya’s voice sings an ancient Carnatic ghazal, a love song, weaving through a soundscape of natural sounds, sounds of migration and an ancient West Yorkshire folk song. We are at the same time in present day Dewsbury and medieval Yorkshire and several places in between. The music washes round the island, sounding different in different places, and different again from over the water. I listen for a couple of hours and as I’m walking back through the park I meet two teenage girls. What’s going on down there? they say. It sounds like a cult. I think, can I take that as a compliment? No. 

 

We visit a primary school in East Bierley. Kindra is there and the whole school is under a tree singing Yan Tan Tethera to Kindra’s backing track. Kindraoke.

Kindra is getting so much attention and love that she has to be taken back to the workshop in the evening for repairs.

 

Next day we’re industrial. The weather is horrible. A (rather sinister) flock on the track leading through Bank Bottom Mill, a flock at Slaithwaite Lock, a flock at Milnsbridge Lock, and a flock round the River Calder at Mirfield. This is an epic industrial landscape, a landscape of Victorian might: a viaduct, a weir, a lock, a textile mill, and in the middle of the river a giant stanchion for a bridge which no longer exists. (We’d wanted to put a sheep on this stanchion but it was going to cost more than the rest of the project put together.) Five sheep on the banks of the river. (We’d wanted to put one on a raft but the Canal and River Trust wouldn’t have it). Monty has made an epic minimalist soundscape (shades of Steve Reich) based on the sounds of looms, which sweeps over the river as if the industrial history of the place has escaped from the past into the present. His music morphs into a spectacularly beautiful brass band arrangement of the Victorian hymn Deep Harmony, written by Haydn Wood, who lived close by. The sound quality is magnificent – loud, clear, perfectly balanced. And no visible infrastructure. Amazing. I stand in the pouring rain, in awe.

 

Next day, the penultimate day of the event, the sheep roam through the streets, adding a benevolent layer of chaos to Saturday life. Instagram is on fire: just seen this outside Greggs, what on earth is it? and it’s making weird sounds. Jo from Yorkshire Sound Women’s Network has made a witty soundscape based on asking questions about sheep of an AI bot. Jaydev has made a massively funky rumbhangra dance track. Hoot have made a frisky piece based on a recording of the crowd at a Huddersfield Town Football match. Jiggit the rebel sheep is out, mounted on a skull-laden punk Vauxhall Viva, playing its eclectic soundtrack. The sheep meet up on what we are calling the Heckmondwike Gyratory, a confusing triangular road system in the middle of the town, and there is a glorious carnival moment. Later the sheep arrive in St George’s Square and are put out to grass on the paving stones for the night, playing a gentle soundscape. Round the flock is Saturday night centre-of-town action, drinking, shouting, vomiting, shouting, people running at the sheep trying to mount them, stop stop. Sheep behaviour, human behaviour - the sheep come out very well from the comparison. (Ok I know it’s not that simple, but tonight….)

 

Sunday and I’m nervous. The weather is wildly changeable. The finale is ready to run, but there are many moving parts. And there’s a complex gnarly problem ahead: in the corner of St George’s Square there is a pub the King’s Head which I like in principle, though I’ve never been in, as they’ve put Jimi Hendrix’s head on the pub sign. But Tilda has been in prolonged unpleasant negotiations with the landlord about a heavy metal band gig he has booked in at 5pm, exactly the start time of the finale. Of course, why shouldn’t they have a heavy metal gig on a Sunday afternoon? A modern version of a tea dance. And it’s a regular thing. But this one day, please could they start later? Tilda talks to the landlord and he is extremely threatening. He knows the council has something to do with our project, and he hates the council for a thousand reasons and would like to take revenge. She talks to the band (normally I’d be in favour on this band, their signature tune is a heavy metal version of On Ilkley Moor Ba’ Tat, nice idea) and they are more amenable, yes, we could play later….maybe. But it’s a smoking gun.

 

During the day the flock occupies the square. We have constructed a track which recapitulates the week’s soundscapes, but now emerges from the whole flock. The sound gallivants round the square. And we’ve added a few specials – Harold and Testament, which only really works in the square, in the presence of the great man’s statue, and works well, as the original British beef speech fills the square, and then becomes fragmented, different phrases emerging from different sheep, before Testament comes into the conversation with a glorious mixture of rap, beatboxing and beef noises. People wander around intrigued, baffled, charmed (I hope, I think, I hardly dare ask). It rains. It stops raining. It rains.

 

The performers start to arrive in the square, the brass bands in their uniforms (we talked to them about wearing their own clothes, no question), the boliyaan group in their stupendous colourful costumes. I am now very nervous, particularly as some of my loyal friends start to appear. What will they think?

