Turning Words Into Song at Chapel FM – Interview 

Exterior of Chapel FM. Image Credit: Martine Hamilton Knight. Courtesy of Chapel FM Website.

Chapel FM Arts Centre, based in Seacroft in East Leeds, is both a community arts hub and home to East Leeds Community Radio, a station dedicated to sharing local stories, music and writing. Inside the building are two radio studios and a radio theatre where live performances, workshops and festivals regularly take place, all broadcast and streamed live, reaching listeners far beyond the room itself. TSOTA spoke with Peter Spafford, Chapel FM’s Director of Words, about how the centre is a space where creativity travels through the airwaves and their most recent project in collaboration with Leeds Song Festival. 

“Basically, for the last ten or fifteen years we’ve been documenting the writing scene in West Yorkshire via radio,” explains Peter. His weekly programme ‘Love the Words’, now approaching its 350th episode, has become a platform for local poets, playwrights and writers. Another of Peter’s projects is ‘Writing on Air’, an annual literature festival broadcast entirely on the radio earlier this month. Now in its tenth year, the event brings together writers, performers and listeners in a space where conversations, readings and performances unfold live on air. 

Chapel FM is a place for experimenting with art, music and writing, and nowhere is that spirit of experimentation more evident than their upcoming event with Leeds Song Festival. Old Words / New Song is a day-long workshop taking place at Chapel FM on Saturday 28th March, inviting participants to explore how all kinds of text can become music.

“We’re coming together to explore the relationship between words and music and create brand new material on the spot,” Peter says. “It could be poetry, a recipe, fire regulations you can see on the wall,” he continues, “it’s just about bringing that text to life through music.” Guided by Peter and  composer/songwriter Hugh Nankivell, participants will work together to transform those words into songs. “It’s a day of experimentation and fun really, with the opportunity afterwards to showcase your work in our radio theatre if you’d like,” Peter says. “It’s free and anybody’s welcome.”

Exterior of Chapel FM. Image Credit: Martine Hamilton Knight. Courtesy of Chapel FM Website.

The workshop forms part of a wider effort by the Leeds Song Festival to broaden its reach and introduce classical music to new audiences. By hosting the event in Seacroft rather than the city centre, organisers hope to connect with people who might not typically go into the centre of town to see classical concerts.

For Peter, the workshop builds on a long-standing personal interest in setting poetry to music. “I’m interested in not necessarily writing your own lyrics but setting other lyrics or poetry to music,” he explains. One poem that first sparked his interest in the idea came from Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “Don’t let that horse eat that violin, cried Chagall’s mother” is the opening line to one of his poems and immediately captured Peter’s imagination. “That’s not a line I would write myself,” he says. “And it’s not necessarily a line you’d think of setting to music. But it opened up a whole sense of possibility.” 

Since then, he has spent years writing songs, plays and poems, and performs with a trio of musicians and writers from West Yorkshire in a band called Schwa, setting hundreds of poems to music. “As a songwriter, I sometimes get stuck in a rut,” Peter says. “So I took some poetry that was much more irregular in terms of line length and order and started setting that to music. It shook me out of my comfortable place and I found different ways to combine words and music together in a song format.” For lyricists, he adds, the approach can also remove the pressure of writing deeply personal songs. “There are great divorce albums,” he jokes, “but for long periods of life you’re just doing the washing up or bringing up kids and inspiration can be lacking.”

Exterior of Chapel FM. Image Credit: Martine Hamilton Knight. Courtesy of Chapel FM Website.

The tradition of setting words to music stretches back centuries. Peter notes that “composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart all wrote songs based on existing poetry. Yet it is a practice that Peter feels is less common today. At Chapel FM, these experiments have already produced surprising results. Poets have heard their words accompanied by improvised music, discovering new rhythms and meanings in familiar lines. “It’s a great chance for people to try it out,” he says. “And it’s lovely for poets to hear their work interpreted in a different way.”

Ultimately, Old Words / New Song is designed as an open, exploratory space. Participants might include composers from the conservatoire, poets curious about hearing their work performed differently, or musicians who have never tried writing a song before. “It’s a day to be spontaneous,” Peter highlights. “Maybe step outside your comfort zone but most importantly enjoy what happens when words find new life through music.”

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Old Words / New Song is taking place on Saturday 28th March from 11:00am to 6:00pm. It’s a free event but spaces are limited so booking is essential. 

Leeds Song Festival 2026 takes place from Saturday 11 – Saturday 18 April. 

To listen to Chapel FM and keep up to date with all their latest events you can visit their website and socials. Also, tune in next week to ‘Love the Words’ to hear us talking about TSOTA and our mission to promote local arts and culture.