BE play Live Tickets

About BE play Live

BE Play Live at Coventry Cathedral


Artist Wolfgang Buttress curates a site-specific performance on Saturday 7th October 2017 at Coventry Cathedral. Music ensemble BE will perform a unique soundscape that features the live-streamed sound of 50,000 bees from a new hive placed within the Cathedral grounds specially for the event. BE will perform their critically acclaimed album ONE, a constantly changing and evolving multi-sensory symphony - a dialogue between bee and human.

An integral part of the BE performance will be hosted by a bespoke community choir engineered by the Pod’s Collective//Pod, an artist collective derived by members with lived experience of mental ill health. The Pod is Coventry City Council’s award winning mental health resource and creative hub. This event is a perfect build up to World Mental Health Day.

BE is the collective name for a collective of musicians who recorded the soundscape for Wolfgang Buttress’s multi-award-winning sculpture
The Hive which is currently sited at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Hive seeks to highlight the importance of the honey bee in our food chain and their plight as a species.

BE have created critically acclaimed sell-out performances at Glastonbury, Blue Dot, Caught by the River, End of the Road festivals, St Mary’s Church in Nottingham and inside the Hive at Kew. Tim Jonze, The Guardian music editor, voted BE one of his top five gigs of last year. The soundscape ONE was voted as one of the best albums of 2016 by Rough Trade, The Guardian and The Quietus.

Acclaimed perfumers Haeckels have created a bespoke site-specific scent for the evening, which is derived from local botanicals and the essential oils from the newly installed bee hive in the Cathedral.

The event is part of Collective//Pod’s annual mental health arts festival Scratch the Surface - DIALOGUE and is supported by Coventry City Council and Coventry Cathedral.