We’re now just a few weeks from the world premiere of Fatherland, and are very happy to announce that Karl Hyde and Matthew Herbert will be releasing Fatherland (Original Music from the Stage Show) a collection of recordings from the show.

You can hear a taste of the soundtrack in our trailer below:

The album comprises the original recordings made through this unique collaboration between two of British music’s most innovative artists, Karl Hyde and Matthew Herbert. The lyrics are based on recorded interviews that took place in Corby, Stockport and Bewdley in 2015 when Graham, Stephens and Hyde (the creators of Fatherland) undertook a road trip connecting their home towns, gathering stories of fathers and fatherhood from family, friends, and strangers – making an odd, affecting collection of elegiac, biographies.

As we began translating these ideas into songs, it became very clear that we were making a kind of 21^st century folk music.
– Karl Hyde

Karl Hyde explains,  “Fatherland is all about the collecting and re-telling of stories. For the last thirty years, that’s what I’ve done with Underworld. I’ve sung verbatim the stories I’ve picked up from the street. Here was the possibility of having complete stories about people we knew, rather than found fragments from strangers.

I invited Matthew Herbert to collaborate as I love his music and the way he thinks. He works incredibly fast – as do I. Early on, we decided we wanted to create our music from the sounds of objects that reminded us of our fathers and our childhoods. That could be a football bouncing or a set of car keys, a whistle or the sound of a car engine purring. Anything that evoked the idea of childhood and of our fathers. All of the sounds on the record came from digging up those memories.

The lyrics are taken from the script. When Matthew and I began, we took stories that jumped out at us from the script and built the tracks around them. I’d sing the words verbatim, inspired by the sounds Matthew made – all the ums and ahs are used as they were in the original conversations. As we began translating these ideas into songs, it became very clear that we were making a kind of 21^st century folk music.”

The cherry on the cake was being able to form that new language with Karl.
– Matthew Herbert

Matthew Herbert discusses the collaborative creative process of making the soundtrack, “Working with sounds rather than traditional musical instruments allowed us ways not only into new textures, but also to add a layer of storytelling that I think is really useful in this kind of context. For example, we used a pick axe and spade to make the main organ/keyboard noise in Perfect Moment that created both the odd harmonics that were useful in the song writing, and also helped us to remember the manual labour of our grandfathers.

The cherry on the cake was being able to form that new language with Karl, whose impeccable experience shaping words and melody meant that we rapidly found a rhythm that hopefully enabled us to get out the way quite quickly, allowing the audience to listen to the stories themselves.”

Fatherland opens at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre on Saturday 1^st July 2017 and runs through Saturday 22^nd July 2017, tickets are available from here. The album is available from 30^th June 2017 and available to pre-order now.

Commissioned and produced by Manchester International Festival, Frantic Assembly, the Royal Exchange Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith and LIFT. Supported by PRS for Music Foundation.

In addition to Fatherland, Hyde and Underworld partner Rick Smith present an installation piece Manchester Street Poem, a project that will spotlight the stories of those who find themselves homeless in the city.

Matthew Herbert will present an installation piece Music for a Busy City at the Great Northern Warehouse.