Silver Meadows [Fables from the Institution]

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2016-06-06

Label: Shadrack & Duxbury Records

UK based singer-songwriter and poet Vinny Peculiar who has been variously described as “an under-sung national treasure” (UNCUT Magazine) and “the missing link between Ray Davis and Roger McGough” (Irish Times) is set to release, on S&D Records, his thirteenth studio ‘concept album’ inspired by working in (he’s a former nurse) and visiting (his schizophrenic brother) long-stay mental health & learning disability hospitals during the 1980s and early 90s.

Set in a fictional 1980s psychiatric/learning disabilities institution Silver Meadows addresses the fears and isolation of lives beyond the mainstream, a world fearful of change, impending community care, back-ward misdemeanours and meaningless ‘training’ activities. In pursuit of normalization, patients are moving on, lives are changing but not always for the better…

The Wednesday Club is a love story set in the hospital disco that ends in separation and tragedy. Silver Meadows welcomes a returning patient unable to make it in the outside world. In Waiting Games, psychology student Beth Williams is on the precipice of a discovery – she’s working with Jason, a long stay patient with multiple disabilities, and he’s fallen for her – but no one realises the extent of his ‘locked in’ intelligence. In Room Management grown-ups are taught... more