Sing Along the River, Summer, 2018, Lostwithiel Parade Gardens.
Really Lovely Projects has been championing and celebrating Cornwall’s rich, diverse and cherished heritage of singing and community music making at its grass roots level, for over a decade.
Our Lostwithiel based Sing Along the River concept, conceived in 2014, created a new, unique and professional outdoor platform to showcase the wide range of community singing groups Cornwall’s towns, villages and harbours behold.
What started with a few strings of fairy lights and bunting, a borrowed stage and PA became a much-loved, large and legendary showcase of the best of local choirs and brass bands. Supported by volunteers and with funding from FEAST, Arts Council England and Cornwall Community Foundation, we created something really special.
Alongside our work in Lostwithiel, we have also designed and led a plethora of composition and performance projects throughout Cornwall.
These original and traditional music-making initiatives have brought together primary and secondary school children in the song writing and composition process. They have performed and shared their work with and been accompanied by adult choirs and local musicians.
Working in partnership with organisations such as RIO, ASONE, Cornwall Music Education Hub, The Cornwall Museum Partnership, KEAP, ARTiculate, CYMAZ, Arts Council England and FEAST; at venues including The Eden Project, White River Place, Royal Cornwall Museum, Wheal Martyn China Clay Museum, Shire Hall Bodmin, Port Isaac Platt, and St Day Town Square, we have engaged and united, ingnited and enabled many sectors, individuals and groups within the Cornish collective to connect through song, singing and music-making.
Lights Up, Bodmin
A three year, music led and combined arts project that united children from Bodmin, Lostwithiel and Port Isaac in song writing, singing, performance and lantern making. The songs the children wrote were taught to local community choirs and we all sang them together, to audiences who had never experienced anything quite like it.
The leadership team at the helm of Really Lovely Projects, and all of our associate musicians and artists, have benefitted from the transformational power that grass roots community music making and community arts embodies and enables. Through our music-led and sometimes multi-interventional projects, we have been able to work with a range of different venues. Through a collaborative project with Really Lovely Projects, KEAP and Cornwall Music Education Hub, Wheal Martyn saw some of its biggest, unmet, new and unknown audiences gather together to experience a singing and creative project, inspired by the China Clay industry. Children from Bugle, near St Austell and Treloweth School, Redruth, combined to write a song, inspired by objects from The Royal Cornwall Museum. It was performed at the museum and then revived the next yearto be showcased and performed in front of King Charles III, the then Prince Charles and Duchy of Cornwall.
Back in Lostwithiel, the energy and joy, collective belief and community confidence gained from Sing Along the River led to galvanising of a new volunteer group and a surge of fundraising activity, future planning and community networking.
With support from Lostwithiel Town Council, Lostwithiel Rotary and Lostfest, Really Lovely Projects were awarded over £30K of grant funding to purchase a community stage, lighting rig, stage canopy and install a community shed to house the assets, we now owned, for all to use.
We All Sing Along!
Funded by Feast, 2019 sees the launch of Tots Rocks, a unique, interactive singing and music making session for children and their families. Over the five nights that summer, we have our largest ever audiences.
With a community owned stage and a growing store of lighting, sound and events equipment, including a bar, LostFest was able to expand its live music offer. We were able to support the Man Engine Tour and our Cornwall-wide collollaborations included the Riots and Lobsters Tour with Jim Carey, Yskynna at Falmouth Maritime Museum with David Greaves and The Diaspora Carols project in 2018 and 2019.
Truro Cathedral
In December 2018, singers from Plymouth to Penzance took part in a service at Truro Cathedral, which celebrated the heritage of Cornish carolling and their travels and development within the Cornish diaspora. The following winter the amassed choir were joined by Cornish writers and poets in a tour of Cornish chapels and churches.
The pandemic led to a pause in our activities but in December 2020, as part of a collaboration with BBC Radio Cornwall, Feast and Cornwall Music Education Hub, we led a socially distanced doorstep singing project, Kerbside Carols.
Weekly rehearsals were held on zoom and the final outdoor singing sessions we held in Lostwithiel were featured on BBC Radio Cornwall at 8pm on the four Thursdays leading up to Christmas. Kerbside Carols was created to raise the spirits and connect people at a time when everyone was still isolating - proving once more, the power that singing and music has to unite people in times of darkness. One very special (and extremely soggy) evening, our famous chums from Port Isaac, The Fisherman’s Friends, joined us in Lostwithiel, lending their fabulous voices in their on going support of what we do in Cornwall. Kerbside Carols was featured on BBC Spotlight, ITV Westcountry, BBC Radio Four’s The Today Programme and Sky News.
Post pandemic and in 2023, our next challenge came from Lostwithiel Medical Practice who commissioned us to devise a campaign to find a doctor. After six months of considerable advertising in the professional medical press and journals and not one application, Really Lovely Projects were tasked to come up with something a little different, that would grab wider attention.
Our solution was, of course, to use music.
Within two weeks of winning the brief, we wrote and directed, produced and coordinated a community pop video plea entitled ‘Lostwithiel Needs a Doctor’. Recruiting from all corners of the town and surrounding area, we engaged local choreographers, film-makers, musicians and a sound engineer to record, then make our version of Nina Simone’s ‘Ain’t Got No, I Got Life’.
The video starred dance students; local school children; Lostwithiel Town Band; Reverend Sheila Bawden; the community choir, Lost in Song; and featured shop keepers including the butcher, the baker and the fish and chip maker. The final aerial shot, filmed from a cherry picker, donated by a local tree surgeon, included as many local residents as possible. With a bit of help from Excess Energy PR, we launched the film on social media and to national press at 5am on the 14th February - Valentines Day - our town’s loving plea for a new doctor.
Our campaign and pop video went viral.
Hypefactors, the media analysts, estimated that our project had over 200 million impressions, gaining over £5million in free advertising space! We were featured on all the national news and current affairs programmes, the One Show, The Jeremy Vine Show and This Morning. It was bonkers and we are delighted to say we have three new GPs now working at the medical centre. You can view all of our broadcast media coverage by logging into Vimeo and then clicking here.
Flying high off the back of ‘Lostwithiel Needs A Doctor’, we produced another summer season of Sing Along the River, introducing Rodeohead, our new country choir collaboration with singers and players from across Cornwall. Sing Along Christmas was produced in partnership with the spoken word collective Kowsel, and was a sell out success.
After a decade of Sing Along success, our email inbox from choirs and brass bands wanting to take part in the event was bulging. With calls and enquiries from all over the county wanting a slot in our programme; we felt inspired. Sing Along Cornwall is our next mission! Time to take the Sing Along concept on the road. We thrive and excel at transformational projects. We have a unique capacity to build connections through music that bring places and people to life.
Sing Along Cornwall will bring the best of Cornwall’s community choirs and brass bands to novel and unexplored venues, delighting and enchanting new audiences. We have a ten year track record of galvanising and shining a spotlight on the incredible and enormous range of grassroots music that Cornwall’s towns, villages and harbours embody. There is a life-blood of music making that flows through the veins of Cornwall, that connects and supports people and intrinsically celebrates and brings together the past present and the future.
In partnership with Lowender, who are an advocacy and development organisation for Cornish culture, we will be co-programming a strand of Cornish musicians, bands and choirs that showcase Cornwall’s traditional music, the Cornish language and new compositions.
Our winter indoor tour, will be co-programmed with Kowsel and our connections with Cornish speakers, writers and poets linking the power of the power of the Cornish tongue, which expresses itself so powerfully through the spoken word and the traditional street carolling songs that Cornwall.
