Music like The Magnetic North

The Magnetic North are a British band, formed between multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong (formerly of The Verve, Blur and The Good, the Bad & the Queen), Orcadian artist and producer Gawain Erland Cooper and singer, composer and orchestral arranger Hannah Peel. Their songs are part autobiography and part psychogeography.

Having come together to make an album that imagined the landscape, legends and people of Gawain Erland Cooper's birthplace, Orkney (2012's highly acclaimed Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North), and originally intending to be a one-off, their popularity led them to reconvene to release follow-up Prospect of Skelmersdale in 2016 - evoking childhood memory, people and place, and an examination of how a failing Northern new town became home to the transcendental meditation movement. If Orkney was the musical equivalent of great nature writing then Prospect of Skelmersdale is somewhere between finely-tuned kitchen-sink drama and urban psychogeography. Inspired as much by the greys and greens of Kes, as the soothing, cyclical patterns of meditative ragas, Prospect of Skelmersdale is a collection of musical snapshots of a uniquely British town.