The Yellow Cake Revue

Peter Maxwell Davies - The Yellow Cake Revue
Performed by members of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

00:00 Introduction
02:51 Tourist Board Song - George Bird
05:56 Patriotic Song - Joe Folley
10:02 Piano Interlude: Farewell to Stromness
13:37 Recitation: Nuclear Job Interview 1: The Security Guard - Leon Hewitt
14:56 Uranium Daughters’ Dance - Sarah Anderson
18:03 Recitation: Nuclear Job Interview 2: The Truck Driver - Daniel Ellis
19:37 Atlantic Breezes - Rebecca Severy
21:37 Recitation: Nuclear Job Interview 3: The Mental Health Worker - Emily Beck
22:27 Piano Interlude: Yesnaby Ground
24:13 The Terrorist Song - Daniel Gibson
25:35 Triumph of the Cockroach - Imogen Rowe

Piano: Pierre Riley

Composer's Note:
The Yellow Cake Revue is a sequence of cabaret style numbers, first performed at the St. Magnus Festival, Orkney, by Eleanor Bron, with the composer at the piano, in June 1980.
It takes its name from the popular term for refined uranium ore, and concerns the threat of the proposed uranium mining to the economy and ecology of the Orkney Islands which islanders are determined to fight, down to the last person.
Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney (pop. 1,500) would be two miles from the uranium mine's core, and the centre most threatened by pollution etc. Yesnaby is the nearby clifftop beauty spot under whose soil the uranium is known to lie. Wharbeth beach is the most popular beach in summer for Stromnessians. The "Douneray dragon" refers to British Nuclear Fuels' establishment at Dounreay, opposite Orkney on the Scottish mainland coast.