Eddie Izzard once famously said that poetry is a lot like music only less notes and more words. He wasn’t wrong; the line between the two has been blurred on many an occasion. That being said, the idea of taking the classic work of William Blake, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson or Emily Dickinson and musicifying it might seem a little perverse. That is until you are introduced to The Wraiths. The acoustic duo (made up of vocalist Mog Fry and guitarist Jon Hunt) take the words of these and many more iconic poets and set them to simple, yet often deeply evocative unplugged music.
While the result might not necessarily be a worthy substitute for a gifted actor or spoken word artist enlivening the piece, it definitely allows you to look at it from an unfamiliar angle, and a fascinating one at that. Results range from uplifting to folksy to downright unsettling, but the tone never strays from the lyrics. The pair have released two albums worth of melody-backed poems and have given well-received live performances across the UK. The standout for me is their reworking of a small section of Ford Madox Hueffer’s Antwerp (titled ‘This is Charing Cross’), the slowly building and falling guitar fits the frantic, ghostly tragedy of the words remarkably well.
The Wraiths are, of course, not the only artists to attempt something like this; history is littered with good and bad examples of attempts to re-interpret classic poetry, but theirs are some of the most effective I’ve yet encountered. The other most notable examples I can think of are Sailing to Byzantium, a gorgeous collection of W.B. Yeats poems made musical by Irish jazz singer Christine Tobin (with the help of Gabriel Byrne, of The Usual Suspects Fame) and the more recent Caged Bird Songs, which sets recordings of the late, great Maya Angelou reading her own work to beats produced by Shawn Rivera and Roccstarr (don’t worry, she was totally cool with it).
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