Wallis Bird announces collaborative album and International Women's day single with German quintet Spark

Wexford-born award-winning songwriter Wallis Bird is collaborating with German classical quintet Spark on a new album titled Visions of Venus.

Arriving April 19, 2024, the LP is set to showcase “1000 years of female composers, from Clara Schumann to Joni Mitchell, Björk to Hildegard von Bingen.”

To mark the occasion, Wallis Bird and Spark will share their original track ‘Dr. James Barry’, this International Women’s Day.

Wallis Bird and Spark by Gregor Hohenberg.

The song's titular figure was a medical visionary during the 1800s. Born Margaret Bulkley in Cork, they were, by virtue of their era and gender, afforded no future in academia or a career, regardless of their talents.

Their mother devised the name James Barry, and sent him to the University of Edinburgh to begin his life as healer.

He became the first “recorded” person to perform a successful caesarean section, a procedure he learned from women healers in South Africa during his post there.  He is also celebrated for his activism for the lower class, leading him to clash with seniors and be demoted from Surgeon General.

“I pondered the extremities of his mental wellbeing and what it must have been like to be a radical and compassionate feminist academic genius healer in the most masculine and violent of fields—to fight regardless of the cost to their career—because they believed in humane treatment for the destitute,” says Wallis Bird.

“What benevolence! What wildness! The fact that he was a trans man gave me a solid anchor as to where this beautiful courage and resilience came from.”