The Year The Earth Stood Still
Castaway Sloop Group is a youth music funded group for young people aged between 10 to 25 and ran through Castaway-Goole music theatre, a registered charity providing arts opportunities for people with Learning Difficulties, Autistic Spectrum Conditions and Mental Health issues. In March of 2020, like a lot of things throughout the world, Sloop Group came to a sudden halt due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. At this point no one knew for sure how long we’d have to stop the weekly workshop sessions for with some people suggesting it would be may whilst others said it’d be in the summer months when it’d be safe to resume. During this period other castaway groups made the transition to running weekly sessions online using Zoom video conferencing but the decisions was made early on by Sloop Group leaders including myself that it would be very difficult to continue Sloop Groups sessions online as there is a huge focus on people playing a range of instruments together that just isn't possible using zoom due to the severe audio latency etc.
During the summer months it was announced that Schools across the UK would be able to open again from September and as a result of this it was also deemed safe for youth groups such as Sloop Group to resume following the current safety guidelines at the time. At the end of September, Castaway was able to open its doors once again for Sloop Group sessions to resume face to face. The management staff at Castaway had laid out the relevant safety measures in the building from floor stickers highlighting the one way system in the building as well as hand sanitising stations and PPE and training for all members of staff. Unfortunately due to having to keep 2 metres apart at all times this meant we wouldn’t be able to resume sessions with the same number of young people as we would usually had as so gave the 10 or so spaces available to the first 10 people who completed and returned a form to say they were happy to attend the sessions again with the new safety restrictions. There were quite a lot of challenges we had to face at this stage including losing 2 members after the first session due to them not liking how the sessions had changed with having to keep socially distanced, temperature checks, entering with a mask etc and their parents said they would prefer to join when sessions are back to ‘normal’. Another young person left after several weeks as cases began to rise again as they were scared to leave the house and with staff and members coming from different tier systems sometimes travel between them wasn’t allowed which meant having even lower attendance numbers and members of staff becoming ill meant having to get last minute staffing cover.
We were able to successfully run for 6 weeks at the end of September before having to stop once again due to a second national lockdown. During this week period the group managed to begin working on a new piece of music that was planned to be recorded and have a music video filmed in the building in December to be submitted for an online version of the annual concert the group usually takes part in called ‘Let’s Rock’. Let’s Rock normally takes place at Bridlington Spa and is an evening of performances from youth music groups from the East Riding showcasing the various projects and young talent from the region and is something our young people very much look forward to every year.
At this point, we had already made a contingency plan during the 6 week period we were together face to face that we would make the move to online sessions despite not thinking it’d work well back in March. Since the end of last year up until now in March 2021 we managed to engage a consistent 6 young people in weekly online sessions with adapted music activities accessible to everyone including listening to music from around the world and discussing the music qualities of it, as well as composing music to accompany short video clips and continuing with the let’s rock piece started whilst we were face to face. Of the 6 people, we managed to get 2 of the young people who previously decided they didn’t want to come to the face to face sessions due to it being so different and because of the fear of cases of the virus rising which was a positive that they were able to engage once again. Using Breakout rooms on Zoom we were able to take our starting point of parts of the song we already had and develop other sections individually, get the young people to record them with an App called ‘Audio Copy’ to record .WAV files to get the best quality form the remote recordings and then using screen share the group were able to be involved in the mixing process of the song too. The lyrics to the piece were written by one of the young people and was written as a spoken word poem about the last year spent in lockdown and being optimistic about the future, the group decided after hearing the finished mix of the song that they’d like to call it ‘The Year The Earth Stood Still’. An accompanying video using copyright free footage of the earth spinning etc was put together with the song and was submitted to be part of the Let’s Rock online event 20th March 2021. Mark from Remarkable Arts did an amazing job of getting the concert to go ahead online.The highlight of the live streamed concert for me was watching it at the same time as other people including some of the young people from Sloop Group and sharing the sense of community previously shared at face to face concerts.
Every year at Let's Rock, they bring us a dynamic original piece of music and this year is no exception
The last year has been hard on everyone, least of all the young people who have had to endure an ever changing world of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Despite the challenges we’ve faced I’m so proud of all the young people and how they’ve managed to keep going throughout all of this and managed to create an original piece of music with lyrics about how they felt about the last year. As useful as Zoom has been in bridging the gap between when the group can meet face to face again and providing the opportunity for us to still provide social and musical opportunities for the young people, I can’t wait to be able to be in the same room making music with these wonderful young people again!
Sloop Group's song can also be found on the website, 'A Song For Us' which is a national music project marking this historic time, A Song for Us celebrates our communities and the power of music to bring us together.