Diversions Vol. 3: Songs From The Shipyards

Diversions Vol. 3 contains the music created by The Unthanks for the Tyneside Cinema commissioned film of the same name, Songs from the Shipyards – a beautiful and moving film, tracing the story of shipbuilding. Diversions Vol. 3 is a studio album that documents a non-sequential ‘best of’ the live soundtrack.

Though The Unthanks became a 10-piece live band from 2009, Songs from the Shipyards is a much more sparse and intimate affair, bringing the vocals of Rachel and Becky sharply back to the fore, and was the first record to capture purely the core 5-piece creative unit that is The Unthanks. The centrepiece of the record is The Romantic Tees – a self-penned piece devised by Adrian McNally, inspired by the poetry of the late Teesside writer Graeme Miles, written to accompany a part of the film called Launch – the beautiful, iconic, cult 1973 film made by Amber Films. The album was the last of three Diversions volumes released inside a prolific 12 month period, and with little time to squeeze it in, The Unthanks recorded most of the album during a tour, finding Vale Studios more or less ‘on route’; an old country house in Worcestershire converted into a studio full of vintage gear and mics.