We recently collaborated with Access College. A national creative college for young people who want to follow their passion for a career in the creative industry.

Students aged 16-21 years old at campuses in Birmingham, Bristol, Lincoln, London, Manchester, Norwich & York from courses in Events, Games, Media and Music, took part in a 4 Week Project during June this year that encouraged them, through their creative pathways, to create a piece of work that would inspire young people and Millennial audiences (16-35 years) to take action for the nature & the climate emergency.

Here are our competition winners and the three fantastic songs that we felt stood out as the most inspiring! Find out more about them below.

  1. Watch The World End - Rebecca Pool & George Coleman
  2. Flowers song by Victoria Blair & Jack Halsall
  3. 52 by Michelle Best, Alice Simmons, Lily McKenzie

Watch The World End

erson singing on a stage lit with purple lights



The inspiration behind Watch The World End is about the toxicity between people and nature. I wanted to highlight these
issues in my song by using phrases like “Smoke and fire will burn us down” and “I don’t wanna watch the earth crumble”, as it can be linked to humanitarian issues around the world. The forest fires in California and Turkey, floods and landslides in Japan
- all caused because of climate change. Towards the end of the song I wrote “If you could go back in time, what would you change?”. This allows the audience to self-reflect on their impact on our planet, their carbon footprint and what they can do to change the way they live their lives to save our world.

 

Flowers

a person with short hair, a bright coloured t shirt, sunglasses, and brown trousers, holding a bright red guitar and standing in front of sound mixing equipment"This song was built as a collective project between the music producers and vocal artists of Access Creative College. After facing the consequences of COVID in college, this project brought us all together in perfect time and made us more eager than ever. 

The overall message of preserving our beautiful wildlife was a big enough inspiration and drive to write this song, yet working in a team with such dedicated, creative and like-minded individuals like Lottie Sayer-Pardoe, Juliet Price-Thomas, or Immy Sawyer, (to name a few), was the biggest breath of fresh air and had us wanting to finish this song as soon as possible. 

From a creative standpoint, the initial groove was made by Jack Halsall with vocal melodies and structure being added by the rest of the team. The feel of the groove was pretty straight forward so after idealising the end message we wanted to portray, the creative journey flowed very easily. The lyricism (written by Victoria (Tordi) Blair), is a reflection of her frustrations on how mistreated the environment is; and the production (done by Jack Halsall), was done in high spirits, finally being able to put everything he's learnt in college into practise. 

This song was a blast from start to finish; as was the join your dots project as a whole, bringing together students from different courses and making something that they can collectively enjoy. Thank you RSPB.”

52

From left to right, a close up image of a person with long blonde hair, wearing a zerba stripe pattern long sleeve top and posing with their hands in front of their face, then a close up image of a person in profile in the dark with some glow in the dark facepaint making green dot and tally patterns on their face, and finaly a black and white image of a person with long hair standing amongst trees. They are wearing a dark and light striped cardigan and their hands are clasped together in front of them.

Our inspiration for this project stemmed from an article in the paper called ‘The 52 hz Whale’. A group of marine biologists noticed something peculiar about this whale (an unidentified species) as the frequency of its call was at 52 hz, which differs from the usual call of 30 hz. 

Studies show that this whale is either deaf and can’t hear its own call or is a hybrid and physically can’t make the call needed to attract a mate. So our song is about how lonely the whale must be swimming around the ocean calling but getting no response. We decided to repeat the section of vocals we had to represent the whale calling over and over again but getting no response, as that was our main focus of this song and we wanted the music to reflect the flow of waves and the ocean and how the ocean is continuously moving.

Whale sounds featured Credited to Oceania Project

Roles:
Lily provides the main vocal for the track with harmonies. Alice provided the guitar and piano to support Michelle’s synth and soundscape work which utilises Lily’s adlib vocals.