 

4.30 and in The Jimi’s Head the heavy metal band starts. Oh heck. I overreact, run into the pub and start shouting incoherently. Needless to say, no one can hear what I’m saying (though they must have an idea because some people start hurling abuse). I want to crawl into a hole. Kind people come up and reassure me – the sound outside the pub is curiously quiet, it’s just part of the sound of the city on a Sunday afternoon. But that’s the problem, that’s the reason I wanted to do this project in the first place!

 

The weather is looking threatening and I’m a bundle of nerves. Everyone else seems magnificently calm. The square is filling up.

 

5pm and the sun comes out. Thabo, up a step ladder, flirts with the sheep with a series of calls from Zimbabwe where he was born. And flirts with the audience, gets them to call back. Ruby and Martin with a song about the future. The brass bands process into the square. Thabo Noah and Rob and the bands with a song about the future, Tomorrow’s World. The choirs come in, chanting their hopes for the future. Huddersfield Choral Society with a strange fractured dreamlike version of William Blake’s Jerusalem. Huddersfield Gospel Community Choir and the brass bands with Hold On. The boliyaan group sings and dances, lighting up the square. Supriya and Martin. Whistles, calls, kazoos: the children come in. Yan Tan Tethera. Sunil, Testament, Jaydev, Mohammadreza, Rob, more children: rap, improvised beatboxing, The Future is the Future. And finally everyone: The Future Is In Our Hands. Thabo flirts with the audience, gets them to join in. Amber signs off. And that’s it. A year’s work, a week in the world, and done.

 

*

 

Well? How was that?

 

I am full of pride. We did it! We brought a massive number of people together to create something meaningful, something enjoyable, something that resonated with the people of the area (oh yes, how many on that housing estate in Golcar? how many in that hamlet near Holmfirth?). It was a visual delight, it was extremely serious and at the same time extremely playful, and it produced some wonderful music, music that could only have been produced in this area. Choirs met choirs, musicians met musicians, people took part in an event they wouldn’t normally take part in.

 

And I am full of regrets, perhaps not regrets, what ifs. What if we had been more collaborative? Given people more say? What if we had had performances through the week? What if we had had no performance at all? What if Shabnam were still alive? What if we’d been able to stage the finale in some marvelous elaborate way? (But I didn’t want that!)

 

Too late. It’s happened, and it’s very unlikely it’ll happen again, anywhere. Time to learn the lessons and go off and make something else. Well, not quite…..

 

Colm and I and his editor David work on the edit of the film. David does a rough edit using a guidetrack consisting almost entirely of one of my soundscapes, but I don’t want this structure, I want a structure that is similar to the structure of the live event: distant past, industrial past, present, future. So I construct a soundtrack from many sources, a mash-up of the music that has been made for the event. There’s a danger that it’s a mishmash-up, so I spend hours finessing it, taking particular care with the transitions between the scenes. David re-edits. Back and forth, back and forth. Colm and I have one disagreement. I want to end with Machines and Blood, the Extra Curricular AI Luddite song, he wants to end with Hold On – and so it seems does everyone else, so Hold On it is. I go over to Colm’s place in Ireland for a few days to help finish the edit. He has bought a chunk of rural County Clare and is rewilding it. Sheep everywhere! Water everywhere! We make a piece that we are both proud of. It is not a record of live event – most of that is missing; it is a meditation on Kirklees and the textile industry. It is shot in 16:3 - postbox format! – so on a big screen it has a glorious panoramic grandeur. We think about making a different version for laptops, where it looks a bit postboxy, but we are in love with 16:3.

 

We show the film in London to the great and the good, actually I’m not sure that the great and the good have bothered to come, it’s mostly friends, and then we show it in Huddersfield, at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, and suddenly everything makes sense to me. We have invited everyone involved in the project, and the theatre is full, and the atmosphere is frisky. Extra Curricular perform live, and we all watch the film together (oh that’s where I went to school! oh there’s my mum! look, that’s you!), and I am profoundly moved, to be amongst these people watching this account of their area, a piece they have created, a piece about them, and it’s absolutely obvious, it means something, it means a lot, and after the film Tracy Brabin the Mayor of West Yorkshire speaks, and Qaisar, and Thabo, and it’s everything I want the world to be.

 

You’d hope that the project might lead to something else, to some other project in West Yorkshire, and it’s possible that it will, and possible that we won’t know anything about it. We’d like to be invited, but there’s no guarantee of that. I’d be very happy to make another piece with these people, or some subset of these people. Probably up to me to make it happen.

 

Meanwhile a question keeps going through my head: What is the future of sheep? What happens when we decide we will no longer eat them, no longer use their wool?

 

And meanwhile Tethera (life-size, willow) is in our front garden, the roses and the viburnum are growing round her, and she is becoming part of the ecosystem.