By Paul Sullivan
“Birds have always filled me with wonder, as a child and also as an adult,” enthuses Erland Cooper from his home in London. “The flight, the freedom…no borders, no restrictions or restraints…and totally weatherproof. The king of seabirds is supposed to be the albatross but I think the northern gannet is the prince or the princess. They’re stoic and frowning but also have these beautiful long necks, golden crests and giant wing spans. They fly and dive in the most majestic way. Watching them is like witnessing a ballet performance…”
Erland, who was born and raised in Orkney, has been connected with gannets ever since his 2018 album Solan Goose—the inaugural part of what would become his acclaimed “Orkney Trilogy” along with Sule Skerry (2019) and Hether Blether (2020). The term “Solan Goose” is the old regional and Scottish name for the northern gannet, his love of which emerged not only from watching them flying around Orkney as a child but also from his zoologist father. “The cover of Solan Goose was an enlarged photo of a gannet that had been in my father’s study since I was a child,” he says. “It has followed me ever since.”
Although his solo musical career has taken several interesting detours since Solan Goose—not least the mischievous burying of the quarter-inch magnetic master tape and sheet music of 2021’s Carve the Runes Then Be Content with Silence, leaving a series of clues for its recovery, and then re-recording it when it was unearthed—Cooper has most recently returned to his place of birth, and his favourite bird, for his latest project: Sula Bassana.
Sula Bassana is the Latin name for the gannet, and the geographical focus this time is Bass Rock, a volcanic island off North Berwick that’s home to one of the world’s largest northern gannet colonies. “This rock is completely white because it’s covered in gannet guano,” laughs Erland. “Something like 100,000 gannets breed there and it has been home for them for around 3,000 years. We took this little boat out there, following in the footsteps of Sir David Attenborough. I met the custodian Maggie Sheddan, this amazing lady with bird poo on her hat and a face weathered by a thousand suns. It was an overwhelming experience. The sheer cacophony of the birds was so much at one point that I had to escape to Maggie’s hut. She has retired now but I have dedicated this work to her.”
The Sula Bassana project began as a commission from Fringe by the Sea’s inaugural Love of Life festival, whose theme is biophilia and humanity’s relationship with nature. In Erland’s creative hands, it has become an immersive work that features an orchestral recording with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, an art installation made with artist Naomi McIntosh and a short movie collaboration with filmmaker Lewis Gourlay, both of whom visited the rock with him.
In contrast to his more ambient works, the resultant orchestral score—which reuses the original melody from Solan Goose across three sections—carries all the romantic, sweeping emotion of a film soundtrack: strings soar, brass swells, percussion rolls. But there are also moments of reflection and melancholy and, unlike the original Solan Goose, which contained field recordings of birds, wind and sea, all the “natural” sounds here have actually been created by the orchestra’s own instruments, including an aeoliphone (wind machine). Cooper calls this “orchestral biomimicry”.
“The commission was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with my favourite orchestra, who are such great people and so forward-thinking. I think my work often leans into something like hopeful melancholia, and I do think that melancholy is a brilliant and important emotion. But I also wanted this to be unashamedly celebratory, so you can definitely hear some glory in there too. It also felt right to re-use the original melody, which was actually sung to me by my daughter back when she was six, and give it to the orchestra to pass around. A bit like the way birds might pass around a fish…”
The work will be performed by the orchestra in its entirety at a special event in Glasgow on 26th November 2026 alongside a separate violin concerto that Cooper has written as a birthday present for David Attenborough, who turned 100 this year. “It’s called Dawn Chorus,” says Erland, “and it’s intended as a special gift for him. It’s also in three movements, each one representing a different dawn: one in Papua New Guinea with Attenborough’s favourite birds of paradise, then onto London, and ending with oystercatchers in the Scottish Highlands.”
Listen to Cooper's latest project, Sula Bassana →
Cooper also features in Ultimate Calm at the Proms on 27th August, a late-night Royal Albert Hall concert inspired by BBC Radio 3 Unwind. Read more →
