Swan Song helps bereaved and terminally ill people tell life stories – Feature in the Telegraph & Argus

Thank you to Bradford based paper The Telegraph & Argus for this lovely feature about our work. “Swan Songs tell the stories of loved ones life”. Featured 19/12/24. Click the link below to read the full story.

“WHEN Michael Mcalpine’s wife Nicky died in his arms, he had so many things he wanted to say.

So Michael wrote about how he was feeling – and he went on to use those words, along with a poem he’d written for Nicky, to compose and record a beautiful song in her memory.

Michael’s song, Take Me Home, was created with the Swan Song Project, a charity that gives bereaved and terminally ill people the chance to write and record their own song. Swan Song started out in workshops at Marie Curie Hospice Bradford and now supports people across the country.

Michael saw a leaflet about the charity when he was with Nicky in the Sue Ryder Wheatfields Hospice in Leeds. “I wasn’t in the right mindset for it then, but in the March after Nicky passed I thought I’d enquire,” says Michael.

Ben ‘Buddy’ Slack, founder of Swan Song, put Michael in touch with Al Bampton, one of the charity’s songwriting team. “I told Al what I’d written after Nicky passed. I said I wanted something simple and acoustic, and we went from there. Al did the musical arrangement, he was brilliant,” says Michael. “There was no time limit. He and Ben have been lovely, they let me do it all in my own time.””