Throughout spring 2025, I worked with young people at Group A vocal performance group, run by Britten Pears Arts. With co-leaders Charly jolly and Carnell Cook we facilitated young people to write a song to help save the house martins, who are on the red list for endangered birds in the UK. The young people performed the song in a pop up performance in the Snape Maltings shop, and they got the audience singing and clapping along, which you can hear in this live recording. The young people gave the audience some information about the campaign too, delivering short speeches using a microphone. They sung other bird related songs such as Blackbird by The Beatles.

We began the project by drawing big placards, what would we create if we were artivists, going to a house martin protest? We used the words from the placards as the lyrical foundation of our song, and the young people experimented with setting the words to rhythms and melodies, eventually arriving at the chorus. We helped them come up with the rest of the song from here, writing a little bit more each week.

The song was called ‘Keep Those Birds Singing’.

The number one rule of group A’s sessions (which the kids came up with) was ‘bring the good vibes’. Although it was a difficult song to write as a group, this rule helped the young people push through and make a song they were really proud with.