23 September 2013 - 0 Comments

Auckland Alt-Folksters, Bond St Bridge are pleased to announce the release of their new single entitled It’s All In The Game – Play On! from the forthcoming album The Explorers Club: Antarctica – due out October 11th.

Boldly rolling and listing with danger and pathos, this song deals with the stoicism and courage the explorers of Antarctica's Heroic Age showed in the face of almost indescribable adversity. The song's title is taken from the the personal diary of the Rev. Arnold Spencer-Smith, who in 1914 found himself marooned with nine others in Scott's hut on Ross Island when their ship Aurora broke her moorings and was carried away in a storm. Spencer-Smith and his companions were there to lay vital supply depots to support Shackleton's ambitious Imperial Trans-AntarcticExpedition, and the men knew that despite the fact that their essential survival gear had been carried away with their ship, failure to carry out their mission would doom Shackleton's trans-continental party to a slow death by starvation.  

So these Antarctic heroes stitched together windproof clothing out of old sails, patched up old sledges left over from Captain Scott's ill-fated 1912 polar endeavour and set out on the 1500 kilometer round trip to lay those depots.  Nine went out; six men came back. Three were lost to hunger, to frostbite and to madness on the Great Ice Barrier. Meanwhile, Shackleton's own ship the Endurance broke up in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, on the far side of the continent, so the Trans-Antarctic Expedition never even made landfall. When Spencer-Smith died out there on the Barrier, bleeding from the gums and bent double with scurvy, his comrades read his diary and they saw his personal motto inscribed there on the flyleaf: 'It's all in the game - play on!'

It’s All In The Game – Play On! is available for FREE download now on Bandcamp:
http://bondstreetbridge.bandcamp.com/

Below is a link to the video with beautiful illustrations by Emily Cater, inspired by original photographic documents of the early Antarctic expeditions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0ItorOI4iY

The Explorers Club: Antarctica is out Oct 11 2013 on Banished From The Universe Records.

http://bondstreetbridge.blogspot.co.nz/

https://www.facebook.com/bondstreetbridge

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