Happy 40th Birthday To Us!

On Sunday the 6th of October LAMK celebrated 40 years of creative placemaking in Milton Keynes with two sold-out celebratory concerts at Stantonbury Theatre.

The celebrations featured performances from the Living Archive Band, Jack In A Barrel, our Future Songwriters, Milton Keynes Community Choir and the Milton Keynes Youth Choir and this concert embodied the two core beliefs that have driven this organisation for the last 40 years.

The first is that ‘everybody has a story to tell’.  For 40 years we have been recording the memories of the inhabitants of the new city of Milton Keynes; the original residents, some of them born in the 19th century, the pioneer settlers who came here in the 1970s, and those who have come since from all corners of the country and all corners of the world to make a new life in Milton Keynes.

The resulting thousands of hours of testimony form an incredibly valuable social archive for people now and in the future to explore.  But we are the Living Archive and those memories are collected not to be just stored away in an archive, but primarily in order to inspire a whole range of creative and educational outcomes that are shared with the community that inspired them and become a source of community pride and celebration.

This brings us to our second core belief – that you ‘dig where you stand’.  You dig where you stand for the inspiration – all those wonderful stories from local people , and you dig where you stand for the talents to transform those raw materials into creative outputs that can be shared.

Here today we can see that process writ large – the local voices sharing their memories spanning more than a century, the talents of songwriters (including members of the younger generation) creating songs inspired by those words, and the voices of people of all generations using their talent to share those songs with you.

For forty years Living Archive has been using heritage and the arts as weapons to help build community in a new city, offering opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds to get involved in something that allows them to explore their creativity, make friends and celebrate the place and people.    We have tried to engender a sense of place, history and belonging in this very diverse city, using old memories to create new ones and bring people together, helping them to make new memories and friendships that will last far into the future.  Have we succeeded?  As the inimitable Hawtin Mundy once said, ‘I’ll leave you to judge that’.

Since 1977, the Living Archive Band’s music for documentary and community projects was centred on old and new communities in the area that became the Metropolitan Borough of Milton Keynes. The Band is the ‘musical wing’ of Living Archive MK (LAMK), formed in the early years of the New City to disprove that ‘new towns have no history’; they were the keystone of MK Theatre’s 1999 opening show.   LAMK’s massive collection of documentary material from local people provided a rich resource for local song-writers – creating over 100 songs and six albums, five of which are now stored, at the British Library’s request, in BL’s Sound Archive.

Thanks to the Living Archive Band, Living Archive has a strong tradition of documentary songwriting. We are determined to continue this tradition and in early 2024 we held a callout for local songwriters to participate in a documentary songwriting project, generously funded by MK Community Foundation. We had an incredible response and we are now working with a group of  talented songwriters in MK, who attended a workshop led by award winning songwriter Sean Cooney of the Young’Uns. This concert features new songs by several of the Future Songwriters, and we hope this is the first of many collaborations.

The celebratory concerts also saw the launch of the MIlton Keynes Songbook 2 – find out more here: https://www.mksongbook.org/

The Living Archive Future Songwriters project has been supported by funding from MK Community Foundation with additional funding generously provided by the Jim Marshall Charity.

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