This Is The Kit & Bucky – A Song for Bristol

A Song for Bristol: Trousers Optional – premiered online on 23 March 2021.

Performed by This Is The Kit, Bucky, The Fantasy Orchestra and people of Bristol.

This is the Kit and Bucky’s song is inspired by public submissions to Bristol Beacon’s A New Song For Bristol project. A city-wide invitation for everyone to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences of Bristol in 2020.

The song is a celebration of the people of Bristol, how everyone is doing a great job at keeping on and looking after each other.

ABOUT THIS IS THE KIT & BUCKY: This Is The Kit is the musical project of Kate Stables. One of time and change and careful listening. It has carried Stables from Winchester to Bristol to Paris (where she’s lived for the last 15 years), and across tours and festivals around the world.

Her fourth album Moonshine Freeze was nominated for an Ivor Novello award in 2017 . In early spring of 2020, just before everything got weird, Kate and her band of trusty companions, (Rozi Plain, Jamie Whitby-Coles, Jesse D Vernon, and Neil Smith), knuckled down to record what would become This is The Kit’s fifth album Off Off On. It was released in October to huge acclaim with the Independent naming them “One of the most original and musically gifted artists of today’.

For A Song for Us, Kate collaborated with fellow Bristol band Bucky. Primitive ‘power-duo’ from Bristol who have been going for ages and were once described as sounding ‘like Billy Childish meets Ren & Stimpy’.

thisisthekit.co.uk buckytheband.com

ABOUT THE FANTASY ORCHESTRA: A community project led by Jesse D Vernon which was born in Bristol in 2010 to celebrate the music of the maestro Ennio Morricone. Since then, the Bristol and Paris (where Jesse lives) based kaleidoscopic symphonic brigade have played their eclectic repertoire in a variety of extraordinary places, from Bowie in the Bearpit to Bollywood in Mumbai and Anna Meredith at Chew Valley Lake.

2020 saw the release of The Fantasy Orchestra’s debut album The Bear and Other Stories, recorded in Bristol and Paris and including versions of Sun Ra, The Liftmen and Richard Dawson among other greats. The Fantasy Orchestra have used the Covid lockdowns to further emphasise that “more is more”, including over 100 musicians on their Lockdown video recordings of Radiohead, Morricone and now a Song for Bristol! fantasyorchestra.org

Produced by Sound UK in partnership with Bristol Music Trust.