Prospecto musical.

Os ingleses The Magnetic North, banda de Simon Tong (The Verve; Blur; The Good, The Bad and The Queen), Gawain Erland Cooper e Hannah Peel, lançaram, na sexta-feira passada, o seu segundo álbum de originais: "Prospect of Skelmersdale". Recorremos à editora da banda, a Full Time Hobby, para sabermos mais um pouco sobre a história deste álbum e de Skelmersdale:

Skelmersdale in West Lancashire was designated a new town in 1961. Part of the UK’s second wave of post-war population redistribution, it was failing within twenty years. Another Northern town facing up to the realities of the Thatcher era, Skem (as it’s known locally) saw house prices spiral down and unemployment figures rise. Prospects for Skelmersdale looked decidedly gloomy until some unlikely saviours stepped in.

In the early ’80s, Skem became the official UK home of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Geographically placed somewhere near the centre of the country, the town was deemed the perfect site for the movement to build their ‘ideal maharishi village complete with gold meditation dome’ (the Guardian). The local community was soon augmented by families from across the country looking to live peaceful, peace-promoting lives with an overriding ambition to spread goodwill to the town and beyond.

Simon Tong was a child of one of those families. “We moved there in 1984 from Bolton. My dad wanted to be a part of the TM movement in the town. He wasn’t ever a hippie; he’d been more of a beatnik in the ’60s. Growing up in Skem as a teenager, I hated the whole TM thing. When I got to 16 and started practising it for a few years, it worked. I became a lot less miserable and angry.”

O primeiro single é este "Signs", cujo vídeo contém imagens de arquivo da promoção da cidade, na década de 1960.