Taking their name from King’s College Cambridge, where a number of the original members were choral scholars (reading for their university degrees while singing six days a week in the college chapel) today’s selection was first featured on the King’s Singers 1980 album “New Day”.

Written by Welshman, John David (best known for his work as a bass player with Dave Edmunds), the inspiration for the song came while David was… “sitting alone late at night on the settee feeling very low, and watching an ominous story on the news about the very real possibility of nuclear war.

“I started singing to the (hopefully) soon-to arrive New Day like it was an entity, that would rescue me from the depths. If the sun came up and the birds started singing as usual then I could believe that it really was the new day in which life would go on, and in which hope would survive.

“The tune and the words popped into my head at the same time, and it was all written in about 10 minutes, which is why (to me at least) it’s not perfect. But I didn’t feel I had the right to change anything. I think that’s about as close as I can get to an explanation.”

 LISTEN TO TODAY’S SELECTION – Sunday 11 March

You Are the New Day

I will love you more than me

And more than yesterday

If you can but prove to me

You are the new day

Send the sun in time for dawn

Let the birds all hail the morning

Love of life will urge me say

You are the new day

 When I lay me down at night

Knowing we must pay

Thoughts occur that this night might

Stay yesterday

 Thoughts that we as humans small

Could slow worlds and end it all

Lie around me where they fall

Before the new day

 One more day when time is running out

For everyone

Like a breath I knew would come I reach for

A new day

Hope is my philosophy

Just needs days in which to be

Love of life means hope for me

Borne on a new day

You are the new day